JAC #50 Online

Leadership in The Salvation Army
A Case Study in Clericalisation
from JAC Issue #37
by Major Harold Hill 

Officers of my vintage were simply commissioned but after 1978 officers were ordained as well. What does that mean? And does it matter? My endeavour to answer these questions led to a four-year research project and some conclusions which I shall attempt to summarise in this article. The answers lie at least in part in the process of institutionalisation which affects all enterprises, including movements of the Spirit, in the course of which roles which begin as simply functional gradually assume significance as status. In this The Salvation Army has recapitulated in microcosm the history of the church as a whole.

 While the charismatic founder may be kept honest by a closeness to the mysterium tremens et fascinans and a single-minded commitment to a vision, the second and subsequent generations tend to keep a closer eye on the political implications. A Moses could exclaim, “Would that all the Lord’s people might prophesy!” A Joshua’s instinct is to complain, “Eldad and Medad are also prophesying,” and to urge, “Make them stop – they’re not authorised.”[1] Against that trend, there has also been, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a counter-cultural, prophetic tradition of protest against the institutions of power. Jesus of Nazareth stood in this prophetic tradition. Jesus and the community which grew up after his death appear to have valued equality in contrast to the priestly hierarchies of received religion.[2] There were evidently varieties of function within the early Christian community, but not of formal status.

Division into Clerical and Lay States

Over the first few centuries, however, as the Church institutionalised and developed structures to order its polity and conserve its message, and as it accommodated to Roman society and to traditional religious expectations, it developed such distinctions, between clerics in orders and laity.[3] By early in the second century the early charismatic offices had been superseded and a three-fold structure of one bishop, presiding over a council of presbyters and supported by deacons was becoming common. A second factor in the clericalisation of ministry was the adoption of the “priestly” language, a second-century development which became entrenched with the progressive development of the idea of the Eucharist as sacrifice which only a priest had power to perform. With Augustine (died 430) an “indelible character” was attributed to priesthood. A third factor was the incorporation of church and priesthood into Roman society and the state. From the “Christianising” of the Empire under Theodosius in the fourth century, it eventually came to be assumed that all people in the state were “Christian”; by the end of the first millennium the boundary between the world and the church was seen as lying at ordination rather than baptism. Even from the third century on it was apparent that all these developments had reduced the “laity” to a passive role. We can call the cumulative process “clericalisation”.

Reaction and Counter-reaction

Many times in the history of the Church when there has been a renewal of mission, some reaction against clericalism has been involved. Usually the movements involved have either been suppressed or have in their turn become clericalised. Monasticism was amongst the earliest such movements, from the mid-second century on. Originally a lay movement, it became clericised with a caste system whereby manual labour was performed by lay monks but clerical roles by priests.

The later middle ages in Europe were a period of huge social and economic change, affecting the church along with everything else. The laity became less willing to accept a passive role and there were many religious revivalist movements, some of which became officially accepted while others were denounced as heretical. Both in officially endorsed orders like the Franciscans and in others eventually excluded like the Waldensians, an initial all-lay ethos was eventually clericalised, with priests or clergy coming to dominate them.

The Reformation movements all involved a degree of rejection of clerical superiority. Luther dismissed “characters indelebilis ...” as “mere talk and man-made law.”[4] However most the reformers remained wedded to the concept of “Christendom”, in which the State and the Church were essentially the same thing and “the clerical office – whether under the name of ministerium (the ministry) or sacerdotium (the priesthood) – continued in being as something constitutive for the existence of the Church.”[5]  In E. L. Mascall’s words, “what Protestantism did to the religion of Western Europe was simply to substitute a clericalism of the Word for a clericalism of the Sacrament.”[6] It was the “radical reformation”, the Anabaptists and their sectarian successors, who tried to make a fresh start and return to the polity of the primitive church. “It was not that the Anabaptists had no clergy; it is more accurate to say that they had no laity.”[7] As marginalised and persecuted, their situation more closely resembled that of the early Christians.

The immediate precursor of The Salvation Army was the Methodist movement of the eighteenth century. John Wesley unwittingly created what was virtually a parallel church though he was a priest of the Church of England, and refused to allow his lay preachers to administer the sacraments or call themselves “Reverend”. After his death the preachers claimed both rights and Methodism clericalised. However, both traditions, the “lay” and the “clerical”, persist in Methodism to the present day. Most of the subsequent schisms in the movement – and most of the reunions also – have been concerned with this polarisation.

In retrospect it may be seen that Bryan Wilson’s analysis of the process of clericalisation in Protestant sects applies to the broad history of the church as a whole:

What does appear is that the dissenting movements of Protestantism, which were lay movements, or movements which gave greater place to laymen than the traditional churches had ever conceded, pass, over the course of time, under the control of full-time religious specialists.. Over time, movements which rebel against religious specialization, against clerical privilege and control, gradually come again under the control of a clerical class… Professionalism is a part of the wider social process of secular society, and so even in anti-clerical movements professionals re-emerge. Their real power, when they do re-emerge, however, is in their administrative control and the fact of their full-time involvement, and not in their liturgical functions, although these will be regarded as the activity for which their authority is legitimated.[8]

The history of The Salvation Army is open to analysis in these terms.

Beginning with the Booths

William Booth inherited the ambiguities of Methodism. He left a Church, the Methodist New Connection, but retained his clerical rank. He denied any intention of founding a “sect” or denomination (“I constantly put from me the thought of attempting the formation of such a people”[9]), but ended up doing so. As Ronald Knox remarks of Zinzendorf, “it is an old dream of the enthusiast that he can start a new religion without starting a new denomination.”[10]

The chief formative influences on William and Catherine Booth were Methodism and American Revivalism. Wesleyan influence on Booth can be seen in his emulation of Wesley himself and in parallels between the situation, ethos and doctrines of Methodism and Salvationism. It can also be traced in a degree of ambiguity about the nature or importance of ordination, in his conviction of the importance of lay-participation, and paradoxically, in his equally strong conviction of the value of authoritarian rule. Herein lay the tension, still in evidence, between the Army’s commitment to the “priesthood of all believers” and its hierarchical structure. From the American revivalists, such as Charles Finney, James Caughey and Phoebe Palmer, the Booths not only learned about evangelical methods and concluded that there was more freedom in their use outside the control of denominational structures, but also had confirmed their convictions both about the importance of lay-participation and about the value of strong government.

Booth’s engagement with a tent mission in Mile End Waste in July 1865 is reminiscent of the Arab inviting the camel to put his nose into the tent on a cold night – soon the camel wholly occupied the tent. By 1867 a revivalist group drawn from a variety of evangelical backgrounds had been transformed into a proto-sect with its own headquarters, a number of preaching stations, systems for processing converts and for poor relief, a membership document, a first annual financial statement, and paid staff as well as volunteer workers. By 1878, this mission had evolved into a highly centralised organisation, a people with a distinct and common identity, and its own full-time, employed leaders, analogous to clergy (although like Wesley’s lay-preachers, Booth’s evangelists were forbidden to style themselves “Reverend” [11]). Under its new name of Salvation Army, the mission was poised to embark on a decade or more of exponential growth. With Divisional and Territorial Commands from 1880 it was possessed of an episcopal hierarchy.

Clerical Roles

The clerical class in the church has come to be associated with specific functions – the administration of the sacraments, pastoring of the flock, the preaching and teaching of the Word and the government of the church. What can we say then about the roles of Booth’s Missioners, the Evangelists, later Officers, under these headings?

Sacraments

The monopoly of the sacramental function became the distinctive mark of the emergence of priesthood in Christianity.  The Christian Mission and, until 1883, the Salvation Army, practised infant baptism and celebrated the Lord’s Supper, and it is apparent that officials of the mission led these rites. The discontinuance of the practice could also have implications for the “clerical” role of officers. Booth’s explanation in The War Cry simply said that (1) sacraments were not essential for salvation; (2) that if he insisted on having them there would be “grave dissensions” within the Army; (3) that the Army was not a church; and (4) that the question could be left until we shall have more light on the subject. (5) In the meanwhile Salvationists were free to take the sacrament at other churches, and (6) should feed on Jesus continually and ensure they had been baptised with the Holy Ghost. (7) Finally, having warned against dependence upon mere forms, he announced a form of service for the dedication of children.[12] Additional reasons subsequently offered, in addition to the dangers of formalism and contentious Biblical hermeneutic, have included the danger of strong drink to people converted from drunkenness, avoidance of controversial subjects, resistance to women administering the sacraments, the avoidance of anything smacking of a separate priesthood and the value of a distinctive non-sacramental witness.

David Rightmire’s study goes behind these presenting arguments and places the Army’s early theology in the context of Victorian society, the Wesleyan revival and the nineteenth century holiness movement. He makes the point that by the mid-19th century Wesleyanism had lost touch with its founder’s sacramental theology, maintaining the forms but subordinating other means of grace to the Word. The American holiness revival teaching of Caughey, Finney and Phoebe Palmer, already mentioned, also “emphasised a pneumatological ecclesiology that needed little continuity with historical institutions.” Rightmire’s argument is that once the Booths’ “Holiness” or “Second Blessing” theology was fully developed, it provided a spiritualised substitute for sacramental theology.[13]

It is interesting to compare the course of The Salvation Army’s relationship with the Church of England with that of its Wesleyan original. Methodism grew out of the established Church and the question was whether it could be contained.  Salvationism was an independent entity and would have had to be grafted on to the Anglican stock – a more difficult exercise.  With Methodism, the preachers, who had not hitherto been permitted to officiate at the sacraments, assumed this role. Salvation Army evangelists and officers, who had enjoyed this privilege, relinquished it.

The history of the Salvation Army also illustrates the maxim that if the sacraments did not exist it would be necessary to invent them, to adapt Voltaire. Forms and ceremonies have been substituted. The Directory or catechism for children in 1900 set out “The Army’s Five Ordinances” as (1) The Dedication of Children, (2) The Mercy Seat,[14] (3) Enrolment under the Army Flag, (4)  Commissioning of Officers and (5) Marriage according to Army rules.”[15] To these might be added the uniform (surely “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, as well as the nearest the Army comes to a medium for excommunication), and the recent practice of “installing” officers in certain commands.

All of this also indicates that although sacramental observances are usually taken as the initial catalyst for the process of clericalisation in the Church, the Army’s clericalisation gathered momentum after their abandonment (apart from the substitute sacraments described above), suggesting that clericalisation is a sociological process independent of a theological base.

Pastoring

Pastoring of the flock was not the original function of the Christian Missioners – they were above all itinerant evangelists. The gradual assimilation of evangelist into pastor in the role of the individual Salvation Army officer has paralleled the gradual metamorphosis of the “para-church” sect into denominational church.  That trend has been accompanied by the gradual loss of the individual and corporate sense of responsibility of the ordinary members or soldiers to exercise the pastoral role.  Within the early Salvation Army there was strong emphasis on the “lay”-pastorate, with the appointment of Visitation Sergeants with pastoral responsibility. With pastoral care undertaken by those with a more settled existence, the Evangelists or Missioners, and subsequently the officers, were itinerant.  Itinerancy was a tradition inherited from Methodism, with frequent changes of pastorate for clergy, combined with the more limited role of the evangelist. Appointments tended to be for a matter of weeks only or months. Railton wrote that, “we refuse to allow our officers to stay long in one place lest they or the people should sink into the relationship of pastor and flock, and look to their mutual enjoyment and advantage rather than to the salvation of others…”[16]

In time, officers became under increasing pressure to exercise a pastoral role in addition to the evangelical one. Bramwell Booth’s 1899 book on officership included a section on “Shepherds and their Flocks”.[17] Whatever Railton’s fear of a pastor-flock relationship developing, it was inevitable; nurturing of new converts would establish expectations for continuing care.

Preaching and Teaching

Clergy have usually assumed the magisterial role, the responsibility for teaching, in the Church. Although the Orders and Regulations for Officers prescribed instructing and drilling the troops as a significant officer-role, Booth saw preaching as the definitive clerical task (“one who had nothing else to do but preach”[18]) and we have seen that in his movement there was no thought of reserving this task to any special group. The reverse was his intention.

It should be noted however that whatever the theory, the Evangelists and then the Officers became the main speakers and preachers as time went on.  A rearguard action against this practice has been fought ever since.  In 1928 Bramwell Booth wrote to an officer in charge of a corps he had visited, advising him to, “Rope in your own people in so far as it is at all possible to take part in platform [i.e. preaching] work if the soldiers and locals felt the responsibility of speaking to the people the words of life and truth they would fit themselves for this work.  This would relieve you of some of your platform responsibilities, and thus enable you to tackle other work.”[19] But many officers still jealously guard their prerogative in this respect, to the neglect of the gifts of their soldiers.

Government and Leadership

On the fourth point, government, only the full-time, employed evangelists or missioners attended the Council of War in 1878, whereas lay-delegates had attended earlier Conferences.  Murdoch avers that this action disenfranchised the laymen of The Salvation Army and “stripped them of the right to participate” in the organisation’s government.[20]  At the same time as the Mission metamorphosed into The Salvation Army, it constitutionally reverted to Wesley’s original Methodist model of benevolent dictatorship. The government of the movement was clearly concentrated in the hands of a leading group, though always as a delegated authority derived in the end from the General himself.  This remains the case today. The role of an officer is to command, to direct the government of the organisation at a particular level.  The post-1877 polity certainly left the way open for the elevation of an “officer class” in the all-lay Army.

In sum, then, of the four clerical roles of officiating at rites, pastoring, preaching and government, it would seem that Christian Missioners became Salvation Army officers with only the fourth of these fields unambiguously as their largely exclusive prerogative.  Their other roles were in the process of development – though also in the direction of a clerical monopoly. However, Officers were not yet clergy in any generally recognised sense at this time, any more than the Army itself was regarded as a church.

What the Founders Said

Here we find an essential ambivalence as far as clericalism is concerned – and as far as being a church is concerned. The pragmatic origins of ministry and polity have meant that the Army has championed the concept of the priesthood of all believers and rejected the clerical role, while at the same time it has claimed ministerial status for its officers whenever that has seemed advantageous. Thus it has inherited and carried forward the ecclesiological contradictions of Methodism referred to earlier.

All Lay, All Priests

Like Wesley before him, Booth did not see his Evangelists as clergy.  He complained in 1877 that some had resigned because “they rub up against some Baptist or Primitive preachers and get ministerial notions.”[21] Railton quotes Booth, addressing young officers, as saying,

I have lived, thank God, to witness the separation between layman and cleric become more and more obscured, and to see Jesus Christ’s idea of changing in a moment ignorant fishermen into fishers of men nearer and nearer realization.[22]

William Booth wanted to disabuse his officers of the notion that there is any “exclusive order of preachers” or that ministry was

confined to a particular class of individuals who constitute a sacred order specially raised up and qualified… on the ground of their ancestors having been specially set apart for it, and authorised to communicate the same power to their successors, who are, they again contend, empowered to pass on some special virtues to those who listen to their teaching… I deny the existence of any order exclusively possessing the right to publish the salvation of God… I honour the Order of Preachers; I belong to it myself… but as to his possessing any particular grace because of his having gone through any form of Ordination, or any other ceremonial whatever, I think that idea is a great mistake.

And I want to say here, once and for all, that no such notion is taught in any authorised statement of Salvation Army doctrine or affirmed by any responsible officer in the organisation… the duty in which I glory is no more sacred, and only a few degrees removed in importance, from that of the brother who opens the doors of the Hall in which the preacher holds forth… As Soldiers of Christ, the same duty places us all on one level.[23]

Booth clearly rejected any apostolic succession or clerical character as needed to authenticate his officers’ functions. Not only were officers not “clergy” but soldiers in effect were. In an 1898 address he hoped that soldiers would not shirk their duty “by any talk of not being an officer.” 

You cannot say you are not ordained. You were ordained when you signed Articles of War, under the blessed Flag. If not, I ordain every man, woman and child here present that has received the new life. I ordain you now. I cannot get at you to lay my hands upon you. I ordain you with the breath of my mouth. I tell you what your true business in the world is, and in the name of the living God I authorise you to go and do it. Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature![24]

“Ministers Who were Not Ordained”[25]

At the same time as we have these, and many other, very clear statements that The Salvation Army is an essentially lay movement, we find the growing assumption that officers do enjoy a distinctive and special role – or status. The specialness of the officer role was emphasised on two counts; firstly because of the need to foster and encourage the esprit de corps of officers in order to promote the effectiveness of the Army’s leadership, and secondly from the desire to secure recognition of the officers within the wider community.  Both would inevitably contribute to the process by which function would assume status.

Although not claiming any ordination for their officers, the Booths regarded them as in every way equal to the clergy of other denominations. Sandall reports a statement by William Booth, made in 1894: “The Salvation Army is not inferior in spiritual character to any organization in existence… We are, I consider, equal everyway and everywhere to any other Christian organization on the face of the earth (i) in spiritual authority, (ii) in spiritual intelligence, (iii) in spiritual functions. We hold ‘the keys’ as truly as any church in existence.”[26] While these claims were made of the Army as a whole, the exercise of “authority” and the holding of the “keys” could be taken as peculiarly clerical or leadership roles.  Booth was in no doubt that the Army would rise or fall on the quality of its leadership. His first Orders and Regulations, written particularly for officers leading a growing movement, noted that “The work must, of course, depend mainly upon the officers…”[27] Bramwell agreed with this, writing, “Officers … they are the spinal column of the affair and their tone and spirit is its spinal marrow.”[28]

In a circular to senior commanders, William Booth spoke of the role of officers as akin to a priesthood: “Indeed, the fact is ever before us – like Priest, like People; like Captain, like Corps.”[29] “More and more as I have wrestled with the [new] regulations this week,” he wrote to Bramwell in 1903, “it has been borne in upon me that it is the Officer upon whom all depends.  It has always been so.  If Moses had not made a priesthood, there would have been no Jewish nation.  It was the priesthood of the Levites which kept them alive, saved them from their inherent rottenness… and perpetuated the law which made them.”[30]

 Such a statement suggests that Booth’s own views were changing. Ervine comments that “This was a far different note from any that he had hitherto sounded.  Priests had never previously been much esteemed by him who was more ready to admire prophets than priests… The Soldier-Prophet was about to leave his command to a Lawyer-Priest.  A younger William Booth would have known that this was dangerous, but Booth was old and solitary and tired, and old men want priests more than they want warriors.”[31] Robertson attributes this change to Booth’s anticipation of a possible leadership crisis during the “period of routinisation” by his Supplementary Deed of 1904 (which provided for the deposition of a General adjudged unfit for office and the election of a replacement by a High Council). “Further, he came to the conclusion that the priesthood of all believers, although already effectively dropped in practice, had to be attenuated as an ideal.”[32]

In an address to Staff Officers, reprinted after his death, William Booth said: 

The Salvation Army also claims possession of certain authority – authority received from God and man adequate for the work required from it, and equal to that of any other Christian organisation in existence, if not superior to that of many which pass under that name. I claim such authority for myself as an ambassador of Christ, and I claim it also on your behalf. I claim for the Army all the authority necessary for the ruling of its people, their admission to its ranks or their exclusion from it… When I am asked to state the grounds on which the Army claims authority over the consciences and conduct of men, I reply that we do these things not on the authority of man, or of any outside organisation of men, but by the authority of God Himself.[33]

In his memoirs Bramwell Booth echoes similar sentiments: 

In this, we humbly but firmly claim that we are in no way inferior, either to the saints who have gone before, or – though remaining separate from them, even as one branch in the vine is separate from another – to the saints of the present. We, no less than they, are called and chosen to sanctification of the Spirit and to the inheritance of eternal life. And our officers are, equally with them, ministers in the church of God, having received diversities of gifts, but the one Spirit – endowed by His grace, assured of His guidance, confirmed by His word, and commissioned by the Holy Ghost to represent Him to the whole world.[34]

In the First World War Bramwell Booth forbade officers to volunteer for military duty, saying: 

It seems to me that the consecration of their lives to the things of Christ, which all our officers have made, is inconsistent with their voluntarily drawing the sword in earthly warfare. There can be no doubt that they are as truly ministers of Christ’s gospel as were the apostles themselves, and as ministers of God they are covenanted to approve themselves in patience, in affliction… And so I say I cannot approve their taking the sword, or any other carnal weapon.[35]

These examples, and many like them, would support the view that the Army and its leaders progressively tended to claim a clerical role and status for officers. So, we have seen that The Salvation Army, in attempting to maintain a sectarian equality of believers, resisted the idea that its officers were clergy like other clergy. At the same time, partly because of the autocratic temperament of its founder, it adopted a military, hierarchical structure which served to expedite the process of clericalisation.

The conditions of officers’ service would constitute their professional milieu in a way that could not be true of non-officer, volunteer Salvationists. The mystique of the Call to officership, the spiritually intensive nature of officer-formation in training and the sessional group bonding with peers, the extent of personal commitment involved in the Covenant and Undertakings, the ranking system, the distinctive functions and roles of officers and the intensity of the all-absorbing work, together with the sense of corporate identity and esprit de corps, gave officership a character which could be described as clerical compared with that of the rank and file.

This ambiguity over the status of officers arose in part from the Methodist theological roots, as we have noted, and in part from the fact that traditional ecclesiastical and canonical distinctions were of little interest or relevance.  Salvationists were, as far as they were concerned, sui generis, needing no external ecclesiastical validation or referencing. Pragmatic decisions beget principles.  The Founders set out to do just whatever appeared the most practical thing to do next.  Rather than intentionally taking the historic pattern of the church as a model they fought against it as repugnant to their view of the ministerial role of Christians in general.  For all that, they could not avoid bringing with them from their church background ways of thinking about how the church should be organised.  The irony is that they ended up with a similar model of clergy and laity and an episcopal system of government under different names. It is difficult in practice, leaving aside ecclesiastical distinctions of legitimacy and apostolic provenance, to distinguish officership from the clerical status in any other church.

Transitions

Sociologists refer to the period of “routinisation”, during which initially radical sectarian movements gradually accommodate to the world around them, and “denominationalise”. While Robertson considered that The Salvation Army had resisted this process and therefore dubbed it an “established sect”,[36] in the longer view it may be seen that the Army in the western world has conformed to type in this respect.

Although it was Donald McGavran’s twentieth century phrase,[37] the phenomenon of “redemption and lift”, was remarked upon by John Wesley nearly two hundred years earlier.

The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away…[38]

Salvationists, originally archetypal “working class”, have participated in the general rise in standards of living in western countries, with increased opportunity for education and diversified occupations. The children and grandchildren of those who had experienced the miracle of changing beer into furniture did not necessarily enjoy a vital conversion experience of their own or inherit the same evangelical imperative.

A concomitant of this development was a change in mindset from “mission to maintenance”; from a crusade to change the world to a preoccupation with the interests and needs of existing members. It is not without significance that the international statistics for numbers of corps and officers in 2004 were little different from those at the death of Bramwell Booth in 1929.[39] (The recent growth in soldiership statistics derives from a new, third world, growth spurt, offset by steep decline in the European homelands.) A diminution of evangelical fervour was also matched by a decline in commitment to sectarian “perfectionism” of the kind represented by the Army’s Wesleyan holiness theology, and the beginnings of a more conscious pluralism of theological outlook.

These changes have also been reflected in a moderation of the Army’s opposition to “the world”: only an embargo on alcohol, tobacco and gambling survives where once wearing a feathers on ladies’ hats, make-up and jewellery, and attending dances, organised sports events or the cinema were equally reprehensible. The Army no longer provides an all-embracing social milieu for many Salvationists, and the movement no longer maintains what Bryan Wilson called “a totalitarian rather than a segmental hold” over its members.[40] Higher education is no longer regarded with suspicion.

At least in much of the “western world”, this process of routinisation occupied perhaps the first sixty years of the 20^th century. As far as the theme of this essay is concerned, the end result of this was that the Army became another “mainline” denomination, in which the officers were regarded, and regarded themselves, as clergy, and the soldiers thought of themselves as laity. Despite a strong and continuing tradition of soldier involvement in “the work”, the officers became the professional religious class. Thomas O’Dea summarised the tendency thus:

there comes into existence a body of men for whom the clerical life offers not simply the “religious” satisfactions of the earlier charismatic period, but also prestige and respectability, power and influence… and satisfactions derived from the use of personal talents in teaching, leadership, etc. Moreover, the maintenance of the situation in which these rewards are forthcoming tends to become an element in the motivation of the group.[41]

Into the Second Century

Although we have observed a denominationalising tendency in the period reviewed above, the Army’s official rhetoric remained sectarian. The inevitable tectonic tension between these two continental plates moving in opposite directions began to surface as the movement entered its second century in the 1960’s. This again conformed to the usual pattern of such movements in their life-cycle, as indeed had happened with the early Church itself. A period of consolidation and reflection begins. The movement becomes more self-conscious, and begins to clarify and rationalise what it had been doing, as well as adjusting to the fact that it is now operating in a world strangely different from that in which it had taken shape. Roger Green, referring to various late 20th and early 21st century initiatives in Salvationist theological discussion, comments that “these are still tenuous efforts for a denomination yet in its primacy.  The Army is only now coming into an understanding of what it means to have a corporate theological life.”[42]

The Debate

As far as our theme is concerned the Army entered upon a period of internal debate, expressed for the first time in its history in articles and correspondence, at first in The Officer and later in such territorial publications as The Salvationist in the UK and Word and Deed in USA. We can trace the coming out into the open of the polarities, “lay”, and “clerical”, between the view that office is simply functional and the belief that office confers a status or character, inherited a century before from Church history through Methodism and inherent in the Army as a sociological and ecclesiastical phenomenon.

The debate took place in two phases. For the first twenty-five years – roughly from 1960 to 1985 – it concerned function and status. In the following twenty years, following the introduction of the “ordination” of officers, this terminology naturally shaped the arguments offered. At the risk of caricaturing the variety of views, we can sample here only a few of the contributions made to the debate.

As representative of the “functional” school we can take the unambiguous statement by Australian Commissioner Hubert Scotney: 

The distinction made today between clergy and laity does not exist in the New Testament… The terms layman and laity (in the current usage of those words) are completely out of character in a Salvation Army context… It is foreign to the entire concept of Salvationism to imagine two levels of involvement. Any distinction between officers and soldiers is one of function rather than status.[43]

Against that we can cite Colonel William Clark (IHQ), who claimed that by: 

a direct call from God into the ranks of Salvation Army officership, we have been given particular spiritual authority… Whatever our role …happens to be for the time being… we are primarily spiritual leaders…Our spiritual authority lies not only or chiefly in what we do, but in what we are… Our calling is to be a certain kind of person and not … to do a certain kind of job… The “ordained” ministry of the Church – to which body we belong by virtue of our calling, response, training and commissioning – is a distinctive ministry within the body of the whole people of God, different from that “general” ministry of the Church which is defined in the New Testament as “the priesthood of all believers”.[44]

In 1978 General Arnold Brown announced that the commissioning of officers would in future include use of the word “ordain”. This innovation evidently passed largely unremarked until Captain Chick Yuill of Scotland drew attention to it in 1985.

May I suggest that we need to re-emphasise the truth that there is no real distinction between officers and soldiers, that the difference is simply of function… If that little word ‘ordain’ has crept in because of a subconscious desire that other Christians should realise that we are as ‘important’ as the clergy of other denominations, … in the end it matters not a jot where we stand in the estimation of any who would compile a league table of ecclesiastical importance.[45]

Cadet Stephen Court of Canada took the same line:

There is no difference between the two functions [officer and soldier], there is no distinctive, and so there are no grounds to justify ordination by this argument. The emphasis on ordination and the professional nature of officership only serves to widen the artificial gap existing between officers and soldiers. Note I use the term “soldier” rather than the insidious term “laity”.

He concluded by warning against “the gradual abdication of our characteristic birthright in ‘favour’ of a mainstream church identity.”[46]

Against those, we can quote for example the following vigorous support for ordination from a retired officer, Brigadier Bramwell Darbyshire: 

In spite of all the stuff about the priesthood of all believers, ordained and commissioned officers are different from non-officer Salvationists. They are not cleverer, wiser, more loved of God than their fellows, but they are special, set apart for Jesus in a way that involves sacrifice and often great inconvenience to their families… No one is more grateful for the Army’s dedicated lay staff than this old warrior; but let’s get it right. They may be as much involved as officers, but there is for an officer a sacramental dimension and if we lose sight of this the Army is finished.[47]

Others again used the term “ordained”, but on their own terms, as implying only a “functional” role. Major Raymond Caddy of IHQ defended it in these terms: 

…one of its meanings is closely tied to the idea of organisation which underlies all military structures… means to categorise, to place in a particular ranking… the specific ranking, then, has something to tell us about function. …this is the classification of people as ministers of religion… to carry out certain roles. These duties are restricted to people of that rank, otherwise there is no point in separating them from the rest.

He went on to distinguish two kinds of ordination in the Church, one of all Christians, and the other to the exercise of certain spiritual gifts (see Romans 12, 1st Corinthians 12), vocations given so that the Church may be governed and served… Particular ministries are recognised and encouraged when the Army commissions or warrants its officers and local officers.  However, every Salvationist is ordained to the greater vocation of Christian.  There is no higher calling than this.[48]

The debate widened to a general discussion of what roles and functions were appropriate to an officer. These tended to follow the culturally conditioned expectation of clergy in general. Officers were to lead, pastor, preach, teach and disciple, and equip the saints for ministry.  Some saw the officer as being assisted in ministry by non-officers; others saw that the officer’s role was to assist non-officers in their ministry.  Some writers addressed officer conditions of service, such as appointability, as the distinctive mark of officership. A few called attention to officers’ representative role, as head and focus of their community of faith. Some people, while rejecting any spurious status equivalent to priestly character for officership, felt that an entirely functional description could not justify a separate officer role.  They therefore looked for an internal, Salvation Army validation, a combination of the officer’s own personal sense of calling and the objective fact that Salvation Army officer ministry was an existing reality to betaken into account. Major Cecil Waters urged a return to an unabashedly Salvationist argument from simple pragmatism.

We will go on looking for a definition of officership unless and until we recognise that officership exists firstly as a convenience by which we organise the Army and secondly as one function, among many, to which we feel “called of God.  [It was] impossible to define a concept of officership which is plainly and clearly distinct from that of soldiership. [He concluded] (a) That it would seem that the Army needs full time workers… Most, but by no means all, these workers are officers. (b) That we believe we may be called to be such workers – and this call may refer to officership (rather than employee or envoy status). (c) That to be so called and so engaged is sufficient to sustain our work, our spirit and our identity. I believe we need look for nothing more special than this.”[49]

Official words

Ordination

Of official statements on this matter the first was General Brown’s introduction of “ordination” in commissioning. The Chief of Staff’s 1978 letter to Territorial Commanders stated: 

It is the General’s wish that a slight modification should be made to the wording of the Dedication Service during the Commissioning of cadets, in order to emphasise the fact that Salvation Army officers are ordained ministers of Christ and of His Gospel.

After the cadets have made their Affirmation of Faith, the officer conducting the Commissioning should then say: “In accepting these pledges which you each have made, I commission you as officers of The Salvation Army and ordain you as ministers of His Gospel.” In countries other than English-speaking, and where the word “ordained” has no exact equivalent, a translation should be used which will give the nearest possible meaning to the English-language expression.[50]

That the decision did not command universal support might be suggested by the fact that it was reviewed in 1988 and 1892, and the rubric was eventually amended by General John Gowans. A 2002 Memo from Chief of Staff John Larsson instructed

The commissioning officer will say to each cadet in turn: “Cadet (name): Accepting your promises and recognising that God has called, ordained and empowered you to be a minister of Christ and of his gospel, I commission you an officer of The Salvation Army.”[51]

The significant changes here would appear to be that (1) the cadets were to be commissioned individually rather than collectively, and (2) “ordination” was now seen as something already done by God rather than in this ceremony by a representative of the organisation.

Response to the Lima Document

In 1982 the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Paper 111 on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Lima[52]), was circulated amongst churches for comment. The Salvation Army’s response was included in Faith and Order Paper 137 of 1987, and also published by the Army itself as One Faith, One Church, in 1990. While the intention had been that churches would look for areas of agreement, the majority ended up by drawing lines around their own particular distinctives and the result pleased no-one. Catholics felt the document was Protestant in emphasis; Protestants felt “left out”.

The Army identified with Lima where it could. Its main concern seems to have been to defend its non-sacramental stance, and even in its response on Ministry, it appeared somewhat preoccupied with the sacramental issue.

About the question of how Salvation Army ministry is perceived in relation to traditional Church belief about ordination, it appeared to be less sensitive and therefore, missed significant areas of difference. It was vague about the meaning of the language of ordination, which it had recently adopted, and confused  the concept of indelible character of orders with the Army’s own expectation that officers would commit to life-long ministry. The Army identified with the theology of the “radical reformation” but that it also sought to be included in the fold of “mainstream” ecclesiology by claiming that it was just like everyone else but with different terminology. Or in the case of “ordination”, the same terminology.

It concluded that rather than “the highlighting of differences,” the Army would prefer to see the churches demonstrating their existing unity in mission and evangelism. It believed that differences in faith and order in the church are issues only to theologians, of lesser concern to lay Christians and of no interest whatever to those outside the church.[53]

Community in Mission

Their work on the Lima document evidently alerted the Salvation Army’s leadership to its lack of a coherent ecclesiology and the difficulties inherent in maintaining a merely reactive mode. The book Community in Mission, A Salvationist Ecclesiology was commissioned from an American officer, Major Philip Needham, and published in 1987. Needham’s basic premise is that “a Salvationist ecclesiology stands as a reminder to the Church that its mission in the world is primary, and that the life of the Church ought largely to be shaped by a basic commitment to mission.”[54] His ecclesiology deals pre-eminently with the ministry of the Army as a whole, and only inter alia with that of the officer corps in particular.

Within the elaboration of this theme, Needham clearly confined the concept of “ordination” to a “functional” role within the movement – and claimed that its significance was best expressed in the word “commissioning”, used of both officers and soldiers taking up specific tasks, while “ordination” was commonly used in connection with “ministries that require theological training, specialised skills, pastoral leadership and a full-time vocation…”[55]

The work of the International Doctrine Council

The Doctrine Council, inaugurated in 1931, has been responsible for producing successive editions of the Handbook of Doctrine. None of the pre-1969 editions mentioned the doctrine of the Church, a concept without interest to the early Salvation Army, and even from 1969 this was discussed only under Trinitarian doctrine, as a Ministry of the Holy Spirit. No reference was made to a “separated ministry”. The 1998 edition, Salvation Story, explains that “One very important change since the Eleven Articles were formulated and adopted is the evolution of the Movement from an agency for evangelism to a church, an evangelistic body of believers who worship, fellowship, minister and are in mission together.”[56]

With reference to Ministry, a paragraph explains that all Christians are “ministers or servants of the gospel… share in the priestly ministry… In that sense there is no separated ministry.” However the section goes on to say:  

Within that common calling, some are called by Christ to be full-time office-holders within the Church. Their calling is affirmed by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the recognition of the Christian community and their commissioning – ordination – for service. Their function is to focus the mission and ministry of the whole Church so that its members are held faithful to their calling.

They serve their fellow ministers as visionaries who point the way to mission, as pastors who minister to the priests when they are hurt or overcome, as enablers who equip others for mission, as spiritual leaders.[57]

Like Community in Mission, this does establish clearly the principle that the ministry of particular persons arises out of the ministry of the whole Christian community, and attempts to explain and justify how this happens in practice.

The Council’s most recent work is Servants Together, arising from the 1995 International Council of Leaders’ recommendation that the roles of officers and soldiers be defined and a theology of “the priesthood of all believers” be developed to encourage greater involvement in ministry (for example, spiritual leadership, leadership in general), worship, service and evangelism.[58]

The book for the first time puts the Army’s ecclesiology in its historical context. It clearly establishes the principle that there is no distinction in status between soldiers and officers, although it then struggles to establish what is unique about the role of the officer. Significantly, and indicative of the Army’s growing pluralism, it does allow that a variety of opinion is held on the subject. As an official response to the debate of the previous forty years, Servants Together entrenches the Army’s traditional ambiguity about the nature of its “separated ministry”.

If we were to attempt to sum up the progression to be found through the sequence beginning with the introduction of ordination in 1978 and culminating in the publication of Servants Together in 2000, at the risk of over-simplification we might suggest that in the 1970’s the pendulum had swung as far as it could in the direction of a status for officers, and that the subsequent works show a move to correct an imbalance and restore a functional point of view – while retaining the

movement’s traditional ambiguity about the question.

Officers who may not be officers

The ambiguity about the status of officers – whether they are clerical or lay – has further implications for Salvationists who have performed “officer” functions without being accorded full officer status. These include not only non-commissioned and warranted ranks and soldiers, but more surprisingly the women officers, particularly the married women, of the Army.

An officer by any other name…

In every army in the world, it is the non-commissioned officers, the NCOs, who see themselves as the real leaders of the army. The Salvation Army’s unpaid, volunteer “local officers”, originally the “elders” of the Christian Mission, evolved to become a paid, full-time parallel structure to officership. From 1893, some were appointed as “Envoys”, equivalent to Methodist local preachers on a circuit, and from the 1930’s these sometimes acted as Corps commanding officers. By the 1940’s these voluntary workers were supplemented by full-time paid Envoys who held officer appointments in both corps and social work but without officer training or commission. Finally, by the 1960’s some were warranted as “Auxiliary Captains”, working under officer conditions but still without officer status, though some later went on to hold substantive rank. The phenomenon of people doing identical work but accorded differing status is fraught with inequities and runs counter to the principle that officership is simply functional.

Although we have referred to the trend for officers to become clergy and soldiers to think of themselves as laity, there has always been a counter-movement, a consistent tradition of soldier initiative and participation in the Army’s work. There has always been some tension between the view that soldiers are “cannon-fodder”, with lives co-extensive with Army programmes, and the belief that soldiers are the front line of evangelism in the world, engaged in real “full-time service”, and to be resourced by officers rather than used. The former approach is always a danger in a clericalising context.

In the “Western world” Army, the second half of the twentieth century saw some attempt to accommodate to the more democratic temper of the times with some consultative machinery on both the local level, with Corps Councils, and territorial level, with a variety of “laymen’s advisory” groups. It is interesting that General Clarence Wiseman, an initiator of the latter, had second thoughts on theological grounds – “to have segregated groupings is really in violation of the concept of the priesthood of all believers… thereafter Officers came officially on to the [Canadian] ACSAL.”[59]

Two weaknesses have dogged all such attempts at spreading the ownership of policy. Firstly, as Peter Price has observed of the Catholic Church: “The consultative structures of the Church are still only ‘recommended’ and ‘advisory’. They do not necessarily facilitate Lay participation in real decision-making. Such participation as well as its authority are dependent on the individual Bishop or Parish Priest, and may be dismantled at will.”[60] Secondly, the default, officer-centred position into which the organisation so readily lapses, attributing omnicompetence to commissioned rank, means that too often business decisions are made by commercial amateurs, with a commensurate loss of credibility in the eyes of Salvation Army soldiers.

A growing late twentieth century trend has been the employment of soldiers in ministry roles – as youth workers, pastoral workers and corps leaders, as well as in social work and administrative roles. This has been particularly the case in western countries with declining officer strength and has provoked further debate about the respective roles and status of officers and soldiers. This has paralleled a similar controversy in the Roman Catholic and some other churches.[61]  The difference between the Church and The Salvation Army lies in the fact that the Army does not in theory reserve spiritual ministry and leadership roles for a sacerdotal class. The similarity lies in the fact that in practice, because of its hierarchical structure, the Army has tended to behave in the same way as the Church, and change in this area therefore occasions similar tensions.

A Monstrous Regiment of Women[62]

If a question is whether Salvation Army officers are, or are not, clergy, the question may have even more point in the case of women officers, given that ordination of women was not generally accepted in the 19th century. Equality of the sexes has always been one of the Army’s boasts. “In the Army,” wrote Florence Booth, “we know no distinction, because of sex, which is calculated to limit either a woman’s influence or her authority, or her opportunity to serve, by sacrifice, the Kingdom of God.”[63]

Over many years, Salvationists regarded the struggles of other denominations over this question with a certain smugness, not always justified, and on two grounds. The first was theological, in that Salvation Army commentators did not always understand the difference between involvement, even leadership, in ministry and a claim to Christian “priesthood”. The second reason for some modesty on the question is that the Army’s practice has not always matched its precepts.  In fact, over much of its history the Army appeared to retreat from its early promise of gender equality. Single women officers were disadvantaged in comparison to their male peers; married women found their officership merged with and subordinated to that of their husbands.

The reason for this was probably simply male chauvinism and the increasing conservatism of a movement institutionalising and tending to be on the defensive. It might be suggested that this touches on our clericalising theme as well. Whatever the Army’s rhetoric, the men thought of themselves as clergy, and in the world to which the Army was accommodating it was not yet trendy to think of the women as clergy as well. While the stand taken by the Booths was ground-breaking in the nineteenth century, they found it difficult to apply the principle of gender equality across the board, quite naturally because they were prisoners of their own times and assumptions.  Theological principles are not easily imposed on resistant cultural norms. Andrew Mark Eason’s Women in God’s Army explores and analyses the cultural and theological foundations upon which the organisation was established. Reflecting views that were similar to those of their male counterparts, most Army women espoused beliefs and accepted roles that were incompatible with a principle of sexual equality. A female officer’s moral and spiritual functions in the home, combined with her other domestic tasks, either called into question or placed constraints upon her public ministry… Within the public realm, a married or single female officer was usually confined to responsibilities consistent with the notion of sexual difference. She was encouraged to possess a femininity defined in terms of self-sacrifice, weakness, dependency and emotion. This construction of womanhood allowed women to challenge sinners publicly from the platform or engage in social work, but their overall ministry remained a modest one… Her ideal role was one of service and submission rather than leadership and authority.[64]

The Salvation Army, having in some senses pioneered equality, evidently lost its momentum fairly early in its history, while continuing to believe its own rhetoric. It has only recently begun to address the issues again, firstly as a result of the work of a commission established by General Eva Burrows and its recommendations as implemented by General Paul Rader in the 1990’s, and secondly as an outcome of the International Commission on Officership, under General John Gowans.

The International Commission on Officership

General Paul Rader set up an International Commission on Officership, on the recommendation of the 1998 International Conference of Leaders held in Melbourne. Its purpose was “to review all aspects of the concept of officership in the light of the contemporary situation and its challenges, with a view to introducing a greater measure of flexibility” into officer service.[65]

Most of the recommendations deal with “officer conditions”. To that extent the commission was a response to the ways in which the original expectations of both the officers and the Army as a whole have drifted out of synch with the changing times and world-view of newer generations. However, the findings of this commission and ensuing changes also bear upon the matters at the heart of this paper – the character of officership, and the question of whether officership is perceived as a functional role or a clerical status.

Of the matters traced in this paper, some recommendations had to do with the role of women and the equality of their status with that of men officers in the matter of allowances, women’s appointments and the need for gender balance on Boards and Councils. These largely affirmed, furthered and encouraged reforms already in train. Only with local, territorial exploration, and will to progress, will changes be made.

Secondly, some recommendations bore directly on the status-function dichotomy we have observed through the Army’s (and the Church’s) history.  Under this heading we could place those referring to Covenant and Undertakings, open-ended or short-term commissions, diverse models of spiritual leadership and tent-making ministry.

Concerning the status of officership there was an inherent tension between two of the Commission’s terms of Reference: to strengthen the ideal of life-time service and to explore the possibilities of short-term service. The first would shore up the “clerical” assumptions behind officership; the second would permit a greater degree of flexibility based on an “all-lay” ethos. General Gowans opted for the former, perpetuating the two-tier model, both tiers performing the same ministry roles but only one with the status of officership, with Lieutenant becoming a warranted rank to replace those of Envoy and Auxiliary Captain. Gowans was unable to commit the Army to a solely “functional” model, and the movement continues to try to have it both ways.

The Commission was not set up to address the issue of clericalisation, so it is not surprising that it did not resolve the tensions between The Salvation Army’s theology and its ecclesiology apparent throughout its history. It was intended to suggest solutions to practical, organisational problems arising from the tensions between an institutional structure, its evolving constituents and its ever changing milieu. In particular, it sought to modify those service conditions which were bringing pressure to bear on officers and making it harder to recruit and retain officers in some territories. However, those conditions and tensions are to some extent the result of and inseparable from the process we have described as clericalisation. Pragmatic rejigging of regulations without recognising and adequately taking into account the underlying sociological and ecclesiological processes involved, is dealing with symptoms without addressing causes. Such measures may meet the need of the hour, or of a decade or two, but do not go far enough to help regroup the Army for the battles of the coming century.

Conclusions

The Salvation Army had three options regarding clerical status:

1. There are priests/clerics/people in orders in the Church, with a status distinct from that of the laity, but we do not have them in The Salvation Army.

This would mean The Salvation Army’s acceptance of an “all lay" status for its soldiers and officers and a second class clergy status for its officers, acknowledging itself to be something like an order or an ecclesiola in ecclesia rather than a “church” or “denomination”.  For Booth it was not enough that his officers should be regarded as Deacons and Deaconesses, members of an inferior order.

2. There are priests/clerics/people in orders in the Church, and we do have them as officers in The Salvation Army.

The adoption of “ordination” by Arnold Brown, and the claim that the Army’s commissioning had always been equivalent to ordination, amounted to this position. This seemed to be an attempt to endorse officially what Salvationists had come to accept in practice over many years, without being very clear about what was meant by it. The confusion that has grown up on this issue within The Salvation Army is, as has been suggested, partly a result of ambiguity about church order inherited from Methodism, and partly from a desire to be accepted by other Christian denominations as one of them. 

3. There are no priests/clerics/orders in the Church, and The Salvation Army does not aspire to any. All Christians are “lay”, in the sense that all belong to the people of God, without distinction of status.

Booth in fact made it clear on more than one occasion that this was his theoretical position; his theology required it. However, the Army’s ecclesiology was shaped instead by Booth’s autocratic temperament, the need for organisation, the twin demons of militarism and bureaucracy, the susceptibility of human nature to pride and ambition, along with historically conditioned expectations. All these meant that the leadership function, as always, appropriated to itself a dominant role and assumed a regular status. The difficulty lies in the tension between the Salvation Army’s hierarchical institutional structure and the “Priesthood of all Believers” ethos inherited from its radical Protestant antecedents.  In a word, The Salvation Army has “clericalised”.

I suggest that the tendency to clericalisation has had two related adverse effects on the Church, and, on The Salvation Army.

§         Firstly, clericalism fosters a spirit incompatible with the “servanthood” Jesus taught and modelled; it is inimical to the kind of community Jesus appeared to call together.

§         Secondly, clericalisation by concentrating power and influence in the hands of a minority, disempowers the great majority of members of the Church. It can therefore diminish the Church’s effectiveness in its mission of evangelising and serving the world.  It might be possible in fact to argue that the effectiveness of function is in inverse proportion to status claimed.[66]

How  might  the effect of clericalisation  be  moderated?  We might consider this question under three headings, concerning firstly the vocation of the officer as an individual, secondly the role of the officer, and thirdly the relationship of the officer to the organisation.

1. The Officer’s Vocation

Over the years the Reformation concept of all believers having a calling has been narrowed to a clerical focus, into which the Army has bought. A newer generation is less willing to accept this. To maintain officer recruitment the Army therefore has a choice of what in the Catholic Church is called the “restorationist agenda”, attempting to set the clock back, and emphasising the status of officership, or the alternative is to give full value to the vocation of officership as one ministry option without, by implication, devaluing other callings.

2. The Officer’s Roles in the Organisation

The debate referred to already and the book, Servants Together show that a variety of attempts to define the officer role over against that of soldiers all came to grief over the basic presupposition, derived from our rejection of any hint of sacerdotalism, that there was nothing done by an officer that could not be done by a soldier.  It is necessary to fall back on Cecil Waters’ dictum that officership is simply the way in which we choose to organise the Army; it has no sacred dimension in itself. It is about leadership.

Given the military metaphor on which the Army is structured, and the necessity of leadership in any human endeavour, it is necessary to ask how we can ensure leadership without the abuse of power to which a hierarchical system is especially vulnerable. Without structural safeguards, all talk of “servant leadership” too easily becomes an instrument of spiritual abuse; systemic privilege and power must be circumscribed. It is true, however, that servant-leader behaviour flows only from servant-leader attitudes, and attitudes are notoriously unamenable to legislation. They have to be caught as well as taught, by the example of what Paul called “working together”, by way of contrast with “ruling over”.[67] Both structural and attitudinal change is required for this to happen.

3. The Officer’s Covenant and Undertakings

The Undertakings signed by the officer commit the individual to a number of conditions intended to ensure his or her full availability to the service, equivalent for example to celibacy for the Catholic priesthood. I would argue that the conditions of officer service have helped create status, in so far as they have set officers apart from other Salvationists. We have seen that this was deliberately fostered, along with all the other devices used to create morale and esprit de corps.  In my view this has now become counterproductive, in that these conditions no longer serve that purpose for people who are already officers and make more difficult the recruitment of their replacements.

The other significance of the Undertakings is that with the officer’s explicit renunciation of any legal claim to remuneration or other benefits of employed status, they are the cornerstone of the Army’s sharing the “employed by God” status enjoyed by the clergy of most churches.  We have seen that this has until now served to safeguard the Army against legal action by its officers. However, it is an anachronism left over from the Theodosian polity of Christendom, and coming under increasing pressure in secular societies.

Rather than trying to hang on to a soi disant clerical status which is irrelevant to the needs of the modern world, we could accept that officers are employees, their covenant no different from that of soldiers in the Army’s service. At the same time, we could accord officer rank to anyone in a leadership roles normally exercised by an officer. This rationalisation would end the two-tier structure whereby some officers are more equal than others and the anomaly whereby a “mere” soldier can be the leader and focal representative of the Army in a whole community. Rank and status would lose their pseudo-theological rationale.

Leadership is indispensable to the effectiveness of a movement. It is not suggested that structure be abolished; the nature of human affairs is that structures will happen anyway, and their having some continuity, accountability and legitimacy may be necessary to help mitigate the effect of unrestrained personal power. As O’Dea says, “charismatic authority is inherently unstable and… its transformation into institutionalised leadership is necessary for the survival of the group.”[68] But if institutionalisation is inevitable, the prophetic critique, the Reformation’s ecclesia semper reformanda, is equally necessary. This section of the Conclusion has attempted to propose some small changes in how the vocation of officership is viewed, in how the role of officership is expressed and in the conditions of officer-service, all with a view to moderating the clericalist tendency. Such comparatively minor modifications to Salvationist culture, some structural, some attitudinal, might at least contribute to the process of re-founding, necessary to the future of The Salvation Army.

However, these suggested changes do not amount to any more than “tinkering”, while it may be that the challenges facing the Church today are of the same order as the implications of global warming for the environment.

Postlogue

            The range of ways in which The Salvation Army in the West is attempting to come to terms with post-modern society could be compared with various contemporary trends in motor car design.  At one end of the spectrum there are those manufacturers fashionably “retro” in style, deliberately evoking the design cues of long-past glory days as a market ploy for the present but technologically thoroughly advanced – the recent S-type Jaguar, harking back to the classic Mark II of the 1960’s would be a prime example.  At the other end of the spectrum is the handful of curious “green” hybrid petrol-electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles, showing that manufacturers are trying to plan ahead for the day the oil runs out.  And in between, the majority of the industry continues to make incremental model changes from year to year as fashion dictates in the hope of improving their market share.

Likewise, in the Salvation Army, there are the “retros” who seek to reawaken the radical passion of the 1880’s – witness an “Army-barmy” website, a “War College” in Vancouver, an on-line Journal of Aggressive Christianity, a fashion for “Roots” conventions, a growing network of “614” communities. Such activists have been described as “neo-primitive salvationists”[69]

At the other end of the spectrum there is the secret army of those who have gone AWOL, of those who would prefer to disavow the whole military metaphor as inimical to the spirit of the age, for whom every convention is up for grabs and every received truth open to re-negotiation; who believe that the “oil is running out” for the institutional church. They are of that great company from every denomination who have taken their faith with them when they have left the church.[70] Many are “church-burnt” and are unlikely to return to the ranks under existing conditions. They nevertheless represent enormous potential for some future form of the Church, because they are attempting to work out in practice what it means to be Christian in a secular society without any of the traditional supports or conventions, or are in some cases involved in new, experimental forms of Christian community or ‘emergent church’. Behind the lines is always a dangerous place to do the fighting, and casualties are likely to be high.

And in between, the majority of Salvation Army units try to maintain market share, sometimes by soldiering on and trying to hold the line against change, and sometimes by borrowing whatever seems to be working somewhere else – usually from some fashionable US megachurch, or trying to implement the current gospel of “church growth” or “natural church growth” – or attempting to become a generic “community church”.[71]  Despite huge effort and some outstanding successes, they tend in the main to be either just holding their ground or are retreating.  The casualties are high here too.

The kind of leadership or officership required by each of these models is likely to differ markedly. For the third of these models the present conception of officership could continue to do duty, still with its tension and ambiguity on the question of status and function.  However, retaining such a theological hybrid may continue to give rise to the same kinds of inconsistency and inequity we have observed in the past, and limit the ability of the Army to harness fully the resources of its non-officer personnel.  The neo-primitive Salvationists, on the other hand, might just possibly stake out the original conception of a “lay” Salvation Army and, for the time being at least, resist the process of clericalisation. Status is of less significance in the trenches than on the parade ground.  The “Underground Army” is unlikely to have officers of any kind, and be less interested in questions of accountability or apostolicity.

In these days of exponential change, when a cultural generation in the West is reckoned at less than seven years, it would be foolish to assume that the present fragmentation and individualism experienced in western life, including religious life, will not swing back towards a desperate search for certainty and authority, for which a restorationist theology, or perhaps neo-primitive Salvationism, might be tailor-made. But there is also the possibility that only the underground church will survive the coming storm.

If we recall that almost every revival of Christian religion in the past has involved a reaction against priestly presumption and a renewal of lay power and activity, it may be that the Salvation Army’s best hope is to rediscover this aspect of its original genius. This is the age of irregulars, not of parade grounds or set piece battles. Like William Booth, one hundred and forty years ago, it would be necessary for The Salvation Army to admit that it did not know where it was going, but that would not matter.  The institutional Church always seems to be bound by the answers to the previous age’s questions. It might be better, David Pawson’s words, to “find out what the Holy Spirit is doing and join in.”[72]