21 Questions for a 21st Century Army: Being the Salvos Now

By Grant Sandercock-Brown

The Salvos are part of the fabric of Australian culture. This once rag-tag mob of 19th Century evangelists has morphed into a much loved Christian charity. This is both gratifying and challenging.

But who are we really? Charity? Church? Evangelists? This thought provoking book asks some important questions, and provides some answers, for the Salvos in the 21st Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781925171334

Book preview

Endnotes

Introduction

I hope you sense in this book that I love the Army and that any criticisms of her are those of a committed family member rather than a dissident. I pray that God through the Holy Spirit will renew us as a people so that we can fulfil our mandate as missioners in his Kingdom. I do think that such a renewal will be a challenging and humbling exercise—renewal normally is! But the result could be a transformed Army and a changed world. And by the grace of God, who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

I do hold the view that as The Salvation Army we are not fulfilling our potential. We do many good things, but I’m sure we can do better. I also believe that by continually seeking better answers to some foundational questions about who we are, and why we do what we do, we can clarify our mission and hone our practices to achieve more. This book is my attempt to contribute to such an enterprise.

I acknowledge that not everything I say here will accord precisely with current Salvation Army practice or some of the convictions of individual Salvationists. I recognise that many of the ideas stated in this book are merely my opinion. And of course I think I’m right. I would hardly write a book expressing views I thought were wrong. But I hope that what I have to say is more than mere opinion. I have done my best to wrestle with each of these questions with Scripture as my starting point, Wesleyan theology as my compass, and my experience of Christ and his people in The Salvation Army as the context.

Much of the content of this book has appeared in writings published elsewhere in Army publications, particularly the Officer magazine, on websites connected to the Army, or in my sermons. I am not sure I have ever had an original idea and I have done my best to acknowledge the sources that I have used. If as a reader you find an unacknowledged source, please let me know and I will do my best to rectify that omission.

1. Why an Army anyway?

We have been the Salvation Army now for over 130 years. The genius of crossing out volunteer and inserting salvation before army changed us forever. The meeting between William, Bramwell and George Scott Railton, where this happened, is now the stuff of legend. My question is really ‘why be an army now’? Is it a metaphor or model that has outlived its usefulness? Is it time to do away with things like flags and uniforms, articles of war, soldiership. Do we need a new name and new methods?

In my view, The Salvation Army is essentially an idea—a simple, profound, and practical one. In the beginning, its logic went something like this: We want to get the whole world saved, win the world for God. Let’s do away with endless committees and boards that will slow us down. Let’s adopt a quasi-military structure with a clear and direct chain of command that will enable us to respond efficiently and effectively where ever Christ needs us. We will go for souls and go for the worst. I think it’s actually a pretty good idea.

The Christian Mission changed its name to The Salvation Army in 1878, and Booth, who was by this time the general superintendent of the Christian Mission, became the sole general of The Salvation Army. The name change somehow focused the movement, and the previously steadily growing mission began to experience explosive growth as The Salvation Army. The newly named movement doubled the previous thirteen years’ growth in just one year.¹

It seems that the military metaphor was originally an innocent, empowering, and energizing one. In 19th Century Britain, soldiers were heroes. They were looked up to and admired. To think of yourself as a Salvationist was to think of yourself as a hero. We’ll Be Heroes, we literally sang. A salvation soldier was a person whose personal commitment, dress, and lifestyle proclaimed to all that they were prepared to be brave and risk all for Jesus’ sake.

However, our contemporary culture no longer sees soldiers as unvaryingly brave, honourable or heroic. This side of the holocaust, Vietnam, countless Hollywood war epics and nightly news bulletins, soldiers are not automatically heroes. They are often viewed with suspicion and their mistakes and failures are gleefully reported and photographed. If that’s the case, do we still want to be soldiers? Is our military metaphor merely a product of its times that has outlived its usefulness? Is it holding us back? Or do we need to reclaim it and invest in it some relevant meaning?

What Changed?

There is no question that up until the First World War the military metaphor energised and focused the work of the Army. There had been steady and slow progress as the Christian Mission but somehow this metaphor helped us explode around the world. The impact here in Australia was enormous. Right into the 1930’s we continued to grow. Yet here we are in 2014 at the end of decades with no significant growth in terms of membership and attendance. What has happened?

Broadly speaking there were two significant factors that we did not plan for or recognise. The first was the challenge of generational Salvationists, or, if you like, the children of the regiment. There is a vast difference between the adult who freely chooses to join a movement and the child who is born into it. They may both love it but they will love it differently. The first with the fervour of the committed activist and the second with the loyal love of a family member. Personally choosing to be part of a movement that wants to save the world is not the same as growing up in one. It was inevitable that in a multi-generational army priorities would change. William, Catherine, and Railton thought of themselves as red-hot, blood and fire missioners. Yet by the time of William’s death, there were a significant, and growing, number of Salvationists to whom such a label just could not be applied. And the percentage of the movement to which this applies has accelerated in the years since.

Secondly, after the tragedy of the Second World War something else changed. A growing militarism took hold, perhaps influenced by the huge number of ex-serviceman, perhaps inevitable in a quasi-military organisation. We began to let our metaphor define us rather than the other way around. Certainly, in part, it flowed from a society-wide desire for consolidation and structure after four chaotic decades in the West. Whatever the cause of this ‘militarism’, in the Army it meant a shift from a heroic and energising metaphor to increasingly rigid and defining metaphor. In fact, we became very focused on military standards and the trappings that went with them. And so, ironically, considering what we know about William Booth and what we suspect about Jesus, you couldn’t be in some corps bands if you had a beard. We began to pride ourselves on deportment. Phrases about wearing your uniform well and, even more unhelpfully, judging people about their uniform wearing began to creep in. Bramwell’s very comprehensive regulations became a mandate to rigorously benchmark what went on in our sections at corps level. People sent home from worship because of their dress. Young men hauled over the coals for being late or having their sleeves rolled up or their tie loose. Teenagers told off for having their skirts too short or too long; songsters for wearing incorrect stockings.

Scripture, in the book of James, explicitly tells us not to judge people by the clothes they wear. We need to remember that. As Chick Yuill said at a men’s bible convention in Sydney, Whatever our reasons for wearing a uniform it was never to ‘make us look smart’. Scripture also affirms that it is humankind that has an obsession with appearance, God looks at our hearts.

Our flexible organisational structures originally designed to resource the coalface of ministry, hardened along military lines and became a hierarchy which some longed to climb. In 1892 Bramwell Booth commented on this process: [C]lass and caste grows with the growth of the military idea. Needs watching.² This had been a clear and present danger right from our founding. We should have done much more to resist.

By allowing this energising metaphor to become militarism, in my lifetime, we somehow marginalised whole groups of young (and not so young) people. In the 70s, telling young men they couldn’t be in the brass band and have long hair meant they left in pretty significant numbers. Perhaps they wanted to anyway. Be that as it may, we failed to give people a valid reason to conform, to not smoke, or drink, or gamble. Too often we failed to give our people an inspiring reason to wear uniform. Somehow, without anybody particularly meaning this to happen, we became a movement, which in terms of its congregational life were seen by many to be obsessed with rules.

Looking for answers

And we have not been able to find answers to our declining health. We noticed we were shrinking in the 70s, we were no longer vibrant and growing, and instead of following our own path we, for the first time, looked to established churches and church organisations to arrest our decline. We embraced Church growth. It didn’t help us as we had hoped. We embraced the seeker sensitive movement; tinkered with the Praise and Worship movement. Some embraced Pentecostalism. None of these has helped us to stop, let alone reverse, our numerical slide. Perhaps because the solution to our decline is not external to us. We needed to recognise that there is something within that needs changing.

We need to honestly accept that we ordinary Salvationists have contributed to the problem. Our decline is not just imposed on us by changes in Australian society or its attitude to the church. We, ourselves, lost something, or at least were too often unaware of our own omissions. Salvationists of my age and older have too often failed to inspire today’s young people. We have forgotten to tell them, and perhaps even forgotten ourselves, what a good, God-given idea the Salvation Army is. Because of this vacuum of inspiration and lack of clearly communicated identity and purpose, young people have become involved in all sorts of other things, have sought their heroes elsewhere. Some have been lost to the intellectual rigour of Calvinism or to healthy congregationalism. Many have left us for the attractions of Pentecostalism. Many have just left.

We need to rethink who we are, what we are doing and why we are doing it. I once was asked to be on a think tank around the question, ‘what is a Salvation Army corps plant?’ Well the better question for me was really, ‘what is a Salvation Army anything?’ That is, corps, centre, or plant? And in answering that it’s no use trying to define our theological distinctives, I’m afraid it won’t help. That’s a cul-de-sac that we’ve been turning around in for the last ten years. We have no theological distinctives! That is, there is no part of our theology that is unique to us. The things that make us distinctive are completely obvious. Things such as wearing uniforms as part of our choosing to organise ourselves along military lines; asking soldiers in our movement to sign a covenant that affects their lifestyle; not practicing the two sacraments of Protestantism. These things are distinctives of praxis but they are not theological distinctives.

Core convictions

A better way of thinking about ‘what is Salvation Army?’ for me is to say that as the Army we do hold some core convictions that underpin our mission. These convictions shape what we say and what we do and very importantly, how we prioritise. These convictions are: we believe that God loves every person and wants every person to know and love him and every person can do this through Jesus the Son. Everyone who does so can know in their heart that they are saved. What is more, they can be transformed by the power of God’s love through the Spirit. And we must express our knowing and loving God through engaging the broken world that He loves so much. All of these convictions will take