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Tradition and Innovation
from JAC Issue Eleven
by Commissioner Wesley Harris
The Salvation Army began with a happy mixture
of tradition and innovation.
There was an acceptance of traditions of Christian faith and
conduct
going back to the early Church. There were also some
traditions from the
particular church background which appealed to the Booths such
as the practice
of inviting people to kneel at the mourners’ bench or
penitents’ form as in
Methodist camp meetings. But with the traditions there were
innovations, not the
least being a willingness to take on quasi-military structures
in order to further the
essential mission.
American writer George Weigel contends that ‘tradition which
in its Latin
root (traditio) means handing on begins not with human
invention but inside the
very life of God, the Holy Trinity...Tradition and innovation
(are) the table and the
dynamic in the Church’.
Tradition is the offspring of history and while in earlier
times Salvationists
were sometimes too busy making history to record it adequately
we are now
more aware of the value of our historical heritage. General
Frederick Coutts
wrote,
History is to a community what memory is to an individual.
Without a
memory I would be an ‘unperson’ unable to say whence I came or
whither
I was bound. History enables a community - whether an entire
nation or a
section of a nation - to place itself in relation to its own
past, its present
opportunities and the future prospects.
Devoid of a sense of history the Army could suffer from a kind
of corporate
Alzheimer’s disease and be unsure about its identity, confused
about its role and
largely ineffective. Traditions are important for our
continuing life and selfawareness;
without them we will hardly know what we are or where we are
going. If tradition can be a dead hand it can also be a
guiding hand.
(In a corps or headquarters situation we may sometimes be
impatient with
those who say, “We have always done it this way” but it may be
even worse
when changes in personnel have been so frequent that there is
little corporate
memory and no-one to point to precedents which should be
noted!)
Wisdom was not born with our generation and all who went
before us
were certainly not fools. (If we get as many runs on the board
as some of them
did we may have reason to be grateful!) Much that obtained in
the past will
obtain in the present. Not all old methods are broken tools to
be cast aside.
Some things are timely because they are timeless and to regard
anything
traditional as necessarily useless would be plainly silly.
Yet, while appreciating
the value of tradition, we should also recognise the danger of
being petrified in
the patterns of the past. To quote George Weigel again,
“Tradtion, the living faith
of the dead, must always be distinguished from traditionalism,
the dead faith of
the living”.
James Russell Lowell wrote,
New occasions teach new duties
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.
Paradoxically, the Army tradition is to be innovative. To be
really ‘Army’ is
to dare to be different sometimes. I remember when I was a
young officer at a
small south London corps a procession with fiery torches was
organised through
the darkened streets as a prelude to an evangelical campaign.
An urchin boy
said to me, “The thing I like about the Army is that you never
know what is going
to happen next!” Half a century later that could still be said
in many places where
there is a willingness to do anything in order to win people
for Christ.
In New Zealand recently I saw a corps hall dubbed ‘the Shed’
which had
on its outside wall a huge, well-painted mural depicting the
various activities of
the corps - sport, counselling, children’s meetings and so on.
The idea was to
make the place appear jolly and ‘user friendly’ and on enquiry
I found that new
people were being attracted and were getting saved which was
what mattered.
Of course, what may be appropriate in one situation may not be
advisable
in another, but an openness to new approaches is needed
everywhere. If we
don’t innovate we are likely to enervate. William Booth is
credited with the
saying, “There should be continuity of principle but
adaptation of method”. It is
certainly a good maxim to bear in mind.
As an Army we began with a happy blend of the traditional and
the innovative.
Our forebears used the great hymns of the Church and they
adapted some
of the pop songs of the day. They were too smart to do
otherwise. Breadth
of expression may still be needed today. Take the sometimes
contentious issue
of the Army song book versus the use of projected ’Scripture
choruses’.
Christian toleration might indicate a judicious blend of the
ancient and modern.
But I have known cases where there has been a threatened
walk-out by older
comrades if any chorus not in the song book was used and other
places where
people have been denied any of the Army songs which have been
their means of
grace through the years.
There must be more than one contemporary application of the
saying of
Jesus, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has been
instructed about the
kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out
of his storeroom
new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13.52).
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