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    Face To Face: Meeting Christ in Friend and Stranger
    Face To Face: Meeting Christ in Friend and Stranger
    Face To Face: Meeting Christ in Friend and Stranger
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Face To Face: Meeting Christ in Friend and Stranger

    By Samuel Wells

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    About this ebook

    Priests and pastoral caregivers often accompany people who are struggling to negotiate experiences of sickness, bereavement or anxiety.

    There are no easy answers in such situations, no formulaic remedies, no slick theological explanations. The process of being present, listening and responding is demanding and requires skills and wisdom beyond ministers’ own experience. Often, caregivers feel they receive more than they give in such encounters.

    Samuel Wells reflects theologically and pastorally on twenty such encounters that were both hugely challenging and hugely instructive for him. The result is a book of profound practical wisdom and understanding that will inform and enrich pastoral ministry for all who read it.

    An extended introduction on the nature and practice of pastoral ministry introduces these memorable and moving accounts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanterbury Press
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9781786221315
    Face To Face: Meeting Christ in Friend and Stranger
    Author

    Samuel Wells

    Dr. Sam Wells is a visiting professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Kings College in London, England.

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      Book preview

      Face To Face - Samuel Wells

      For Abby

      Contents

      Preface

      Introduction

      1 The Finger of Judgement

      2 Faint Hope

      3 Slipped In

      4 A Question without an Answer

      5 Meeting God in the Bedroom

      6 Confession

      7 Curate’s Egg

      8 Greater Love

      9 Our Place in the Story

      10 Reunion

      11 If We Dare Ask

      12 The Banality of Failure

      13 Baptism

      14 Clear Out

      15 Love and Death

      16 From the Dust

      17 Are Clergy Christians?

      18 Hanging Out

      19 Making Amends

      20 Resurrection

      21 First Impressions

      Copyright

      Preface

      This is a book of epiphanies – moments when it became clear that God was present, tangibly or retrospectively, in ordinary events or extraordinary coincidences. It’s intended as an encouragement to clergy, and to all who minister, and a reminder of why we do what we do, especially should we ever feel discouraged, underappreciated, or bewildered. But it’s also designed as a way for lay people to see through the eyes of a priest, to renew their own sense of ministry, and to gain fresh perspective on the humble and surprising ways God shows up.

      I assume that anyone who has been engaged in ordained ministry for nearly 30 years could have written this book. Maybe it will encourage such people to cherish their memories and be deepened in their sense of the importance of what they do. Yet I’m aware that I’m taking a risk in publishing these accounts. The reader may be anxious that I’m breaking a code of confidence, betraying the trust of my confidants. Aware of this concern and the responsibility that comes with it, I should say how I’ve addressed it.

      There are five kinds of stories presented here. One kind is accurate and very personal: in these cases I have sought and gained the permission of the individual concerned to publish their story. Another kind is accurate, but it would be hard for others, and usually the person themselves, to identify the precise details; in one or two cases the person has died and a good deal of time has passed. A third kind is less accurate: I have changed significant details in the story in such a way that retains its character and truth but is not traceable to its original protagonists. In a fourth kind I am making generalizations from many conversations; no particular individual is in mind. And in a fifth kind the information is in the public domain, and I am simply offering my own perspective on it.

      The introduction is long in proportion to the book: it is designed to do the same kind of work, just in a different genre. It arose out of a conversation with John Inge, and wouldn’t have come about without his encouragement. It might make a suitable piece to read the night before one’s ordination, or before one’s twentieth anniversary; or in a moment of exhaustion or humiliation. Like the encounters themselves, it’s about power: but power as exercised by the Holy Spirit. My humble hope is that reading this book may be an experience of that power in the Church today.

      Earlier versions of a number of these pieces first appeared in The Christian Century, and I’m grateful to Debra Bendis and Steve Thorngate for their trust in me. Three, ‘The Finger of Judgement’, ‘If We Dare Ask’, and ‘A Question without an Answer’, can be found in different forms in my Incarnational Mission: Being with the World.¹ Another, ‘Baptism’, is an expanded version of an account that first appeared in my God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics.² The passage concerning the clerical collar in the introduction may be found also in Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church.³

      The book is dedicated, with gratitude and appreciation, to a friend, former colleague and sometime co-author who has a particular gift for recognizing the presence of God in the ordinary and extraordinary; about whom a taciturn person, after receiving her ministry, once said, ‘She has a beautiful way of just being.’ It’s hard to imagine a greater endorsement of a ministry – of all ministry – than that.

      Notes

      1  Samuel Wells, 2018, Incarnational Mission: Being with the World, Grand Rapids and Norwich: Eerdmans and Canterbury (pp.27-8, 44-8, 51-4).

      2  Samuel Wells, 2006, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell (pp.69-70).

      3  Samuel Wells, 2017, Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church, Grand Rapids and Norwich: Eerdmans and Canterbury (pp16-17).

      Introduction

      This book begins in two places. The first is with a ring on the doorbell of the flat in my first parish. At the door was a woman with a deep and sacramentally shaped faith, a stressful job and a failing marriage. One evening, after finishing work late, she called by my home at around 6.30 p.m. I invited her in. As she sat on the sofa of my sitting room, she poured out the details of her distress, most of which concerned a delicate situation at work that crossed the borders of the criminal, the medical and the pastoral in disturbing and emotionally challenging ways.

      After around 45 minutes of almost uninterrupted monologue, she paused for breath. She looked around her at the stillness and peace of my flat. Then she noticed a plate of half-eaten curry – a sign of the meal I’d been enjoying on a relatively unusual quiet evening at home. ‘You’ve really got it made here, haven’t you? Nice meal, nice flat, quiet home. This is the life I need.’ And she laughed, as if she’d made a joke; but I took it as a sign not to take her envy as aggressive. I kept silence for a little while. ‘It’s all for you,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’ she replied, actually realizing there was someone else in the room for the first time, someone with feelings and needs of their own. ‘All this peace and security and stability is so you can come here and pour out your heart with confidence that there’ll be time and space to find God in it,’ I said. ‘If I lived like you there’d be no place for you and other people like you to go on nights like this,’ I said.

      That was the moment I realized that ministry means being set apart. At both my ordinations my married colleagues had been distressed at the point in the rehearsal where it became obvious that the four of us to be ordained would be taken away from spouses and children to sit alone for the second half of the service. I went along with their sense of injustice. But that night in my flat I realized that ‘ordained’ really did mean set apart – set apart to be available as a free gift. So in this introduction I want to explore the power of ministry, and in what qualities the power of that setting apart resides.

      The second place this book begins is in a photograph of my peers at theological college. What does one do with these photographs, which lie in a box with my under-12 rugby team, my school prefect photo, my undergraduate matriculation class picture, my college rugby team, and a host of bad haircuts and fashion casualties? In one vicarage I made the mistake of hanging them all on the stairs. And so I faced the reality, several times a day, of passing that photo, which told me that around half my colleagues from theological college were no longer in ministry. Which ones fell out with the bishop, which ones slept with the youth worker, and which ones unaccountably stopped believing Anglicanism was the only way to salvation I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination and lament.

      The point is this. All of us knew power was a bad thing. All of us knew that ‘among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them’ (Mark 10.42). All of us knew that it was not to be so among us, and all of us knew the words ‘whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mark 10.43-44). We were also just beginning to discover that since most of us were white Western males, who had for countless generations regarded ourselves as the unquestioned universal moral subject, we were crossing a threshold from an era where we’d been regarded as the norm for all good, to one in which we were taken to be the source of untold harm. So another reason not to be powerful, then. And we were being ordained into a Church that was becoming obsessed with its loss of numbers, money and social influence, and was forgetting that numbers, money and social influence obscure the power of the gospel at least as often as they reveal it.

      The result was we were a generation that had no idea of our own power. We had no vocabulary for it, no social legitimacy for it, no theology for it, no encouragement for it. So those of us who fell into despair, anger or depression, or displaced desperation for security or love, did so more than anything else out of a sense of powerlessness. If we did damage to our parishioners or our tradition, it was less through reckless use of intoxicating power than through ignorance of the power we had. I consider myself blessed to have had several years’ experience of living in

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