God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics

by Samuel Wells

We are pleased to annouce that God’s Companions by Samuel Wells has been shortlisted for the 2007 Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing.
www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk
Grounded in Samuel Wells’ experience of ordinary lives in poorer neighborhoods, this book presents a striking and imaginative approach to Christian ethics. It argues that Christian ethics is founded on God, on the practices of human community, and on worship, and that ethics is fundamentally a reflection of God's abundance.
Wells synthesizes dogmatic, liturgical, ethical, scriptural, and pastoral approaches to theology in order to make a bold claim for the centrality of the local church in theological reflection. He considers the abundance of gifts God gives through the practices of the Church, particularly the Eucharist. His central thesis, which governs his argument throughout, is that God gives his people everything they need to worship him, be his friends, and eat with him. Wells engages with serious scholarly material, yet sets out the issues lucidly for a student audience.

Genres: Theology, Church

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Samuel Wells (PhD, University of Durham) is vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican Church at Trafalgar Square in London. He previously served as dean of the chapel and research professor of Christian ethics at Duke University. Wells is the author of several books, including Be Not Afraid, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, and Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas. He also coedited, with Stanley Hauerwas, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics.

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the way Wells locates the movements of worship theologically. I appreciate his insistence that we (we being the church universal) operate out of abundance. God has given everything we need to worship him. EVERYTHING. I also appreciate the three movements: to worship God; to be God's friends; to eat with God.

I know I started this review saying "I loved the way Wells locates the movements of worship theologically," and I do; it is also where I got bogged down. He goes painstakingly through each step of a worship service he might lead in an Anglican parish in England. I am in a setting where we don't call our church a "parish," but rather a congregation. If you walked into my congregation talking about our "parish" they would probably look at you blankly.

We also don't center everything on the eucharist and we don't call it "the eucharist." We call it the Lord's Supper or Communion, and we don't take it every week. There are several steps of worship in Wells' book we don't follow, or we do it very differently. Wells so heavily theologizes the meaning of each step of worship, the reader might suppose it's not actually Christian worship if it's done exactly as he describes and in the order (sequence) he very intentionally portrays.

I love what he does and I am capable of applying the ideas in my setting, but the deeper into the book I got, the more distant I felt from what he was talking about.

[Zac Koons · Rating 5 out of 5]

No other book has had a greater influence on my own formation than this one. Wells works to show the theological rootedness of our Sunday liturgy, and how those practices in turn shape us to be more like Christ.