To be sure, the community he is referring to is the Anabaptist community. McClendon argues that all Christian theology "must have a community of reference that cannot without confusion be subsumed under some more general ecclesial type; it must be Orthodox or Protestant or Catholic or the like" (p. 19). This notion is foundational for his three-volume work because he is developing a theological account from within an ecclesial community that has not had one.
A systematic theological contribution has been a missing element within the Anabaptist tradition. What is more, the Anabaptist tradition fits more clearly into the shape of the primitive Christian community (pp. 31-35), and will thus be interesting even to those who are not heirs of that tradition. He refers to it simply as "the Christian life" (p. 19). What is ethics in the Christian life? It is not what is commonly referred to as ethics; Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, Kant's deontological decisionism, Philip Wogaman's quandary ethics (pp. 48-59). With this (and other) short sampling of ethicists, he takes the most familiar ones as opponents for this work. With Bentham, we are told that ethics is a matter of acting upon whatever will achieve the most good, or in short, our happiness. With Kant, we are told that we must rely on a principle of moral duty, and decide in favor of what is right in itself over and against my happiness, or what good I may achieve. And although these two theories have fundamental differences, they are also fundamentally alike; they base ethics on the will; on inward quandaries in the moment of decision (pp. 56-59). They fail to take into account the sort of person who makes ethical decisions. For McClendon, ethics is not so much a tool for making better the decisions: ethics is the study (or systematization) of morals, while morals (or morality) means the actual conduct of people viewed with concern for right and wrong, good and evil (p. 47). That systematization occurs on a deeper level. For Christians, the moral life consists of much more than individual wills.
McClendon seeks to uncover the structure of the shared Christian story, to provide moral theologians at every skill level, with analytical concepts by which (and here we return to his definition of theology) to discover, interpret, and transform the convictions that shape the Christian story (p. 63). He does this by developing what he calls the Three Strands of Christian Ethics (p. 62) which he spends the remainder of the book developing. He argues that Christians really have three ways of talking about morality that correspond with the fact that we are (1) part of the natural order -- we are organic, embodied beings (2) we are part of a social world that is constituted by the corporate nature of Christian existence, the church, and share in human society (3) that we are members of an eschatological realm, the Kingdom of God, the "new world" established by God's resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Thus we have three strands of Christian ethics; the body, the social, and the resurrection strands (p. 66).
We cannot have a fully formed ethic without attention to each of these strands. A decisionist ethicist tends to focus primarily on strand one; the individual, or body and neglects the fact that we are social beings formed within communities of shared convictions, and that as Christians, our social and embodied lives are reoriented in light of the Kingdom of God. Some ethicists focus primarily on the communal strand, and neglect the embodied drives and needs, as well as the revelation of God in Christ that transforms our engagement with society and shapes the manner in which we manage our drives and needs. Something similar can be said of Christians who emphasize the resurrection strand while omitting our social and embodied strands. That too is an inadequate ethic. McClendon uses narratives to demonstrate the historical presence of these strands within the Christian community. With the organic strand he tells the story of Sarah and Johnathan Edwards. With the social strand he tells the story of (Hauerwas' and Macyntyre's initially) Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his theology of sociality (to borrow from Clifford Green's work), and with the resurrection strand, he tells the story of Dorothy day. This is a much needed theological method for doing ethics that stands alongside Glen's holistic character ethics grid as a very handy tool for theoethical analysis.