andygoodliff

Book Review: Conversations by the Sea: Reflections on Discipleship, Ministry and Mission by Andrew Rollinson

Andrew R. Rollinson, Conversations by the Sea: Reflections on Discipleship, Ministry and Mission (Handsel Press, 2023), 194 pp. £10.00

Reviewed by Rev Dr Paul Goodliff.

This is a wonderfully rich, eminently readable and wise book by one of the most experienced and gifted of Baptist mInisters, Andrew Rollinson. After pastorates in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Edinburgh, Andrew was Ministry Advisor for the Baptist Union of Scotland, overlapping for much of the time with me while I was Head of Ministry at the Baptist Union of Great Britain (which meant we often 'chewed the cud' together on matters ministerial), and finally a fruitful ministry in St Andrews before retirement (although I can hardly imagine Andrew 'retiring'!)

Structured as meditations around John 21, each chapter takes a different scene from that narrative, and takes a look at matters as diverse as discipleship, resourcing a missional community, leadership, unity and failure. This is the accumulated experience and wisdom of half a century of ministry, and we are all the richer for it.

If I take a sample of the voices which speak into this book, you'll see how broad are Andrew's interests and how wide his reading: Colin Gunton (oh, hurrah! and his Bampton Lectures, The One, the Three and the Many to boot,) Bonhoeffer, Eugene Peterson, Michel Foucault and Miroslav Volf. Here is the evidence of a pastor who has continued reading widely throughout his ministry — a vital resource for the feeding of the pastor and an almost absolute necessity for every minister, both in its continuation and its breadth.

It is also a deeply theological book, written by one who has engaged throughout his ministry with the great themes (and writers) of theology. It is by no means a purely pietist meditation on discipleship and ministry, but Andrew does not shy away in embarrassment from the evangelical giants of the spiritual life — Richard Baxter or A W Tozer, for instance — or those from wider traditions, such as Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, or Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. Here is evidence of a truly ecumenical spirit at work, ready to draw from the treasury of wisdom, wherever its roots may lie.

I found the chapters on leadership and power; ministry starvation and its remedy; ministry failure and restoration and self-awareness and self-deception in ministry of particular significance. I wish every pastor might read them and benefit from them. Their ministries would be safer and richer for it.

I hope that Andrew continues to read and write in retirement for many years, but meanwhile we have Conversations by the Sea: a book that ought to be on the reading list of every newly-ordained minister and minister in formation, and near the top of the list of books that more experienced ministers read in their sabbatical (if not sooner!) in order to feed both mind and soul. This is, in short, one of the best books on ministry and discipleship I have read in many a long year.

Emma Nash, A Pastoral Theology of Childlessness (SCM, 2021)

Emma Nash, A Pastoral Theology of Childlessness (SCM, 2021)

Emma Nash is a Baptist minister who currently works for the Methodists. In this, her first book, she offers reflections on her experience of being unable to have children. Nash addresses an issue that gets very little attention in society or church. It is very rarely, if ever, talked about. The first strength of this book is it brings it to wider attention and to the pastoral life of the church. 

In five chapters Nash explores being alone, being in pain, being powerless, being barren, and feeling guilty. The reader is given a personal insight into the journey of those seeking to have children and the struggle and trauma it brings, especially when the end result is an inability to conceive. The testimony brings light to an experience too often hidden. In each of the chapters Nash turns to scripture and finds narratives both helpful and not so helpful. 

This is a pastoral theology. It has a gentle tone and is easy to read. There were moments when I would have liked the theology reflection to have gone further. There is room perhaps for further theological and pastoral reflection to follow (something akin perhaps to the kind of work John Swinton has being doing on dementia, disability and mental illness), but this is a very helpful beginning and it lives up to its title. It is a very important read for all those involved in pastoral care and hopefully for this reason, it will sell well! Its not a book to be enjoyed, but it is one that should be read, and talked about. One of the questions Nash's book should lead us to ask is how do we foster church communities that are inclusive of the childless, when so often family, parenting, children are the focus of much our life together. 

Motherhood: A Confession by Natalie Carnes

If you read this book it will likely be one of your books of the year. Motherhood: A Confession is beautifully written. (In the acknowledgments there is thanks given to Lauren Winner, who has helped so many others with what we might called theological memoirs and has written several herself.) It is a powerful reflection on being a mother and a disciple of Jesus. Inspired by St. Augustine's famous Confessions (well known to many from its early line 'all hearts are restless until they find their rest in you) — Carnes is a professor of theology who has taught the work numerous times — this is very much her own confession. It borrows its shape from Augustine's work, following the chapter themes and in some way it might be considered a commentary, but Carnes brings her own confession on becoming a mother and the impact that has on herself and her faith and of course on her daughter. As she explores motherhood she does in conversation with Augustine, and also scripture (Mary and Martha, the mother of Moses, Mary and Joseph, and more) and with the saints.

I must confess I've never read Augustine's Confessions — I have a copy and have been meaning too, perhaps now I'll get round to it.

I read Motherhood in just over a day — I found no rest until I got to the end! — but it is perhaps better read slowly and patiently because her reflections although her own, will be recognised and shared by lots of other mothers (and fathers), at least, if you live in the West. I am not a mother, but I am a father, and the both brings out some of the shared questions every parent faces and as well offers a perspective into what its like to be a mother — it might help us understand our spouses (I recognise conversations I've had in Carnes' descriptions of what motherhood is like).

While the whole book is rich in spiritual and practical awareness, the chapters on mercy, suffering, desire, temptation and domination are especially remarkable in insight, not least in that common conundrum of when you want a child to say sorry! This is an honest book. Carnes covers questions on how do we both protect our children from suffering and let them experience it; how do we balance work and play; how do let go of trying to enforce our will on another and more. My only wish was that Carnes might have reflected on motherhood when a second or third child come along (Carnes has 3 children) and how that is another re-adjustment in love and desire. 

Having read Motherhood, I now want to read her earlier work — On Beauty and Image and Presence — which explore her interest in the theology of the arts.

This is a book for mothers, but also, as I've suggested, fathers too. It won't tell you how to parent, but it might help you reflect on (what Marcia Bunge calls) the vocation of parenting. It is a book for pastors (in understanding the parents in their congregation) and a book for anyone who wonders what its like to love God and neighbour, and in particular, little neighbours.

 

Pauline Dogmatics by Douglas Campbell (Eerdmans, 2020)

Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God's Love by Douglas A. Campbell (Eerdmans, 2020)

What might the reader want to know about this latest book from Douglas Campbell. Perhaps it will be this first: it's shorter than The Deliverance of God (Eerdmans, 2009), but definitely longer than Paul: An Apostle's Journey (Eerdmans, 2018). This is Campbell's fourth book in ten years (five if you count the Chris Tilling (ed.), New and Old Perspectives on Paul). Thirty years of research and thought is now emerging in an important body of work that gives us a Paul we can love and a gospel that really is good news.

Deliverance was a ground-clearing work. It was long because Campbell argued there was a lot to tear down before there could be a chance to build up. Pauline Dogmatics gives readers of Deliverance Campbell's constructive statement of how to read Paul as we find him in his letters and how to read beyond (but arguably still with) Paul for those tasked with preaching today. For those who both liked but were also frustrated by An Apostle's Journey, Pauline Dogmatics is the main course and dessert compared to Apostle's Journey's appetiser. Pauline Dogmatics was already in draft form when there was request for something shorter. Pauline Dogmatics is now the full treatment, the full argument.   

In Pauline Dogmatics Campbell takes us into the classroom and leads us a 29-session course on how to read Paul. It sounds intense but the way the book is put together many of the chapters can be read on their own as well as in sequence.

What do we learn of Paul according to Campbell? Here's an attempt at the briefest of summaries, but as they say about Barth that the best thing to do is read the theologian himself, so I suggest you need to do the same with Pauline Dogmatics.

You have to start with Jesus and no other foundation will do. You have to do theology backwards from Jesus. The God revealed by Jesus is a God of love 'fundamentally and limitlessly.' The cross deals with sin, the resurrection with death. Followers of Jesus already experience in some sense the resurrection and possess the mind of Christ and yet simul iustus et peccator remains true. In this we have experienced God's election, which is covenantal, and this establishes human agency and does not remove it.

God's election is one to fellowship with God, which begins now in the founding and nurturing of relational communities. These communities are shaped by learning and they have leaders who provide a model of Christian living for others to imitate in a relational way, dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit. The tenor of the communities reflects the life of Christ which is a life and a four-fold activity of love (incarnation, cross, resurrection and ascension) that is shaped by giving faithfulness, peacemaking and celebrating.

Churches have an apostolic foundation which for Paul meaning having a divine commission to go cross-culturally to proclaim the Lord Jesus. This mission must have the right view of outsiders, must have the right motivation for engagement, must have right method of engagement and a right manner of engagement. All are in Christ and in Adam, the difference between a Christian and an 'outsider' is the Christian is responding to rehab, there no hard boundary between church and non-Christians. The right motivation for mission is a hopeful, prayerful but agnostic universalism. Paul does not consistently press this view, but his explicit expectations regarding future salvation offer an implicit universalism. Mission is motivated by genuine friendship, these friendships will sometimes be strange, in the sense of unexpected. Mission in this manner will produce diversity as it crosses cultures.

At this point we move into Part Four of Pauline Dogmatics which is headed 'Navigation.' In this section especially Campbell continues to describe Paul, but also to go beyond Paul or seek to interpret Paul with Paul. Paul's church planting in different contexts saw him respond in different ways. Campbell identifies 4: affirmation, admonition, reformation and condemnation. Rarely does Paul simply affirm (which would indicate no change required), he mostly practices admonition (be more loving), reformation (a different way of practising benefaction or reconciliation) and condemnation (most clearly in his no to all idolatry, prostitution and magic). Paul models a way of mission that is flexible, discerning and avoids colonialism. This emerging communities in 'pagan' contexts required teaching, and most importantly this requires translation, and resourcing. Here there be dangers that certain things don't get challenged. So we might suggest Paul imposed a structure of sex and gender that was too Jewish and he failed to reform and condemn slavery. Paul's ethics sometimes betrayed a foundation other than Christ. Paul's ethics are relational because God is relational. Paul's offers a virtue ethic that enables us to here the commands/requests of God which we should obey. A virtue ethic requires a tradition, the key part of which is Scripture. Scripture is something we come to know well and read in different ways to discern God's commands, distinguishing between the Spirit's use of scripture and other uses of scripture, the latter of which can be death-dealing rather than life-giving.

Paul's thought articulates the birth of a new creation. The 'trap' that emerges here is to claim that God had two plans, A and B. When A failed God introduced B. What is called an 'infralapsarian' account. Campbell argues for a 'supralapsarianism' account in which God only has one plan, Plan A, Christ brings Plan A back on track. Death is unnatural. Creation is battlefield between God and forces of evil. This challenges how we read creation correctly. Paul in many places offers this supralapsarian account — e.g. Gal 3.28, 2 Cor 5.17, Rom 8.29, 1 Cor 8.6, Col 1.15-17. And so we come to navigating sex, marriage and gender. There is lots to navigate here. Paul offers mostly an infralapsarian account of sex, marriage and gender that continues to maintain 'a pyramid of vertical binary oppositions', seen in the household codes. To a certain extent Paul 'Christianizes' these relationships and occasionally challenges them But here Campbell particularly wants to go beyond Paul. While he holds to the importance of either marriage or celibacy, he wants to challenge patriarchy and a heterosexual only account of marriage. Here Campbell sees too often foundationalist and infralapasrian accounts of gender. So he argues for same-sex marriage on covenantal, and ascetic grounds (close he says to the position of Eugene Rogers). He recognises he is going beyond Paul's stated position, but argues that this is still in line with Paul's key trinitarian, christology and pneumatological convictions. I'm summarising a much more extended argument that recognises 16 different ways of reading Paul's texts on sex and gender. The chapters ends that in making this argument there will be a need for strange friendships (between affirming and non-affirming), peacemaking and defending the gospel. 

Chapters 27 and 28 address the issue of Judaism and supersessionism. How does Paul avoid a negative reading of Judaism, he resists foundationalism and he reads backwards. This requires us to see the justification texts as contingent and dealing with messanic Jews hostile to Paul. Paul advocates a non-colonial gospel. Paul does a provide a salvation-historical account of the gospel but it is retrospective. 'Paul never expected Judaism to be erased.' The final chapter addresses 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. He sees these as second century and show how Paul was being interpreted by the mainstream church then. 

This says Campbell is his 'A to Z of Pauline theology' but with a strong practical edge, reflecting the kind of theologian Paul was. This is tremendous achievement which I hope many pastors, ministers, evangelists and missionaries read. Campbell wants us to read Paul differently than we often read him and in so the book while scholarly is also deeply practical. This is what makes it stand out from a lot of Pauline theology. It's the kind of book you might read in one go (with necessary food, toilet and sleep breaks!), but it is also the kind of book to pick up again and again to re-engage with chapter here or there. There is so much to ponder, even where you might disagree, for those of us who are tasked with forming churches, leading in mission and helping the church navigate culture and context.

We can't breathe for the constant stream of books on Paul's theology be published all asking to be read, Pauline Dogmatics should be at the top of the pile. 

Wondrously Wounded by Brian Brock

Brian Brock, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ (Baylor, 2019)

This is a beautiful and challenging book and Brock's most readable one so far! The big reason for that is the presence of Adam, Brian's son. Through Wondrously Wounded Brock tells stories from Adam's life and how they shaped Brock's life and theology. Like the work of Frances Young, Amos Yong and Thomas Reynolds, this is lived theology or practical theology. Adam is profoundly intellectually disabled, although a big part of Brock's argument in this book is to challenge that description, to re-narrate who Adam is in society and in the church. In so doing it is to challenge the idea that we, as a society and as churches, have 'done' disability because we have made our buildings accessible and have embraced 'inclusivity.' 

The book is divide into five parts: Disability in the Christian Tradition; Welcome and Screening; Systems, Norms, and Modern Medicine; The Everydayness of Mercy and Wonder; and Body–Life as the Communicative Life of the Worshiping Community. At the end of each part Brock provides a Coda, which helpfully offers a summary and the 'general thrust' of the argument. 

In this brief engagement with the book I want to focus on the final two chapters. The first is a close reading of 1 Corinthians 12, the second explores the prophetic presence of the disabled. In the former, Brock begins by recognising that Christians want to be inclusive, but that this often creates an othering, 'we' seek to include 'them', in this case the disabled. Brock's reading of 1 Corinthians 12 seeks to challenge this tendency. Brock sees in description of the church as the body of Christ an understanding of life together, communion, beyond disability. Of course those pushing an inclusive agenda often refer to 1 Corinthians 12, but in ways which do not properly, in Brock's view, with Paul's argument. A close and careful reading, says Brock, sees the Spirit upending 'widespread assumptions' about any attempt at creating a 'we' and others who need to be 'included.' Every member of the church both gives and receives. Brock argues that the church, as the body of Christ, needs to be open to the 'surprise, wonder, and discovery about what sort of gifts the Spirit might be attempting to give through the life of any individual member of the church.' He tells the story of how Adam, at age 13, found his place in the church, sitting very close to the minister, and that this has changed the church. Brock sees that what part of the Spirit's gift through Adam is 'to liberate the congregation from any pretention that we are a church devoted to presenting a culturally and aesthetically flawless performance.' Brock concludes that 'a church that treats some as continual recipients, and never givers of gifts, enacts at forgetfulness that Christians are Gentiles.' In other words we are all those who have been received. 

The final chapter tells some stories of life with Adam in public and the inhospitality experienced. These struggles are contrasted with the church, which Brock sees as being 'at least one space in liberal society exist[ing] solely to foster a more receptive openness to others, a greater willingness to hear, and in which taking responsibility for one another defines its social form.' Of course this is not always the case and Brock acknowledges that churches can be just like any other public space. In a wonderful phrase Brock describes a story of Adam dancing to the music of a young Romanian street performer as an 'assault of grace.' This scene was 'an incursion of the prophetic Christ.' In this final chapter Brock uses militant language, borrowing from Barth, because it 'preserves the ethical bite and political force of the gospel.' He quotes from Barth:

 It is a remarkable stroke in a strange and remarkable war. For the attack is that of the love of the Father and the Son. It is the attack of the grace of God. It is the attack of His affirmation of the world, of his generous self-giving to it, His intervention for salvation, of His pleading and guaranteeing of its life. This is what the Prophet Jesus proclaims to the whole world and to all people. 

The sin of inhospitality is met by the assault of grace, through the Spirit of Jesus, in the lives of Adam and others. Will we dare see it?

Brock offers a different view of those we so easily named as disabled. The gospel centres the margins. He challenges how pre-natal care and testing takes place, he challenges how we view healthy and quality. He says that while there are problems with how the church has historically viewed disability, the church has also had an understanding of mercy and wonder and revelation that we have lost when the conversation in liberal society is reduced to services and rights. He offers a picture of being wondrously wounded seen in the life of Jacob having wrestled with God.

Brock's book will surely sit alongside the likes of Young's Face to Face and Reynolds' Vulnerable Communion, as among the most important contributions to how the church and theology understands, welcomes and rejoices in lives like Adam's. But more than providing theological reflection on 'disability', Brock, likes others, presents us with what it is to be human, to be church — it is to begin with a life like Adam's, in all its joy and all its difficulty, it is to experience what it means to be wondrously wounded.

Helen Paynter, God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today? (BRF, 2019)

 Helen Paynter, God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today? Wrestling Honestly with the Old Testament (BRF, 2019)

Helen Paynter is a Baptist minister and Old Testament scholar based at Bristol Baptist College. This is her second book. Her first, a version of her PhD, was Reduced Laughter, looking at how to read the books of 1 & 2 Kings. This second book, written for a broad audience, engages with the thorn of subjects violence in the Old Testament. It arrives at the same time as the work of the Centre for the Study of the Bible and Violence (CSBV) begins, of which Paynter is the Director. The book comes in two parts. The first establishes some 'foundations' — reading the Bible as God's word, how to read the Bible well and what is meant or encompassed by the word 'violence.' The chapter in reading the Bible well is especially helpful in offering some important lessons. The second half of the book seeks through 5 chapters to engage with the most serious of questions around the Old Testament and violence. 

These 5 chapters make a series of important points. When violence is described, it is not always (often?) being endorsed. An example is given in the story of Samson. Paynter provides a different way of reading the book of Judges that pays attention to how the book is narrated. When violence is implored, as is the case of a good number of Psalms, there is a cry for justice and handing over of that desire for vengeance to God. Violence against animals is not as wanton as might be supposed. Paynter offers some helpful readings of the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 and the place of sacrifices within Israel's worship. The fourth and fifth chapters explore violence as divine judgement and violence as commanded (e.g. the herem passages in Joshua). These questions are more difficult to address, and Paynter acknowledges, that this is not her last word on them, but almost a first foray into these questions, in conversation with wider scholarship. She takes us carefully through the importance of justice, the meaning of the law of talion (eye for an eye), a reading of the death of Uzzah (2 Sam 6) and in the latter chapter the meaning of the word herem. 

A final chapter suggests that God's great plan in the Old Testament is shalom (peace) and we read it with trajectory in mind. 

This is an excellent book, which wears its scholarship lightly. Paynter has a great way of explaining and the book is an easy read, although exploring difficult questions. The book seeks as its subtitle suggests to 'wrestle honestly' with the violence found in the Old Testament. It doesn't have, and doesn't promise, a magic solution, but does show that a surface level reading will miss or overlook at more subtle ways the Bible describes and responds to violence. I look forward to future explorations that I'm sure will be forthcoming from Paynter and the CSBV that will continue to reach a broad audience. It is good to see Baptists engaging in these questions and for how Paynter is continuing the good track record Baptsits hve in Old Testament scholarship (Henry Wheeler Robinson, H. R. Rowley, Ron Clements,  Rex Mason, David Russell, Ernest Lucas, Deborah Rooke). 

Paul Writes (a letter)

Chris Raschka, Paul writes (a letter) (Eerdmans, 2018)

Last Friday was the day that the church remembers the conversion of St. Paul. I was going to write about this book, but forget, so three days late here it is. 

This book is for 'young readers' and it introduces children to Paul the letter writer, rather than the Paul of Acts.

We remember Paul because of his letters, but his letters are not easy to read, and so Raschka has found a way to bring this important part of Paul's life and this huge part of the New Testament alive. 

It takes little bits from each of the letters - mostly Paul's encouragement to his churches to act in Christ-like ways.

The pictures and map are beautiful to go a long with it.

It will help younger readers, and maybe also older readers, get an idea of who Paul wrote to, some of Paul's friends, and some of the things he said.

 

 

 

Ben Myers, The Apostles' Creed

Ben Myers, The Apostles' Creed (Lexham, 2018)

I spent some of the afternoon reading this new book by Ben Myers which expounds the Apostles' Creed line by line and in some cases word by word. It didn't take long to read, which might suggest its a light read, but its brevity and simplicity is joined by a beautiful and truthful and profound description of Christian belief. It would make a great gift to one who is preparing for baptism and for anyone who needs a reminder of the essentials of the Christian faith. Ben, in this book, writes with lots of references to the early church fathers, showing that in many ways that all the questions and queries of Christian belief were already addressed in the first 3 or 4 centuries. This book will sit aside another short-ish book on Christian doctrine — A Theology in Outline — by Robert Jenson. Both books demonstrating that theology can be readable, understandable and brief and so books to easily return to. We need more of this kind of writing.  

 

This is My Story by Paul Beasley-Murray (Wipf & Stock, 2018)

Paul Beasley-Murray, This is My Story: A Story of Life, Faith and Ministry by (Wipf & Stock, 2018)

Last year Baptist minister Keith Clements published an autobiography of his life: Look Back in Hope. We know have a second autobiography from a similar period in this account of his life by Paul Beasley-Murray. Both autobiographies interestingly mention the other in passing from their time overlapping as students in Cambridge. Paul is the son of George Beasley-Murray, one of the leading Baptist New Testament scholars of the twentieth century. He followed his father into Baptist ministry, into doing a New Testament doctorate and into being Principal of Spurgeon's College. Here is a story of what it is like to be child of the manse and of college (George taught at Spurgeon's College and the International Baptist Theological Seminary while Paul was growing up). Paul although following in his father's footsteps has charted his own course - he trained for ministry at Northern Baptist College while doing his doctorate at Manchester, spent two years as a Baptist missionary with BMS and had two long pastorates in churches that grew.

Apparently when Douglas McBain published his book Fire Over the Waters in 1997 many wanted to read it for what they hoped would be juicy stories of someone on the inside of Baptist institutional life. Many may want to read Paul's book for his account of what happened at Spurgeon's when he was Principal. The story of why Paul stepped down as Principal is one that never been told (although as Paul points out an unnamed version did appear in Alistair Ross's Evangelicals in Exile). It has been a unspoken moment, which no hint of difficulties is given in either Ian Randall's history of English Baptists in the 20th Century or his history of Spurgeon's College (A School of Prophets). In the chapter Paul sets out to tell the story honestly and carefully from his own perspective on the difficulties that he faced during this period. The vice-principal, tutors at the College and the governing body do not come out well. It is a very sad account, especially with the impact it had on his children, and it is testimony to Paul in the way he responded to the fallout and the silence until now that he has kept. As Paul says it is for others to tell of their own involvement. I know Spurgeon's is a different place to how it sounds it was during the 1980s and some of this is down to Paul's innovations and modernisation, which arguably saved the college at that time.

Outside of the Spurgeon's chapter, the chapters on his time at Altrincham and Chelmsford Central give in an insight to the life of being church pastor and leader and Paul's own particular style and approach. The impact of church growth theory, his involvement in Mainstream and then from 1994 Ministry Today and more recently the College of Baptist Ministry. I could have done without the appendixes on his leadership style and why he is a Christian and other bits - these are typically Paul Beasley-Murray pieces. I would have been more interested in his reflections on wider Baptist life, but then perhaps the title of the book is a clue - This is My Story - which stresses his story. 

Paul has had a mixed reception amongst Baptists and reading this autobiography has the potential for people to see him differently, but for others it may confirm their already held view. Regardless This is My Story is well worth a read as a story of one Baptist minister living though the last fifty years. Perhaps Paul and Keith have started a trend, which will see similar accounts emerge. I for one would love to read them.

 

Sam Wells on Being With

Sam Wells, Incarnational Ministry (Canterbury, 2017) and Incarnational Mission (Canterbury, 2018)

The first thing I read by Sam Wells was back in 2004, an essay he wrote for a festschrift in honour of Stanley Hauerwas. I quickly came to the conclusion that here was someone worth listening to and later that year I came across his book Improvisation. Wells has so far not written a bad book and these two new ones are among his best.

In 2015 Sam Wells published A Nazareth Manifesto, which sought to describe the theology of being with, the argument that at the heart of the Christian faith is God's commitment to be with, revealed must clearly in Jesus Christ, who while he spent a week in Jerusalem working for us, and three years in and around Galilee working with us, he spent 30 years in Nazareth just being with us (hence the title A Nazareth Manifesto). Wells' conviction is being with is the heart of the gospel and the Christian life. A Nazareth Manifesto set out to demonstrate why theologically. The book was subtitled Being With God. While no book by Sam Wells can ever be described as just academic, A Nazareth Manifesto is at least on one level, a foundations book, its making a case and seeks to defend it. 

Wells' two new books, published within 6 months of each other, build upon the earlier work and, in what might be called playful ways, explore the implications of a being with theology for ministry and the church and mission and the world. Incarnational Ministry is subtitled Being With the Church and presents the read with what discipleship might look like and pastoral care might look like if we taking being with over working for as the central call of ministry. Incarnational Mission does the same but in terms of the world, those outside the church.

What both books helpfully outline and explore is that no conversation pastorally or evangelistically is ever the same and part of being with a person is to pay attention to whether the person before us is called, troubled, hurt, afflicted, challenged, dying or lapsed, seeking, of no faith, of another faith, hostile. Each of these is given a chapter to uncover what being with might mean in Wells very readable style. The Ministry book begins with what it means for us to be with God, with ourself, with creation and with the gathered - we are disciples before we are pastors or ministers. The Mission book ends by opening up what it means to be with organisations, institutions, government and the excluded.  

In no way does Wells offer the last word on pastoral care and mission, but he helpfully positions those involved in ministry and mission in the right place. Too many of us habitually position ourselves in a working for direction and Wells draws us to a better, more faithful position of being with. Being with is just as demanding as working for, perhaps more so, because it will often take more time and involve more trust (especially in God). Its not that there might sometimes be the demand or need to work with or even occasionally work for, but they shouldn't be the default. There is pressure on the pastor or minister today to inhabit a whole range of roles, and Wells reminds us first and foremost that those who are church ministers are pastors called to be with.

There are too many books on pastoral care and mission, which make them seem uninviting tasks, Wells lead us to see afresh the gift, the delight, the opportunity that can be found in a conversation. Highly recommended.