Saved to Save and Saved to Serve

Perspectives on Salvation Army History

Hill

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532601682
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Salvation Army has now been around for more than one hundred and fifty years, having celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2015 with an International Congress in London. Over the years both the Army and the world in which it appeared have changed beyond recognition. This is a good time for the movement to stop and look back--not just to celebrate, but to see where it is today. The Army has not evolved in isolation from the world. Bringing its own history with it, it nevertheless belongs to the twenty-first century world as much as William Booth's little East End Mission belonged to nineteenth-century London. This book attempts to explore the interaction between mission and world as it has impacted the Army's beliefs and practices as well as the place it now occupies in the wider world. This critical and analytical study may also be of interest to those beyond the Army's ranks who would like to learn more about this remarkable organization.

1

Overview of Salvation Army History

The Army has only escaped from the old ruts in which it would have stuck fast and been incapable of accomplishing its great work by desperate fighting against itself . . . [It had succeeded] because the General has had, from the first, a single eye, and that single eye will enable us, if necessary, to emancipate ourselves further still, will make it as easy to abandon Army customs, as the custom which prevailed before The Army, whenever it may be proved to our satisfaction that, by so doing, we should more rapidly or completely attain the one great end in view.5

—George Scott Railton

Prologue

1829 Catherine Mumford (later Mrs Booth) born at Ashbourne, Derbyshire (17th January). William Booth born at Nottingham (10th April).

1842 William Booth apprenticed to a pawnbroker after his father’s bankruptcy.

1843 Samuel Booth, William’s father, died.

1844 William Booth began attending the Wesleyan chapel. Converted, he undertook freelance street-preaching as a teenager.

1846 Catherine Mumford converted.

1848–49 William completed his apprenticeship and was laid off work. After a year’s unemployment, he shifted to London and was again employed by a pawnbroker.

1851 William, a local preacher with Wesleyan Methodists, met Catherine Mumford at Methodist Reformed Chapel. Both were expelled from the Wesleyans for Reformist views.

1852 Funded by Edward Rabbits, William became a full-time preacher with the Methodist Reformers. Engaged to Catherine, he explored prospects of Congregational ministry, but rejected Calvinism. From November 1852 to February 1854 he was Methodist Reform minister at Spalding.

1854 Leaving the Reformers for the Methodist New Connexion and after brief training February to July, William was accepted on probation as minister and evangelist. He conducted evangelistic campaigns in many parts of England.

1855 William and Catherine were married at Stockwell New Chapel, London.

1856 William Bramwell Booth (the Booths’ eldest son and second General of the Army) was born in Halifax.

1858 William Booth ordained as a Methodist minister in the New Connexion (27th May) and sent to Gateshead as minister.

1859 Female Teaching, Mrs Booth’s first pamphlet, was published.

1860 Mrs Booth’s first public address (Whit Sunday, 27th May) at Gateshead.

1861 The Booths left the Methodist New Connexion to become independent evangelists, a venture in faith when aged thirty-two and with four children. They were involved in revival campaigns in Cornwall and Wales, then Midlands. William was involved in the formation of the “Hallelujah Bands,” free-lance working-class evangelists. Catherine increasingly took independent speaking commitments as well.

The Booths and the “Second Evangelical Awakening”

The “first” evangelical awakening was that associated with Wesley and others in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1858 there was a religious revival in the United States of America, spreading to the United Kingdom in 1859. J. Edwin Orr claimed that “the religious revival of 1859–65 equaled in magnitude the famed eighteenth century revival.”6 Significant converts and notable people influenced included Dr Tom Barnardo (founder of orphanages), James Chalmers (missionary to New Guinea), Hugh Price Hughes (Methodist leader), Evan Hopkins (founder of the Keswick Convention); Handley Moule and Francis Chavasse (both later Anglican bishops), and Alexander Whyte (Scottish preacher). The revival produced the Children’s Special Service Mission, the East London Special Services Committee, the Salvation Army, the China Inland Mission and many other groups.

Orr reports the exploits of thirty-four-year-old William and Catherine Booth along with those of numerous other contemporary evangelists. For example, of a campaign in Hayle, Cornwall, in 1861, Orr writes that

After-meetings for prayer followed each service, with much emotional demonstration and not a few conversions. Anglicans, Baptists and Methodists of three varieties were “delightfully united” in the work . . . Great crowds could not gain entrance to the services, and were ministered to by other clergymen while William Booth was preaching. Two thousand people attended the final meetings, and six weeks’ labour produced 500 conversions . . . The total number [of converts] in all of Cornwall was 7,000 or so.7

In the Spring of 1863 William and Catherine Booth, fresh from Revival meetings in Cornwall, began preaching in Cardiff, and won 500 people to the faith. Mrs Booth preached with great simplicity and modesty. So great was the interest in the Booth campaign that it became necessary to use a large circus building accommodating between 2,000 and 3,000 people. The effort was supported by Christians of every denomination.8

Orr considered that

The most significant and fascinating home development of the 1859 Awakening was the birth of the Salvation Army . . . Booth’s experiences in Cornwall taught him the connection between holiness of Christian living and successful evangelism, for he preached one to achieve the other. His experience in the Black Country Revivals taught him that the masses could be most successfully reached by their own kind bearing witness. His frustrations at the hands of unsympathetic denominational directors must have determined him to shape an organization of his own. He was an inter-d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions and Disclaimer
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: Victorian Britain
• Chapter 1: Overview of Salvation Army History
• Chapter 2: The Ecclesiology of the Salvation Army 1: Sect and Church
• Chapter 3: The Ecclesiology of The Salvation Army 2: Leadership
• Chapter 4: The Ecclesiology of The Salvation Army 3: The Role of Women
• Chapter 5: Salvation Army Theology 1: We Believe
• Chapter 6: Salvation Army Theology 2: Diversity
• Chapter 7: Salvation Army Theology 3: Worship
• Chapter 8: Social Work 1: In Darkest England
• Chapter 9: Social Work 2: Out of Darkest England
• Chapter 10: To the Ends of the Earth
• Conclusion: Looking Back
• Appendix One: Ranks of The Salvation Army 1878–2017
• Appendix Two: The Booth Dynasty
• Appendix Three: Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index