Like a Mighty Army?

The Salvation Army, the Church, and the Churches

David W. Taylor

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625644367
  9781498227742
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875008
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In 1937, prior to the 1948 inauguration of the World Council of Churches, Karl Barth challenged the churches to engage in "real strict sober genuine theology" in order that the unity of the church might be visibly realized. At that time The Salvation Army didn't aspire to being formally known as a church, even though it was a founding member of the WCC. Today it is globally known as a social welfare organization, concerned especially to serve the needs of those who find themselves at the margins of society. Less well known is that seventy years after Barth's challenge it has made its peace with the view that it is a church denomination. Accepting Barth's challenge to the churches, and in dialogue with his own ecumenical ecclesiology, the concept of the church as an Army is interrogated, in service to The Salvation Army's developing understanding of its identity, and to the visible unity of God's church.

Part One

Emerging Salvationist Ecclesiology

Introduction

This book proposes that there have been three defining phases in the emerging ecclesiological conviction and practise of The Salvation Army. The first phase began when William Booth and his wife Catherine, fresh from their independent itinerant holiness revivalism in England and Wales, took leadership of a group of “lay missioners” working from a tent in Whitechapel, London, and set about adapting holiness revivalism to the particular challenge of London’s East End, with its stark poverty and low church attendance. During this phase, 1865–1878, the Booths, after a quick succession of several named organizations, ultimately founded “The Christian Mission.” Characterized by William Booth’s naïve declaration that he was not creating another sect or church, this phase was deeply influenced by the Booths’ understanding of the current trans-Atlantic holiness revivalism that they so eagerly exploited. They could not foresee the eventual size, impact and influence of the organization that they had initiated.

The second phase emerged in the rapid growth and organization of a movement that quickly established the quasi-military identity and structure of an Army. In an ecclesial sense this phase dates from the failed negotiations for co-operation with the Church of England which fizzled out in the early 1880s, galvanizing Booth’s perception of his Army as a kind of spiritual emergency service within the Church. The phase began with the Christian Mission’s change of name to The Salvation Army in 1878, and characterizes the incipient and institutionalizing period of its first two Generals, William, and his son, Bramwell Booth, to the year 1929, though may for the purposes of this study be extended to the inception of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948. It was a phase in which The Salvation Army, whilst still not claiming to be “a church,” was nevertheless in its own opinion, and within its own militaristic and missional terms of reference, to be reckoned as an equal partner, alongside other major denominations, as “part” of the universal Christian Church. It was a position which enabled The Salvation Army enigmatically to be a founding member of the WCC, whilst still officially disavowing that it was a church.

The third phase represents the development of this emerging conviction and practise, to The Salvation Army’s contemporary ecclesiological understanding. It charts briefly the influence of twentieth-century ecumenism upon The Salvation Army, and in particular the WCC invitation to respond to the Faith and Order paper Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM), in which it found itself having to reflect more fully upon its own idiosyncratic ecclesiological convictions. The ecumenical movement, including BEM and the Army’s response to it, has proved to be the catalyst towards the recent publication of a brief official clarification that seeks to outline The Salvation Army’s current ecclesiological convictions. In this publication The Salvation Army, which continued for a large part of its history to strenuously deny that it was a church, asserts that in its own understanding it is to be understood in these terms.

The first part of this study represents the charting and analysis of emerging convictions and practise through these three phases, in order to assess their theological character and coherency. It is argued that these three phases also loosely describe three identifiable ecclesial strands that have in the historical development of The Salvation Army become tangled. In the first phase, the dominant influence of holiness revivalism and its espousal of what became popularly known as “aggressive Christianity” inspired the ecclesial strand of a Christian mission, in London’s East End. In the second phase, this aggressive evangelical mission logically led to the establishing of the ecclesial strand of a Christian army; The Salvation Army. This quasi-military denomination, with its emphasis upon what it termed “practical holiness” rapidly developed the character of a quasi-missionary religious order within the wider church. Booth likened it to a spiritual emergency service, with a disciplined regime of order, regulation and lifestyle requirements. Finally in the third phase, partly through the familiar sociological development of a denomination, and partly the tentative theological enquiry of a movement exposed to an emerging ecumenical consensus, there has been an attempt to retrieve an understanding of The Salvation Army as a church. These three tangled strands are, for ease of identification in this study, simply termed “mission,” “army” and “church.” What follows in this first part of the study is the characterization of these three defining phases, together with the three identifiable ecclesial strands that loosely emerge within them.

1

The Origins of a “Christian Mission”

Introduction

The Methodist roots of William1 and Catherine2 Booth and The Salvation Army3 which they founded, come as no surprise to Salvationists, bred on an understanding of William’s teenage conversion in a Methodist chapel in Nottingham. The Salvation Army is viewed as the last of a series of schisms in the history of nineteenth-century Methodism.4 On the other hand, The Salvation Army’s origins in what is termed in this study the “holiness revivalism” of the nineteenth-century “holiness movement,” are surprisingly poorly understood in Salvation Army literature, and much is still to be learned about these formative influences.5 This book argues that William Booth’s Methodism was mediated more through these influences, than directly from John Wesley. Paul Rader was right to recognise this in a brief article that just pre-dated the research of John Kent and Richard Carwardine, who both linked William and Catherine Booth to holiness revivalism’s predominant personalities:

One can understand William Booth and The Salvation Army’s heritage of holiness only in terms of the dynamic spiritual movement within which they were cradled. That movement may have had more to do with what the founders were and The Army became, than with their debt to Wesley and Methodism.6

In a letter of 1876 to his eldest son, Bramwell, whom he had been developing as a young leader,7 William Booth wrote: “Making saints must be our work, that is yours and mine. G.S.R. [George Scott Railton] and others are all for converting sinners and making workers. We want saints.”8 He can scarcely contain his delight, when a month later he commented on Bramwell’s reply:

He wrote me last week saying that it is the experimental realisation and definite teaching of the blessing of holiness that alone can make us different from the other organisations around us. I say Amen. And only this, it seems to me, can justify us in having any separate existence at all.9

This “experimental realisation” and “definite teaching” which lay at the heart of the identity of Booth’s mission and “alone” justified its existence as an “organization,” can only be appreciated in a brief review of both his Methodist and holiness revivalist origins, in order that their influence on The Salvation Army’s emerging ecclesiological convictions and practise may be charted.

William and Catherine Booth as Methodists

Though christened in an Anglican parish church in Sneinton, Notting-ham, William Booth (1829–1912) experienced little religious influence at home or religious training at church. After his father died, the impoverished family was forced to move to the Goose Green area. A middle-aged couple took a special interest in him and introduced him to the Broad Street Wesley Chapel, where he attended Sunday services, became a member of Brother Henry Carey’s midweek class, and in his early...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Emerging Salvationist Ecclesiology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Origins of a “Christian Mission”
• Chapter 2: The Establishing of The Salvation Army
• Chapter 3: The Salvation Army as a Church
• Part 2: The Salvation Army in Dialogue with Karl Barth
• Introduction
• Chapter 4: Electing the Christian Community
• Chapter 5: Reconciling the Christian Community
• Chapter 6: The Nature of the Christian Community
• Chapter 7: The Form of the Christian Community
• Chapter 8: The Marks of the Christian Community
• Chapter 9: The Mission and Ministry of the Christian Community
• Conclusion
• Bibliography