March Forth! Marssige Edasi!

JOURNAL OF AGGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY
Issue 19, June - July 2002
The Mission of The Salvation Army
Captain Geoff Ryan
“Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross
between two thieves on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan
that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek; at the kind of place
where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is
where He died and that is what He died about that is where churchmen should
be and what churchmanship should be about.” (George MacLeod)
“Meanwhile our churches, like secular associations, are concerned with fundraising,
beautiful buildings, large numbers, comforting sermons from highly
qualified preachers, while they display indifference to the poor, the insane, and
the lonely. Jesus himself would find no place in our all-too-respectable churches,
for he did not come to help the righteous but to bring sinners to repentance. Our
churches are not equipped to do that sort of thing.” (John White)
A corps officer should understand that he is sent by God and the Army to all the
unconverted, non-church-going people in his district, especially to the most
needy and depraved among them. (Orders and Regulations for Corps Officers)
The Only Two Questions
What is the mission of The Salvation Army? Who were we created to be? What is
it we were created to do? Identity and function – the only two questions that
really need answering and they are being asked all over the place, all the time
and by all sorts of people.
The Russians summed it up nicely for me. Walking around St. Petersburg in the
early 1990’s, not speaking a word of Russian and with “The Salvation Army” in
large, silver Cyrillic script.... Upon
seeing my unusual uniform and reading the boast emblazoned across the front of
my cap, they would invariably ask or shout or laugh, one of two questions: “What
is The Salvation Army?” or “Who do you save?” Always one or the other and
sometimes both.
It took me some time to realize that these questions were not only valid, but well
asked and that between those two questions lies the answer to everything else.
They require examination of our identity and our mission: who are we and what
do we do? In trying to answer these questions, for the sake of the Russians, I
gradually started asking them to myself. I spent nine years trying to answer those
questions and at times I wonder how good a job I really did. In some ways I’m
still asking.
The asking is taking place on this side of the Atlantic as well, as I soon found out
upon return from Russia. Who are we? What should we be doing? I wonder
though whether the questions are being asked honestly though? Because if you
ask an honest question then you should be able to expect an honest answer.
You at least deserve one. But honest answers to these questions carry with them
a host of implications and a horde of consequences. The Pandora’s box for The
Salvation Army is the one that contains the true and direct answers to these
questions and we are wise in approaching it with more than a little fear and
trepidation.
We lament our confusion and uncertainty. But our instinct is to avoid the bright
sun of clarity for the netherworld of uncertainty and questioning and tentative
assertion. Muddy the waters, set off a smoke bomb, turn the lights off and you
can avoid the obvious - the hard facts that bruise your shins and skin your ankles
and generally just make life more of a hassle. “The truth will set us free”, Jesus
warned us. But freedom is often frightening, it has implications, carries
consequences and demands an investment and responsibility that our
commitment-phobic culture instinctively shies away, rather like a priest on the
road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
With less and less to lose with each passing year, let us open the box, clear the
water, turn the lights on and answer the questions. Personally I think the truth
therein is relatively simple. To be sure, a hard truth, but nothing too complicated.
As a Russian philosopher once said: “Life is simple. People complicate it”. So it is
with our life as an Army. The difficulty lies not in the obvious answers to the
questions asked – but in the fact that we lack the honesty to listen steadily to
these answers and live our lives – individually and corporately – in that truth. The
answers are not what we want to hear so we root around in the box hoping to
turn up some other answers, some different ones, some that better fit with what
we had in mind and how we have constructed our lives and corps and ministries.
A liar is not only someone who speaks a falsehood but includes also those who
hear falsehoods amid the spoken truth....
We need to have a sense of history and continuity, a deep understanding of what
God was up to in 1865 when he gave Booth the vision that was The Salvation
Army. Jacques Ellul, the French Christian philosopher, opined that “modern man
was a man without memory” and that this was a dangerous thing. To be
disconnected from the past and bereft of any tradition or sense of self leaves one
a prisoner of the present, bound by the laws and and temporal and fleeting
values of the transitory. We all need giants on whose shoulders we stand.
I believe there were three seminal moments in William Booth’s life that defined
and directed the vision given him by God and consequently all The Salvation
Army was and became. I believe that vision was crystal clear and specific and
focused and guided Booth throughout his life from beginning to end. It was a
while coming, but when it hit, it came with a certainty and clarity that I believe
never left him. It grew and developed, evolved even, but in its essence remained
as intact as the night God passed it on to Booth.
You see, vision is specific. Anything I have ever read about visions or visioning
tell me the same thing in one respect - a vision has hard edges, sharp edges
even. A vision is specific and unyielding in its focus - more laser beam than lamp.
If it is fuzzy around the edges, if it is too wide and large and spacious and all encompassing,
then whatever else it might be, it is not a vision. A plan maybe,
an idea, a strategy even. But not a vision. Visions are specific callings given by
God to his visionaries, his prophets. Men and women that he calls as vessels to
embody the vision, give birth to it and nurture it to full flowering. This is what
happened to Booth.
A Vision Birthed
It was summer 1865. Booth had been asked to lead a mission in London’s East
end, filling in for a leader who had fallen sick. Specifically, it was a tent campaign
in an abandoned graveyard in Whitechapel, then as now, one of London’s
rougher neighbourhoods. After one evening's toil, around midnight, Booth
returned home to his wife Catherine. She was waiting up for him. He was tired,
but “strangely excited” as he later remembered it (possibly an unconscious nod
to Wesley’s famous heart experience of being “strangely warmed” over a
hundred years previously). Walking in, William declared to Catherine, “I have
found my destiny!”
He was 36 years old. He had been working as a full-time minister of the gospel,
and more specifically a preacher and evangelist, for about 13 years at this point.
He had preached to thousands of people and seen hundreds of souls won to the
kingdom. Yet only now he finds his destiny? What did he mean? This is a vitally
important question because it is from this point, this juncture, that the Christian
Mission and subsequently The Salvation Army was created. So important is this
event that we commemorate it officially in The Salvation Army as Founders Day,
July 2; the day on which the evangelistic campaign on the Whitechapel
graveyard commenced is rightly seen as the birth moment of our movement (and
not William Booth’s birthday as is widely assumed).
So what was Booth on about to Catherine that summer’s night? He meant that
saving these particular type of souls in this particular place was what God wanted
him to do with his life and so he set about creating an organization in order to do
it as effectively as possible. His destiny was to the poor, the marginalized, the
disenfranchised, the submerged tenth, the last, the lost and the least.
A Vision Passed On
The second event came a bit later that same year when his son Bramwell was 12
years old and the Christian Mission was just getting started, The Salvation Army
yet to be birthed. It was again late on a Sunday night following a hard day of
preaching. Bramwell Booth, William and Catherine’s oldest child, was twelve
years old. Cyril Barnes writes of this moment in his book: “Words of William
Booth”.
“They had left Mile End Waste and gone but a few yards along Cambridge Heath
Road when William pushed open the door of a drinking saloon. What Bramwell
saw he never forgot. As a grown man he recalled seeing a ‘brilliantly lighted
place, noxious with the fumes of drink and tobacco, and reeking of filth… .The
place was crowded with men, many of them bearing on their faces the marks of
brutishness and vice, and women also, dishevelled and drunken.’
As the lad looked wondering what was the cause of all this sorrow, his father
said: ‘Willie, these are our people; these are the people I want you to live for and
bring to Christ.’”
This whole scene is full of Old Testament imagery. The Father and patriarch,
giving his blessing to his first-born son, passing on his legacy, ensuring that what
he has started will continue and flourish. The whole exercise undertaken by
Booth is about sustaining vision with William taking the vision that God had given
him and cloaking Bramwell with this mantle; a prophetic act foreshadowing
Bramwell’s term as the second General of The Salvation Army.
How many of us would take a twelve-year old son or daughter and expose them
to such a scene? But Booth - gripped by a vision that would consume the rest of
his life and one to which he would sacrifice everything he had, children included
as it turned out, needed to ensure that his heir would know what he was about
and understand the charge God had given him and that he himself would become invested in developing and sustaining this vision.
Catherine Bramwell Booth, writing of this incident in her biography of Bramwell
Booth goes on:
“Prophetic, almost symbolic! For these two, Father and son, were destined to
travel strange roads together; metaphorically speaking, one sees them hurrying
through all, or nearly all, the Whitechapels of the world, always searching out the
sinful, repulsive and outcast of the children of men, and always saying to each
other, “These are our people.”
“That first vivid impression of mankind’s misery and degradation, of its
immeasurable spiritual need, which he received in Whitechapel, never left
Bramwell Booth. More than sixty years later he lay dying in circumstances of
peculiar personal sorrow and loss, but his thoughts and prayers were with “our
people"
Summing Up
The third seminal incident occurs in May 1912, three months before Booth is
promoted to glory. It is his last public address, delivered at the Royal Albert Hall
in London before 10,000 people, a month after his 83rd birthday.
Last words are always very telling. We study the last words of the great and
famous looking for clues about their speakers. Books are published containing
nothing more than the last words of famous people. We somehow feel that a clue
to the life and purpose of such people will be contained in their parting words,
that what have they have experienced and learned will be summed up and
explained. That if there is a legacy it will be passed on.
So what did Booth say? What charge did he give to the more than 10,000
Salvationists gathered to catch his closing statements?
Well Booth does do a summing up. He spoke of housing for the poor, of
unemployment, and addictions, health issues, criminal and prison reform, noting
that while not one of these was intentionally the object of life’s efforts – his vision
– The Salvation Army had nevertheless addressed each of these concerns. He
declared that his object was to do God’s will in his life and that sixty-five years
previously, he had consecrated his life to this end, to this “object”, as he termed
it. And what was God’s will for William Booth?
With reference to the litany of social ills afflicting the poor that the Salvation Army
had addressed, Booth continued:
“And the object I chose all those years ago embraced every effort, contained in
its heart the remedy for every form of misery and sin and wrong to be found upon
the earth, and every method of reclamation needed by human nature.”
Then he concludes with his now famous “I’ll Fight” declaration:
“And now, comrades and friends, I must say goodbye. I am going into dry-dock
for repairs, but the Army will not be allowed to suffer, either financially or
spiritually, or in any other way by my absence; and in the long future I think it will
be seen – I shall not be here to see, but you will – that the Army will answer
every doubt and banish every fear and strangle every slander, and by its
marvelous success show to the world that it is the work of God and that the
General has been His servant…While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight;
while little children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in
and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while
there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul
without the light of God, I’ll fight – I’ll fight to the very end!”
This I’ll fight is probably the closest thing to a mission or vision statement that
Booth ever made. It is echoes Jesus' mission statement given at the
commencement of his public ministry as recorded in Luke 4: 18, 19 where he
quotes Isaiah’s 61st chapter. It is the cry of a prophet “nailing his colours to the
mast” (albeit more after the fact than before). Words to inspire the troops by
pointing to personal example and history and personal vision.
In essence what Booth was saying was that this is what I have been about for the
past 68 years: the drunkards and criminals, the prostitutes, the starving, those
lost for time and eternity. This is the call - the vision - that God placed on my life
and out of which came The Salvation Army. This is what we (read Salvationists)
are about. This is why you are here today. Learn from me, follow my example,
catch the torch as I throw it to you and move forward. And with that he left the
platform and three short months later left for heaven.
Therefore…
If there is any value is looking at one’s ROOTS, in returning to the fundament
and source of the vision, it is for times and questions such as these. The way
forward must needs be linked to a comprehensive understanding of the road
already traveled. We need to attempt to understand God’s purposes and plans
with regard to our movement and the answer to this lies in the that vision that
was birthed well over a hundred years.
We speak here of ecclesiology and not methodology. Most of the disputes and
identity issues that crop up in The Salvation Army today regarding who we are
and what we should be doing (and where and among whom we should be doing
it) pick methodological battlegrounds on which to battle out their issues. Yet
method itself defines little if anything - rather it is defined by context and guided
by philosopy, or in this case theology and ecclesiology. It is pointless to argue
about things such as uniform styles, musical tastes, sacramental options, the role
of officers etc which are inherently methodological and structural issues, if the
vision remains questioned, ill-defined, confused or lost.
To say that Booth was simply about reaching the lost and leave it at that is to
misunderstand the nature of vision and to misread the particulars of Booth’s
calling and vision. Yes, Booth was, at the end of the day, an evangelist – a
pragmatic evangelist whose passion and inclination was to preach and
evangelize.... To move from
this, however, to the assertion that this, in and of itself, constitutes his vision and
that this was no more focused or particular than a “reaching of the lost”,
irrespective of which “lost” he was attempting to reach, is to willfully ignore the
evidence of our history as a movement and Booth’s own recorded thoughts on
the matter:
“To help the poor, to minister to them in their slums, to sympathize with them in
their poverty, afflictions, and irreligion, was the natural outcome that came to my
soul through believing in Jesus Christ.”
The imperative to reach the lost does not constitute a vision. It is larger, wider
than any vision. It is in fact a commission, in Christian circles generally termed
the “Great Commission”. It comes from Christ’s words to his disciples in Matthew
28:18-20, taken as binding on all subsequent disciples. It is a non-negotiable for
anyone who becomes a Christian. To say it is a vision per se, is a misnomer. To
say that this general instruction to all believers constituted Booth’s is to
misunderstand the nature of vision and calling and possibly to fail to grasp God’s
wider plan for the salvation of the world.
Booth had a passionate understanding of his message as a gospel for the
whosever. The vision God gave him was for those of the whosoever that were
neglected by the churches and rejected by mainstream society. His vision, and
the vision for The Salvation Army was of a mission of, to and with the poor.
Certainly this vision is lived out within the context of the Great Commission.
Picture if you can an actor, playing a particular role on stage, with a scenic
backdrop that establishes the context and sets the tone and informs the theatregoers
of the period and setting for the play. This is how I believe God envisions
us as The Salvation Army: One actor amid his troupe, playing a specific role with
specific intent – our vision – as part of his grand play of
redemption.
“Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love…Repent and do
the things you did at first.” (Revelation 2:4,5)