Episode 10: Sam Wells
Interview Date: 3 November 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.
Since 2012 Revd Dr Sam Wells has been Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, a church which has an honourable history in social justice and as a centre for the arts. He has served for many years as a parish priest in situations of social deprivation. He also spent 7 years in North Carolina, where he was Dean of Duke University Chapel. A distinguished theologian, Sam has published 35 books, on subjects ranging from Christian ethics, mission, ministry, scripture, liturgy and preaching. He is one of the most respected exponents of the sermon in the Anglican Communion.
Sam Wells - Timed Interview Summary
0:00 - 31:13
The interview took place in November 2020 during the Covid pandemic in the UK. Sam Wells was born in 1965 in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Parents and their different backgrounds. Father fought in the Second World War. Mother, a nurse, was the daughter of Jewish converts to Christianity in the Ukraine in Eastern Europe. Maternal grandfather was a Baptist pastor who escaped to the West from Stalin’s Ukraine in the 1920s, only to flee with his family from Berlin in Nazi Germany to England in 1938. Sam’s father came from a very different background, a tradition of Anglican clergymen, in which Sam is the fourth generation. Sam regards himself as a mixture of his parent’s very different temperaments: his father, gentle and understated and his mother, driven and ambitious. His mother develops cancer when he is five, and dies when he is a teenager. He meets a cousin from his mother’s family in America, in early adulthood, and he notes a strong family resemblance. Reflecting on his own career, he sees it as emerging from his father’s tradition but being propelled - after Sam’s natural ability as a writer was discovered by an early publisher - into something more ambitious: as a public preacher, national broadcaster, and now head of a fairly large institution at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London, in addition to the pastoral aspects of a priest’s life, which he still treasures.
31:14 – 34:16
Of his grandparents, the one that Sam feels he knows best – although not from personal contact - is his maternal grandmother. He discovers her memoir in a drawer at his late father’s home. His mother had never talked about the family story, which was quite remarkable and involved converting Nazis to Christianity in East London. If Sam were ever to write a novel it might be based on this material, as it is the most precious thing that he owns.
34:17 – 41:42
Sam’s place in his lineage of Anglican clergymen, who were often unpretentious and obscure. One was a public-school master who after getting married then became an Anglican parson. His father, who had many remarkable qualities, spent 30 years in the same parish, before ending his ministry in a remote country living. Sam has had to struggle against this tradition as the only definition of a godly life. He remembers his father, on meeting the eminent theologian Stanley Hauerwas, ascribing his son’s abilities to his mother. It took Sam well into his thirties to realise that his own calling was different. Reminiscences of being with his father.
41:43 – 45:15
Childhood memories. Father was vicar of a small 12th century church in a thriving English parish of five-thousand people, for which it was really too small. Rogation, beating the parish bounds and harvest were important in the annual cycle of church life, involving worship in the parish churchyard, whose tremendous views are still fresh in his memory. Sam plays a lot of sport. Apart from this, the major event in his family life, a “given”, is the serious illness of his mother.
45:16 – 53:52
His mother’s fatal illness. He is first aware of this when he is only five, when his mother has the first of several operations. She shares more of the details with Sam’s sister, who was three years older and became her confidant. However, he has written about the experience of his mother sitting him down about ten years later and telling him about the illness and that she does not have long to live. Reflects on the fact that there is no nice way to receive bad news, and being told something gently but directly is a good method. Living in an old vicarage, cold, drafty and far too large for a modern family, Sam is able to take over the drawing room as an “A” level study room and place of retreat. For Sam, writing still follows this same pattern of retreat to a quiet place, and he reflects on how this has continued during the Covid-19 pandemic UK lockdown.
53:53 – 1:16:58
University and theological education. Like his father, Sam goes to Oxford and studies history. Feels weighed down a little by a sense of privilege having gone there. As well as Oxford, he goes to Liverpool to work with Canon Neville Black in a working-class part of the city. A formative time. The Oxford guilt dissipates. The calling to Anglican ministry comes very early, while at Oxford. Goes on to Edinburgh where he has three wonderful years studying theology. Great parties. Rediscovers an intellectual appetite and energy. A professor there suggests that he should do a PhD, and Sam has to overcome his inherited scepticism that intellectual pursuits are not really compatible with the calling of a parish priest. The incumbent of Sam’s parish suggests that he undertake a PhD part-time, one day a week and he takes to it naturally. It is about the theologian Stanley Hauerwas. It is a rich period of his life in a post-industrial working-class Anglo-Catholic parish on Tyneside, the time when he meets his future wife. Hauerwas’s work brings together the practical and theological aspects of Christian ministry for Sam, and the final part of the last chapter is about improvisation. This latter section, incorporating some ideas from the theatrical pioneer, Keith Johnstone’s Impro, develops into Sam’s fourth book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, which remains the one in America for which he is best known.
1:16:59 – 1:21:03
Reflections on formative ministry in Tyneside in the 1990s, a sort of parish which probably exists less today: a congregation of 160 on a Sunday morning, liturgically shaped with 40-plus funerals a year, a lot or pastoral care, grief, death unemployment. Real stuff with people who were not used to someone sitting with them for half an hour or an hour, and really wanting to hear what it was like for them. For Sam, the most important part of being a priest is “to be with people in the most difficult and unresolved parts of their lives and to be a person who can stay there and not run away or try to fix it”. Going to the bottom of the pond with someone and seeing God’s reflection at the bottom of the pond which one could not see on the surface.
1:21:04 – 1:24:27
Developments in thought. Sam regards the two critical books exploring the implications of his PhD and its application to church life as Improvisation and God’s Companions, the latter being something of a “favourite child” until the writing of The Nazareth Manifesto. They bring together 15 years of reflection on ministry and of academic study. The next big insight for Sam came from a chapter about whether morality can be Christian in Jon Milbank’s The Word Made Strange: this was that ethics or faith is too often predicated on scarcity rather than abundance. It was then 9 years before a new “big thesis” emerges for Sam Wells, the idea of being with
1:24:28 – 1:31:33
The Covid Pandemic and putting the insights of Christian ethics into practice. For Sam, the sermon that he preached at St Martin’s on 15 March 2020 is a critical example, because the Covid pandemic is starting to take hold in London. The sermon is a reminder to his congregation to put into practice what they have imagined through the common practices of the church in previous years. So, community care, outreach work with refugees, liturgy and contemplative prayer become threaded together. A quote from Iris Murdoch: “Decisions are what we take when we have tried everything else”. What we do comes out of what we have practiced in our imagination. Examples are Sully Sullenberger landing US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 after both engines were disabled by a bird strike; two elite British divers spearheading the rescue of a football team from caves in Thailand in 2018; the Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe taking the place of a condemned prisoner in Auschwitz in 1941. Often the right decisions emerge organically from what has been thought and practiced beforehand.
1:31:34 - 1:56:39
Sam Well’s 7 years as Dean of Duke Chapel, Duke Divinity School, one of the most visible pulpits in the United States. As Dean he was preaching on a Sunday to 1,000 congregants and on the Monday directly afterwards, 1,000 pastors would watch the sermon, and if an important topic was being preached about, it would make the newspapers. A high investment of resources, staff (choir of 100, fellow clergy and a team of researchers), an excellent library and input from Professors across the University support the preaching. The Duke sermon, a rhetorical performance and a direct encounter with the listener, is largely alien to British Anglicanism. Therefore, it was essential to become good at the specialist skill of preaching, as it provided a link to both the Ivy League and the Bible Belt. A matter of varying one’s style and trusting the Holy Spirit and one’s instincts. The experience has made him a different Vicar of St Martin’s, London. As a result of learning from the American ambition to put resources behind an idea, there is the ambition to make St Martin’s, because of its prestigious London position, the Flagship Broad Church Anglican pulpit in Britain. Reflections on American Christianity: Duke University in Durham, North Carolina has the things that British Anglicans thinks it lacks, in numbers, money and social influence. But Sam soon realizes that the Kingdom of God is not necessarily closer. In the American context, he recognizes the blessing of the UK parish priest system, and he applies its insights while at Duke University.
1:56:40 - 2:02:54
Sam and his family’s return to the UK. It had never seriously occurred to them to stay in America forever. A private conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the vacancy at St Martin-in-the-Fields is pointed out to Sam. Aspects of its history, in particular the association with Canon Dick Sheppard in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sheppard also came from a background where you did not do things by halves. He transformed St Martin’s from being one of a dozen London society churches to being known for its radicalism: from supporting soldiers on their way to the Western Front in the First World War, to doing the first radio broadcast from a church in the world, and the first Christmas appeal. In the UK, everyone thinks that St Martin’s is a homeless centre and in America they think it is an orchestra: both are true and not quite true. Sheppard created the myth of St Martin’s by being larger than life and being the epitome of always being with the poor while being connected to the aristocracy, rather like the Red Vicar of Thaxted, Conrad Noel.
2:02:55 - 2:08:53
The Nazareth Manifesto. Seeing the misplaced energy of support given by US volunteers at the time of Hurricane Katrina, and seeing the assumption in some parts of the American Christian community that it had all the answers to other people’s problems, leads Sam to reflect on the importance of being with people, rather than working for them. He works out the 8 dimensions of “being with” in his book, The Nazareth Manifesto.
2:08:54 - 2:13:57
Reflections on how the local church might change as outlined in a 2018 book, For Good: The Church and the Future of Welfare, co-authored with Russell Rook and David Barclay. It looks at the five evils described by the architect of the Welfare State, William Beveridge in his 1942 Beveridge Report: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. It then matches them with five assets – relationship, creativity, partnership, compassion, and joy – that the Church is well placed to cultivate. It argues that the Church should not get into the “deficit” business of providing welfare but focus on fostering these assets which will enable individuals to regain control of their lives. The importance of local associations. Sam sees the book as the application of the “being with” principles to the welfare state. It is better to define people by their abundant assets than any particular deficit.
2:13:58 – 2:21:26
The Nazareth Manifesto, abundance and scarcity. He believes that: “Poverty is a mask we put on people to hide their true wealth, and wealth is a mask we put on people to hide their true poverty”. Prayer is when you recognize the difference between two things: those which last forever which we could call essence and things which last for a limited time which we call existence. In common parlance we call essence, God, and Christians realize that this is a personal relationship. We need to connect with essence, and this is like joining a cosmic grid of power.
2:21:27 – 2:30:35
Covid and the Church. Sam thinks that a humbler church and a bigger God will emerge. In the pandemic period what has been catalyzed is more of a Spirit church, watching the Holy Spirit working beyond us. During this period, the energy has not come from trying to replicate the physical church online. Being locked down in a familiar domestic situation may have encouraged people to share experiences of grief more fully with others online. St Martin’s has had a lot of success with “Being With” enquirers groups. St Martin’s are running seven and another twelve are being run in other places across the country. The fundamental conviction is that the Holy Spirit has been working in individual experience across people’s lives.
2:20:36 – 2:37:51
Looking to the future. Sam came up with a formula about twenty years ago about the three ministry roles. You can be in a specific job (for example, the Vice Chancellor of a University); you can be in the strategic place that you want to be in to change the world; or you can just be in a good enough place to do kingdom stuff with kingdom people. He feels that he has done all three. He does not know which he will end up doing next. For Sam the third option is the best, but it does not really matter as long you are doing Gospel work.