Sam Wells Challenges and Encourages

Who’s the most famous vicar in the world today?  After Guy Benton, it’d be hard to go past Rev. Dr. Sam Wells. 

Author of over 40 books and a regular broadcaster on the BBC, he’s the vicar of one of London’s most famous churches, St Martin in the Fields.  St Martin’s is an active worshipping community that also manages to host over 400 (!) classical concerts a year, house around 8000 people annually through its charity, and feed tens of thousands of tourists in its cafes.  That combination of Community, Culture, Compassion, and Commerce is no accident: it’s the model for church renewal, which underpins churches in the Heart Edge Network of which Sam Wells is a founder.

So it was quite a buzz to have the man himself in the Diocese a couple of weeks ago. 

On Tuesday night, he gave an uplifting address in Kelburn parish about the six ways he sees the Holy Spirit inspiring people in the world. 

Then on Wednesday and Thursday, he gave a suite of three talks in Wellington and Palmerston North, outlining his theological approach and how it informs St Martin’s work of mission and discipleship.

In the first talk, Wells unpacked his fundamental conviction that God, the Holy Trinity, desires to “be with” us.  That’s why God created the world in the first place, to “be with” us.  And that’s why the Word of God becomes human in the person of Jesus. The incarnation is the definitive instance of God’s desire to be present to humanity.

At this point, Wells makes a controversial move.  So great is God’s desire to “be with” us (he argues) that the Incarnation must always have been God’s intention, even if sin had never entered the world.  This is an argument that’s been made at different times in church history (e.g. Maximus the Confessor and Duns Scotus), but it’s always remained a minority viewpoint.  From it, Wells suggests that the crucifixion of Jesus isn’t part of God’s redemptive design. Rather, Jesus’ willingness to die a violent death demonstrates God’s utter commitment to “be with” humanity, even in the very worst of human experiences, and even if this threatens the unity of the Trinity itself.  The resurrection then shows that nothing will stop God’s desire to “be with” us, on into the life to come.

This view has consequences, and Wells isn’t shy of these.  He insists that Christians can too easily approach the cross as a piece of “theological technology” that works for us as individuals. We gladly claim forgiveness of sin and assurance of eternal life, but we don’t see the gospel from God’s point of view. By contrast, Wells argues that the gospel isn’t really about God being “for us”, but instead always and primarily about God being “with us”.  In the process, he’s critical of sacrificial explanations for Jesus’ death, partly because of the way they can misrepresent God’s character and obscure that fundamental divine desire to be alongside us, in all our messiness.

So, for Wells, theology is best done on the understanding that God is “with us” more than being “for us”.  In the second and third sessions, Wells outlined how this theology informs St Martin’s ministry.  To take one example, St Martin’s work with asylum seekers emphasises being alongside them and humanising them in their need, rather than seeking to fix their situation in abstract, professionalised ways. This has revolutionised the volunteer base for the homeless ministry, which now prioritises the involvement of church members.

In the third session, Wells introduced the “Being With” course that St Martin’s developed during lockdown. It’s an attempt to reclaim evangelism as a task for the whole church, not just churches that consider themselves evangelical.  Much of what he described sounded very enticing. The course starts right where people are at, with participants’ experiences central to the content.  In a highly regulated format, group members help each other to see where God has always been present in their lives, and so draw closer to the God who seeks to be with them. This is apparently life-changing: some participants report that they could have saved thousands on therapy if they’d taken the course earlier!

But it’s not without controversy. Unlike, say, The Alpha Course, “Being With” explicitly assumes that participants don’t start as sinners alienated from God. And that means atonement theology is off the menu, even though that’s been the key lever of much Christian evangelism over the centuries. 

Much of the conversation I had afterwards centred on this.  Attractive though the narrative nature of the course sounds, some of us wondered if it presents people with false choices.  Doesn’t the New Testament consistently present a God who is both with us and for us?  Isn’t it “for us and our salvation” that the Word becomes flesh, inaugurates the Kingdom, and then is crucified, dies and is buried?  And in a world of evil and strife, do we have any lasting hope to offer people if we abandon the conviction that God defeats evil on the cross, just because some atonement theologies drive a wedge into the heart of the Trinity and present us with a monstrous portrait of God?  These aren’t trivial questions.

Still, it was bracing to be introduced to an inquirers’ course designed consistently around a thought-through theological outlook, and I’d be really interested to give it a go.  Probably the most important thing about evangelism is that we’re doing it, and the course is helping many people discover Jesus who otherwise wouldn’t.  But I’d want my fellow travellers to come away with a sense that there is truth and wisdom in the faith about Jesus that the tradition hands on to us, even those parts that contemporary Westerners struggle to understand.

For me, one enduring benefit of the day has been the ongoing dialogue I’ve had with colleagues about how our theology informs the way we do ministry.  If we’re serious about our commitment to Jesus as the light of the world, that’s still a vital task.  Three of us -- Jethro Day, Sonya Lewthwaite and I -- thought there’d be real merit in organising a study day to think through the practical outworkings of a theology that holds incarnation and atonement tightly together.  What might it look like to hold to a theology of Jesus’ life that’s incarnational and atoning and cruciform and kenotic?  Please get in touch if you’d like to hear more!

Tim McKenzie – vicar@stmichaels.org.nz