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The Salvation Army as a Prophetic
Movement?
from JAC Issue #39
by
Captain Geoff Ryan
What does prophetic ministry really mean?
The terms “prophet” and “prophetic” are loaded terms. They are
loaded with meaning often far removed from their original
intention and divested of much depth and nuance and
occasionally even integrity. They have become blunt
instruments in the hands - or mouths - of whoever wants to use
them. It is therefore important to clarify terms of reference
right from the beginning.
I would like to suggest that there are two main ways by which
“prophetic” is used in Christian circles these days. One is
favoured by conservative evangelicals, particularly
Charismatic/Pentecostal Christians and one favoured by the
more mainline, what might be considered “liberal”, branches of
the Church.
One conservative, evangelical view on the prophetic is that of
the prophet as a future-teller, often reduced to the role of a
fortune-teller. In such an understanding, the prophet is much
concerned with the future and things to come, the end times
and apocalyptic visions. The prophetic ministry is primarily
concerned with what is to come to pass, what will be and what
has not yet happened. The present is a concern only in so far
as it impacts what is to come in the future, distant or close
at hand.
Certainly there are aspects of “future telling” in the
prophetic role, however, as Walter Brueggemann points out in
The Prophetic Imagination: “While one would not want to
deny totally those facets of the practice of prophecy, there
tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and
therefore untenable. While prophets are in a way
future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it
impinges upon the present.” (p. 13)
In this conservative understanding of the prophetic ministry,
value is placed on the impartation of power - the prophet is
“gifted” by God with special insight usually termed a “word
from the Lord”. As Steve Thompson writes in his book, You
May All Prophesy! “When I use the word prophesy in this
book, I am describing receiving and giving a specific “word”
to a person or group of people.”(p. 9)
This understanding of prophetic ministry concentrates power in
the hands of the prophet. With such insight from God, the
prophet’s direct access to God provides a mandate to speak
into anyone’s life and situation with impunity. Validation of
authentic insight, or “second sight”, is largely subjective
and often not held to the same standards of discernment that
the Church has traditionally applied to such gifting.
While such a view of the prophetic does contain aspects of
biblical prophetic ministry, there is an inherent danger,
which lies in all branches of intense charismatic
Christianity. Highly emotionally motivated and often accepting
only of experiential validation, the Christian life can be
reduced to the realm of feelings (“the worship was anointed
today” or “God showed up”) and personal experience (“God told
me…”). A high level of subjectivity is tolerated, in which
people are loathe to challenge those in authority (those
anointed as prophets) lest they are considered un-spiritual.
The most troubling result of such an understanding of the
prophetic is that issues that traditionally and biblically
concerned the prophets, such as social justice, the poor and
marginalized, economic inequity, etc. are not deemed
priorities. To be “prophetic” takes on a new meaning and
purpose that is almost entirely “spiritualized”, the majority
of the time concerning itself with issues of personal piety
and private sinning.
Meanwhile, the liberals “settled for a focus on the present.”
(Brueggemann: p.13). The concept of the “prophetic” is reduced
almost exclusively to righteous indignation at societal
injustice and therefore, a response through social action. To
be prophetic means to be a critical thinker, pointing out what
is “not working” and what is “wrong”.
This understanding of the prophetic also contains aspects of
biblical prophetic ministry - however concerns itself
primarily with criticizing and attacking and tearing down,
rather than shifting perceptions. It is about revolution
rather than revival. The great danger here lies in replacing a
holy God’s concern for justice with human-centred social
justice, good works and even social engineering. The
destructive ideologies that characterized the twentieth
century were all utopianisms that sought to improve the world
through means that were justified by end results. This view of
the prophetic flies dangerously close to this flame. True
prophets also address the internal spiritual condition of
people and not only the external social conditions of the
society. They are grounded in God and his word and not
political thought systems.
So, what does it mean to be a prophet and to have a prophetic
ministry? How is this distinct or different in any way from
priests and the priestly function? Why should it matter to
Salvationists in the 21st century, living in an era long after
the advent of Jesus, who resolved within himself this tension,
by being both prophet and high priest?
In one very simple definition, a priest is someone who talks
to God on behalf of the people; a prophet is one who speaks to
the people (society, culture, the church) on behalf of God.
In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann defines
prophetic ministry in the following manner:
“The task of prophetic ministry is to
nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception
alternative to the consciousness and perception of the
dominant culture around us” (p.13).
“It is the task of prophetic ministry
to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of
enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the
prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has
taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of
perception and system of language, who is so at home in that
memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the
situation of the church in culture can be discerned and
articulated with proper urgency” (p. 12).
Brueggemann’s definitions will be our basic construct for this
discussion of the prophetic and its relevance to us today. I
want to state at the outset that I believe The Salvation Army
was raised up by God to serve a prophetic role in culture and
in the Church. However first we need to look at the prophetic
tradition in the Bible, commencing in the Old Testament, in
order to give ourselves some background understanding and
context.
The Prophetic Tradition in the Bible
As far as anyone can tell from the Scriptures, the first
record of God endorsing “religion” is found in the book of
Exodus (starting at chapter 19 until the end of the book and
continuing on into Leviticus). Not long after Moses has led
the people out of Egypt, he is summoned to Mount Sinai by God
to receive the Ten Commandments, as well as a host of
instructions regulating the separate life of God’s chosen
people. While Moses is gone, the people, tiring of waiting and
dealing with an abstract God that only their leader had access
to, collected all their jewellery and, in imitation of the
surrounding peoples, fashioned an idol and declared it their
god (Exodus 32).
Up to this point,
Israel
had no formal religion. What they did have was a man who
approached God on their behalf and approached them on God’s
behalf. No rituals or traditions, no teaching, no system of
observance - no religion, in short. This was in stark contrast
to the surrounding cultures among whom they moved, the
Egyptians and the other peoples they encountered as they fled
Egypt.
In these cultures, the gods had “incarnated” themselves in
forms and rituals that gave structure and meaning to their
adherents’ lives. Dealing with the pure abstract for any
sustained period of time is virtually impossible for humans.
We serve a God who is Spirit (ergo abstract) yet who defines
himself relationally in reference to us as his creations.
However, our need to codify things in concrete terms is too
strong to deny. God acknowledges this right at the beginning
in Exodus by providing a complex and all encompassing
religious system in order to satisfy this need in his people
and to provide a concrete way through which they can maintain
a relationship with him and deal with their sins. God’s
ultimate acknowledgement of this need in his creation is
Christ’s incarnation several thousand years later. It began
however with Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai.
God instituted all this for the benefit of his people. It was
about us, not him. God is self-sufficient and self-contained
and needs nothing outside of himself- he never lived in that
golden box known as the Ark of the Covenant. These were all
symbols whose function was to serve our needs until the time
when the fulfillment of these symbols arrived.
“Therefore do not let anyone judge
you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious
festival, a new Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a
shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however,
is found in Christ.” (Colossians 2:16,17)
The Temple was built in Israel and a system of Temple worship
instituted. The Temple became the focal point of the nation,
the heart of the people - a permanent symbol of God’s
accessibility. However, it was always intended to serve a
symbolic function, as Solomon’s dedicatory prayer makes clear:
“But will God really dwell on earth? The
heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much
less this temple I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27)
Over time, however,
Temple
worship became corrupted. The priesthood, a religious order
whom God had called into existence starting with Aaron, was to
serve the function of regulating and maintaining the spiritual
life of the nation through the faith system that God had
ordained. However, what was meant to symbolically represent
and concretely contextualize a spiritual (abstract) reality
became itself the focal point of people’s devotion and
worship. The
Temple and the worship centred in it, were idolized and
subsequently became corrupted - the “means” became the “end”.
This is one of the inevitable outcomes of faith and religion
divorcing. One of them, generally religion, is elevated above
and beyond the other. The history of religion through human
history is a sad litany of this imbalance. Nearly all of the
more unsavoury chapters in the history of the Church can be
traced to moments when true faith and its helpmate religion,
become disconnected. Religion assumes the dominant role in
place of faith and a vital relationship with a living God.
Once this takes place, anything and everything can be
justified in the name of God. The Crusades, the Inquisition,
the Nazis marching into war with “God With Us” etched on their
belt buckles and more modern-day examples such as the conflict
in Northern Ireland.
To counter what had happened with the Temple worship and among
the priesthood, God rose up a “second stream” or a second team
- the prophets. Some of these men were themselves priests;
many were not. To effect a “holy tension” in order to realign
his people and refocus them on himself, God required that the
prophets concentrate their message on areas neglected by the
priests. The priests, perhaps inevitably, given our need for
making the abstract tangible and our weakness for power,
focused their efforts primarily on ritual and formalism,
external observance and ceremonial religion. The prophets were
tasked to go to the heart of things.
The prophets pretty much had one message: Get your heart right
with God and everything else will follow. If the heart is not
right, then everything else is becomes skewed and ultimately
pointless in God’s eyes. If your relationship with God is not
sorted, then your programs are empty; if your heart if not
right (internal) then your worship (external) is unacceptable.
They spoke of relationship, with God and with others. God
speaks to his people through their relationships with others
and their love and devotion to God are to be expressed by
serving those whom they are in relationship with. True worship
and religious expression are validated by a social imperative,
and a person’s relationship to God is integrally linked to
their relationship with others, in particular those whom God
called “the least”.
“Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me. New Moon, Sabbaths and
convocations - I cannot bear your evil assemblies. Your New
Moon festivals and your appointed feasts my soul hates. They
have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When
you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from
you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your
hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take
your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do
right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause
of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah
1:13-17)
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the
chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set
the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share
your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer
with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not
to turn away from your own flesh and blood.” (Isaiah 58:6,7)
“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Go
ahead, add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and
eat the meat yourselves! For when I brought your forefathers
out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them
commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them
this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be
my people. Walk in all the ways I command you, that it may go
well with you.” (Jeremiah 7:21-23)
“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God
rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)
“I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your
assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain
offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice
fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away
with the noise of your song! I will not listen to the music of
your harps. But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24)
“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before
the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I
offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body
for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is
good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and
to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah
6:6-8)”
The tension created by these two “streams” was intense. The
prophets felt compelled to denounce the false sense of
security that the people had gained by trusting in the
Temple
and its service. They were speaking an often unpopular message
that made the people uncomfortable and that challenged the
religious (ergo State) power system.
The prophets did strange things in order to get the people’s
attention and to get God’s message across. They were the
original sensationalists (revivalists) and “out-of-the-box”
thinkers. Hosea was told to marry the town whore; Ezekiel lay
on his side for 390 days and cooked bread using human waste as
fuel; Jeremiah invested in real estate in a city on the verge
of capture. Saints and sinners alike misunderstood the
prophets and, though meeting with some success, most met the
same fate: “Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not
persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of
the Righteous One.” (Acts
7:52)
Extreme counter-culturalism was met by death, more often than
not.
As we enter into the New Testament period in Israel, the
priests had truly triumphed. During and after the exile years,
the prophetic voice slowly died out. The prophets, concerned
as they were with issues of true faith in a God of justice and
equity and the implications of these ethically and morally in
society, were linked to the periods when
Israel
was sovereign and had her own kings. As Israel came under
foreign domination and lost control over the life of the
nation, the prophets fell silent. Some scholars speak of the
400 years of silence when no prophet was heard in Israel. By
the time the Romans arrived, the national power was
concentrated with the Sadducees (priests) and the Pharisees
(religious legalists). There was no one exercising a prophetic
ministry.
Then John the Baptist appears (John 1:19-23), a prophet in the
classic Old Testament mode, and speaking much the same
message. John was followed by Jesus:
“When Jesus came to the region of
Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say
the Son of Man is?” They replied. “Some say John the Baptist;
others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the
prophets.” (Matthew 16:13,14).
In their mission, both John and Jesus were firmly in the
prophetic line, at odds with the religious establishment, in
tension with the priests and seemingly dismissive of ritual
convention. Both met the same fate as the other prophets.
Jesus’ most quoted Old Testament verse was Hosea 6:6: “For
I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God
rather than burnt offerings.” A key passage to the
understanding of Jesus as prophet is his encounter with the
Samaritan woman in John 4:1-38. In this encounter, as with
pretty much all his encounters with people, he drew them
toward the centre, the essence of the law. He summed up the
Ten Commandments, the heart of the Old Testament law, in a
succinct way:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
The second one (commandment) is this: ‘Love your neighbour as
yourself.’ There is no greater commandment than these two.”
(Mark
12:29).
Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees and teachers of the law in
Mark 7:1-23 is paradigmatic, a pivotal encounter between the
prophetic focus on the essential heart of things and the
priestly obsession with ceremonialism. “You have let go of
the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of
men,” asserted Jesus. “Nothing outside a man can make him
‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out
of a man that makes him ‘unclean’, he later states, clearing
drawing the lines of perspective.
Jesus, however, was also a priest - the great high priest
(Hebrews 4:14-16; 5: 1-10, 7:1-28; 8:1-6; 10:1-18). This
tension between the inward and the outward, between
relationship and ceremony, symbol and reality, shadow and
substance, priest and prophet runs throughout the Bible, from
the foot of Mount Sinai until the coming of Jesus who ushered
in the new order (Hebrews 9:10) and who combined perfectly
these two aspects of true faith and mission.
The Prophetic Tradition and The
Salvation Army
God raised The Salvation Army up as a prophetic movement.
Theologically and culturally we were positioned prophetically
in contradistinction to the dominant culture, both culturally
and religiously.
Our early theological convictions ranging from our
non-observance of the sacraments (communion and water
baptism), empowerment of women for ministry, our bias toward
the poor, our use of non-sacred music and even our choice of
venues in which to hold meetings (music halls, etc) can all be
understood as prophetic in the context that has been defined
here.
From early on, The Salvation Army viewed itself as a prophetic
movement. The first
Officers
Training College in London was called “The
School of the Prophets”. Booth was known as the “Prophet of
the Poor” (the title of a 1905 biography by Thomas Coates).
Samuel Logan Brengle’s official biography is titled “Portrait
of a Prophet”. Booth’s favourite Scripture passage was Isaiah
58 - he referred to it as “The Charter of The Salvation Army”.
Our relationship to the other, established churches was
initially one of great tension which, even though it has eased
considerably through the years as The Salvation Army grew and
established credibility, was defined by the prophetic stance
we adopted in relation to the perceptions and practices of the
other churches. We felt that we had something to say to the
wider church; something to remind them about (the poor);
something about which to bear witness (ritualism and the
sacraments); areas needing challenging (female ministry). One
could say that we viewed our Christian brothers and sisters as
primarily priests, and ourselves as primarily prophets.
In time, though, we settled down. We “came in from the hills”
and built Temples of our own. We hankered after the status of
priests and the certainty of established ritual. Most
denominations still tend to hold the Army at arm’s length,
mainly due to our theological understanding of sacraments, and
refuse to grant us the ecclesiastical legitimacy that many
feel is important. Yet we continue to strive hard to establish
ourselves as priests and, in fact, to function as priests. We
have worked hard to throw off the “prophetic mantle” of our
early years.
I believe that God called The Salvation Army into being for a
prophetic purpose and that this is who we are - it is in our
DNA. If the Army is to now to emerge into robust adulthood as
a movement, 140 years after our birth, having moved from a
glorious (and rambunctious) infancy and through an awkward
adolescence, then we need to understand, accept and embrace
our true identity as a prophetic movement.
But how is this to be expressed today, in the post-modern
milieu of the early 21st century? What does God want us to say
to his people?
I hold two convictions that shape my thinking theologically
and my actions missiologically. One conviction is about the
prophetic role of the Church in culture and society, and the
other is more particularly about The Salvation Army’s
prophetic voice within Church culture. Both, I believe, are
convictions that strive to “evoke a consciousness and
perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of
the dominant culture around us.”
Speaking prophetically in the world
I have a conviction that there is only one credible message
left for the church to speak in the world today. That is,
there is only one message that might capture the attention of
the world, one message that the world might possibly listen
to. That message can be encapsulated by combining Galatians
3:26-28 and Colossians 3:11:
“Here there is no Greek or Jew,
circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or
free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Everything that the church has historically done, every good
work, in order to make the Gospel attractive and to lend
weight and credibility to our faith (which is dead without
actions, as James said) can be, and has been, replicated by
the world. Hospitals, schools, various expressions of social
service and assistance ranging from shelter beds to
counselling to addiction programs to youth centres - all such
initiatives have their genesis in the Church.
Before governments realized their responsibility in these
areas, before private charities and non-profits emerged, it
was only the Church that educated children, took care of the
sick, and helped the fallen. While the church continues to do
this (in particular The Salvation Army) and should continue to
do such things, as expressions of Christ’s love, it’s capacity
to enhance the Good News and it’s usefulness in giving
credence to our mission, are diminished greatly from the time
when we were “the only game in town”. The “competition”, for
lack of a better term, is so intense in these areas that that
the uniquely Christian aspect of practical, charitable service
is all but lost.
Paradoxically, words have become increasingly emptied of
meaning as well. The Internet and E-mail, globalized mass
media and mass culture are all expressions of a world in which
there is simply too much information for people to process.
Too many words, in fact. The straightforward and unadorned
proclamation of the Good News has never had it so bad. A
post-modern, media and technology-savvy generation requires
that in any presentation, content has to fight for attention
against image and sensation. Experientially based, sensation
driven theologies are a better draw than the dry,
intellectualism of the rationalistic Christianity of the
recent past. In the wider cultural sphere, anyone can say
anything these days, with equal credence, given the context of
a tolerant, pluralistic culture committed to moral relativism
and ethical subjectivity. Words are cheap.
So what we say - even if it is heard - will likely not be
listened to. And if what we do - even if it is noticed - will
not be linked with our message, what is left? What remains
that is uniquely Christian, that the world cannot replicate
and that no one else is saying with any degree of validation?
I believe it is that message of reconciliation that Jesus left
with the church:
“All this is from God, who reconciled
us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of
reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself
in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has
committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are
therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his
appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be
reconciled to God.” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).
In a world that is fractured along a thousand fault lines of
ethnicity, religion, racial and tribal loyalties, nationalism
and economics; where in a thousand villages and cities around
the globe the juggernaut of Globalism meets the backlash of
Tribalism; where skin colour, tribal affiliation, religious
practice or geographical happenstance are determining factors
in whether or not a person will live to their 21st birthday;
where over thirty wars are raging at present globally, each
because of seemingly non-reconcilable issues of race, religion
or economics - what is the message that needs to be spoken
prophetically into such a world?
I like to think that a typical Sunday service at my corps 614,
in Regent Park, Toronto, implicitly embodies something of this
message of reconciliation. Our neighbourhood, our “parish”, is
the rough part of our city - challenged economically,
struggling with social problems and crime and containing about
100 nationalities within a 15-minute walking radius. Regent
Park itself, the oldest and largest housing project in
Canada,
covers 69 acres - about one square mile. Running east to west,
is Dundas Street, the only through street in the whole
neighbourhood. It divides north Regent from south Regent, or
“Northside” from “Southside”.
In the spring of last year, a young man was shot and killed on
a Friday evening, a half a block north of where we hold our
Sunday services. The family had an Army connection through an
uncle in another city so I was asked to conduct the funeral.
At the uncle’s request this was a private family affair, with
no friends or acquaintances from “the Park” invited. However,
we were asked to organize a memorial service to which his
friends from the neighbourhood could be invited and so we
planned one for the following Saturday. The only building we
had available to hold the memorial service was the city-owned
community centre that we rent each week for our Sunday
meetings (we have no building of our own). The community
centre is situated half a block south from the site of the
shooting.
The boy was shot about 3 yards north of Dundas Street, just
inside north Regent. He was a “Northside” boy, as the tattoo
emblazoned on his lower stomach proudly proclaimed. The
community centre we use is situated half a block away from
where he was gunned down, about 20 yards south of Dundas
Street, just inside south Regent. Nobody showed up for the
memorial. It seems that we had disrespected the memory of this
boy by holding a memorial for him on the Southside. This
situation would seem ridiculous if it had not involved the
death of a young man.
In such a context, add to the mixing pot of ethnicities in our
community, who often continue to grind their tribal and
political axes here in their new home, the pressure from the
increasingly gentrified adjacent communities, where a trendy,
upscale housing market has emerged from the ruins of the old
slum community, and the potential for conflict and the need
for reconciliation quickly becomes obvious. Our neighbourhood
is, in many ways, a microcosm of the larger world.
Yet, each Sunday evening at 4:30 p.m. our mongrel of a church
meets and worships and fellowships. One hundred plus people of
all ages and different skin colour. It is a veritable polyglot
of racial backgrounds, all babbling different languages and
dialects and representing all strata of society from wealthy
professionals through middle-class and petit bourgeois to
working poor, welfare Moms and the homeless. Straight and gay,
addicted and abstinent, profane and pious – I am convinced
that Sunday church at 614 Toronto represents the most
disparate and eclectic group of people gathering anywhere in
our city.
And so it should be. Commissioner Phil Needham, explaining of
true community, true church, writes in his book, “Community in
Mission”:
“The Church is not a grouping of individual Christians; it
is a community in which Christians share in one another’s
struggles and hopes. In the fellowship of believers,
Christians bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), weep
together, rejoice together (Romans
12:15), lift one another up in prayer (Romans 1:9; 2
Corinthians 9:14; Ephesians 1:16; Philippians 1:4; Colossians
4:2; etc), and love one another as Christ loved them (John
13:34). There is togetherness in this fellowship that goes far
deeper than mere camaraderie. The pledge which the Spirit
empowers the Church to carry out is the pledge of members of
the community of faith to be with one another in every
circumstance.” (p. 15)
This was the message of the early church. This, I believe, lay
at the heart of what Jesus was getting at during the Last
Supper, Passover meal. This is why Paul was compelled to
traverse the ancient world planting churches and instituting
“Love Feasts” in order to get the message across about the
reconciliation that Jesus had effected through his
crucifixion.
In reconciling man to God and man to man, Jesus reversed the
effects of the Fall, the moment when our relationship with God
was severed (Genesis 3:1-24) and the subsequent murder of Abel
by Cain (Genesis 4:1-16). When relationship with God is
ruptured, then we cannot sustain relationship with each other
because the two are inexplicably linked. Jesus’ last command
to his church was intentionally this:
“Love one another. As I have loved you, so you
must love one another. All men will know that you are my
disciples if you love one another.” (John 13:34,35)
If The Salvation Army is called to be a prophetic presence in
the world, then this starts with the recognition that our
world - both our individual Monday-to-Friday-to Sunday-morning
worlds as well as the larger global family – is profoundly
conflicted and deeply divided. From this starting point, we
must speak and act a biblical reconciliation that transcends
the boundaries and barriers that not only plague the world,
but those also bind us in the church.
One American preacher remarked that 11 am on Sunday mornings
is the most segregated hour in American life. Though we live
in apartment buildings with people of different race and ride
elevators with people of colour and work in workplaces with
people of various ethnicities, every Sunday morning when we go
to worship God, people divide into their own particular racial
groupings. We build black churches, Hispanic churches, Chinese
churches, churches for the wealthy, churches for youth - all
sorts of mono-cultural churches, some ethnically based, other
based on age or interests or income and status. By so doing,
we model ourselves after a world in which people only
associate with people “like themselves” and we fail to model
the Kingdom of God, an inclusive Kingdom of the whosoever,
where differences are cause for celebration, not division. In
today’s world, the mission statement of every Christian faith
community should be: “Here there is
no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian,
Scythian, slave or free, male nor female, for you are all one
in Christ Jesus.”
For example, here in
Kentucky
we are on the edge of the American south, a place where the
black-white issue has never been truly resolved, either in
society or within the church. In spite of the great strides
made by the Civil Rights movement over three decades ago, the
tensions run deep and hard. In the words of a friend of mine
who is a Salvation Army officer born, raised and presently
serving in the Southern Territory, the “spell has never been
broken”. Look around the room at your fellow Salvationist
students. Racially and economically do you reflect the cities
and towns where you are from? Or do we reflect that statistic
that says that less than 1% of churches in North America are
reaching people “unlike themselves.”
If the church - the church “large C” and the “small C” local
congregation - is meant to be an outpost of the Kingdom of
God, reflecting what heaven is like, then what vision of
heaven are we speaking of? What vision will capture the
imagination of a weary and divided world unable to rise above
its irreconcilable differences? The book of Revelation gives
us a vision worth striving for: “I
looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one
could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language,
standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.”
(Revelation 7:9).
The Salvation Army is complicit, both at national and
international levels, of not speaking this message clearly or
distinctly enough. We need to change and strive to “encircle
the world with our arms”, in the words of William Booth, and
challenge the Church to do the same. As we have entered the
new millennium, the witness of the church is lost in the
babble, one voice among a myriad, all speaking much the same
thing, as far as Joe Public is concerned - one great choir of
cacophony.
Can we sing a different song, though? Can we sing a new song
in this strange land of the 21st century even though we are a
church in exile? Apart from the Roman Catholic Church, the
Salvation Army is virtually the only truly international
church that benefits from a centralized authority. Can our
voice sound in the halls of ecclesiastical authority? Can the
witness of our internationalism be used of God to speak
prophetically to the Church and the world beyond our church
walls? We are, after all, an Army that numerically
(statistically) is overwhelmingly brown and yellow and not
white, based on soldier and officer strength. We have a hope
to offer and it is a realistic hope to counter the
Bosnias
and Rwandas and Middle East of the world. It is the hope that
in Christ we can truly be reconciled with our Creator and his
other creations. It is a message that the world should be able
to come and see how this works every Sunday.
The last time I was at Asbury I heard the venerable John M.
Perkins speak. He told a story of an Indian friend of his who
is a Christian and a philosopher. Speaking of the church and
its present fascination with power and experience, the friend
told Dr. Perkins that anything that a Benny Hinn or an Oral
Roberts or any other Christian miracle-worker can do, he can
find a “Fakir” (a local Indian holy man) who can do the same
thing. Pretty much everything - except one thing, that is.
There is one thing the holy men cannot do. They cannot make a
high-caste Indian love a low-caste Indian. That takes the
power of the Gospel!
Speaking prophetically in the church
I have a conviction that the other main reason God had in
raising up The Salvation Army was as a prophetic voice within
the church - to live and speak as constant reminders to the
Church of Jesus Christ not to forget the poor. I believe that
the only true theological distinctive of The Salvation Army is
our calling to the poor. From the outset of our history, this
was the motivation for our mission and today it is the only
raison d’etre for our continued existence. William Booth’s
personal convictions on this matter are quite clear.
“God shall have all there is of me.
There have been men with greater brains than I, even with
greater opportunities, but from that day when I got the poor
of London on my heart and caught a vision of what Jesus Christ
could do to change them and me, on that day, I made up my mind
that God should have all of William Booth that there was.”
“To help the poor, to minister to them in their slums, to
sympathize with them in their poverty, afflictions, and
irreligion, was the natural outcome that came to my soul
through believing in Jesus Christ.”
Why was God moved to rise up The Salvation Army? There were
two main determining factors. The state of society (the world)
and the positioning of the churches relative to society. Booth
was shown a London where a full one-tenth of the population
was “submerged” in poverty, vice and sin. His subsequent
efforts through mission stations and corps and social
endeavours ranging from the “Cab Horse Charter” to his
treatise “In Darkest England and the Way Out”, focused on this
submerged tenth. The churches of the day had no interest in
reaching them and left to themselves, they would never darken
the door of any place of worship. This was Booth’s world. The
question for us is that 140 years later what, if anything, has
changed?
I want to quote last year’s Miller Lecture speaker, Dr.
Jonathan Raymond, from an article that ran in “Word & Deed” in
2002 entitled: “Creating Christian Community in a Fragmented
World.”
Throughout the twentieth century…War,
civil strife, genocide seemed ubiquitous and normative
simultaneously…Today, the asset of 358 people (billionaires)
in the world is greater than the combined income of 45% (2.6
billion) of the world’s people. The share of the global income
of the poorest 20% of the world’s population has dropped from
2.3% to 1.4% since the late 1960’s. Booth’s “submerged tenth”
is now nearer a thirtieth.”
Submerged tenth to a submerged thirtieth - hardly an
improvement! If the needs of the poor and marginalized,
locally and globally, are greater now than they were in Booth
times, what about the “positioning” of the churches? By this I
mean, the Church’s capacity and willingness to engage with the
poor?
A quick perusal of any Christian (evangelical) bookstore will
reveal that the vast majority of resources on offer in the
areas of evangelism, mission, church planting, church models,
children’s ministry etc are not dedicated toward ministry with
the poor and marginalized, urban or otherwise. Browse the web
and research the major conferences to be held this coming year
in “evangelicaldom” and note their subject matter and the
demographic they appeal to. Who are our “heroes” in the realm
of Christian leaders? Which churches do we read up on and seek
to imitate as models of ministry? What do you think the
percentage split is among Salvation Army officers who, in the
past five years have visited either Saddleback or
Willow
Creek
Community Churches versus those who have checked out the
Sojourners Community in
Washington
or JPUSA in Chicago? Apart from a few Catholic orders and
independent missions, I cannot name one evangelical,
protestant church that is focused on and committed to reaching
the poor.
I have two quotes on the wall of my office at 614, and they
serve as constant reminders to me of the mission of the church
as I understand it:
“Jesus was not crucified in a
cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two
thieves on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroads so
cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin
and Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and
thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He
died and that is what He died about that is where the church
should be and what the church should be about.” (George
MacLeod)
“Meanwhile our churches, like secular associations, are
concerned with fund-raising, beautiful buildings, large
numbers, comforting sermons from highly qualified preachers,
while they display indifference to the poor, and to the
pariahs of society – drunks, whores, homosexuals, the poor,
the insane, and the lonely. Jesus himself would find no place
in our all-too-respectable churches, for he did not come to
help the righteous but to bring sinners to repentance. Our
churches are not equipped to do that sort of thing.” (John
White)
The “dominant culture” of the protestant church in North
America is one inextricably linked to wealth and power. The
gospel of prosperity, preached so explicitly on TV screens, is
ubiquitously present throughout modern-day North American
evangelicalism. For years evangelicals have lauded Paul
(David) Yongi Cho for having the largest church in the world (Full
Gospel Central Church in Seoul, Korea). We read
his books and invite him to speak at mainstream, evangelical
conferences. Yet Yongi Cho is a proponent of this theology. We
all sing songs from the Hill Song conglomerate out of
Australia and read books by Darlene Zschech, the high profile
worship leader of Hill Song. The Hill Song organizations are
proponents of the prosperity gospel. Even Bruce Wilkenson’s
“Prayer of Jabez” that swept through the evangelical world
like wild fire a few years ago, is essentially implicit
prosperity teaching - asking for God’s blessing, something
most easily quantified in material terms.
This has always been an underlying dynamic in North American
Protestantism, woven into the fabric of the stories of our
culture - the “great American dream”, driven by the Protestant
work ethic, singing as we worked: “I've got a mansion just
over the hilltop / In that bright land where we'll never grow
old /And some day yonder we will never more wander / But walk
on streets that are purest gold”. (Ira Stamphill)
Implicit in the assumptions of our model churches (such as
Bill Hybel’s Willow Creek Community Church or Rick Warren’s
Saddleback Community Church) are a corporate ethos that views
the pastor as CEO (there is a book on the market by a Laurie
Beth Jones entitled “Jesus CEO”) and that elevates success
indicators such as rapid growth and size, quantifying
“success” in the same way, and using the same terms, as any
corporate structure. The Church Growth Movement and more
lately, the Natural Church Development method, are examples of
business tools, backed by sociological methods, applied to the
Church. The meta-narrative, told countless times, is of a
small group of friends who gathered together to start a new
kind of church, usually in someone’s living room and within
eight years it has grown to several thousand members and… The
narrative is interchangeable with Apple or Microsoft or any
number of the dot.com enterprises that sprung up starting in
the 1990’s.
According the Brueggemann: “The contemporary (American) church
is so largely acculturated to the American ethos of
consumerism that it has little power to believe or act…our
consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception
and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric” (p.11).
Not long after returning from almost a decade of service in
Russia, while holidaying at a Salvation Army facility, I
overheard some friends talking about a Corps Sergeant-Major in
a local corps who drove a new Mercedes-Benz. I joined in the
conversation by asking why would a Christian be driving a
Mercedes? Further, I wondered why would a Salvationist
Christian be driving a Mercedes? My question was met with a
combination of annoyance, anger and eye-rolling sufferance at
the recently returned, self-righteous missionary. You see this
local officer was seen as an example of success. He held a
relatively powerful position in a relatively powerful corps in
the city. He came from a well-known Army family. His
possession of a luxury car such as a Mercedes-Benz was somehow
seen as a validation of The Army and a kudo for the corps that
he attended. I viewed the situation as incongruous with my
understanding of the Gospel and more particularly, the calling
of The Salvation Army, but I was alone in holding this
opinion.
Wealth and power go hand in hand. Attending a Christian
conference in the southern
United States
last year, I was struck by how many of the songs used in the
contemporary worship had the motif of Jesus as King. Along
with this, the lyrics were rife with allusions to war, battle
and conquering. They seemed full of imperialistic imagery.
Many of the prayers offered up were those in which we were
“taking back what is ours” and “claiming places that we could
put our foot on”. As an aside at the end of one fervent
prayer, a friend leaned over and remarked that in the course
of the weekend he had heard more references to Satan than he
had over the past year. Intentional and deliberate? I do not
believe it was. If anything is to be read into it, it possibly
represents an unconscious reaction to the ethos of projected
power, connected with the war that the United States is
presently engaged in - a war that has been couched in
theological language and rooted in deeply religious
worldviews.
If nothing else, 9/11 has put religion firmly back on the map
in the increasingly secular West. An act of terrorism that was
profoundly religiously motivated was met and matched with a
theological rhetoric (examine President Bush’s speeches
immediately before and after 9/11) and two action-orientated
responses: a military action and an urging for us all to “go
shopping” to help stimulate the economy.
In their attacks, Al Quaeda targeted political (military) and
financial symbols. The White House, the Pentagon, and the
World Trade Centre. The effects of what happened on that day
continue to reverberate in The Salvation Army. A financial
crisis was precipitated in all the American Territories and in
my home Territory of Canada and Bermuda. In the few short
years since 9/11, we have been plunged into a financial crises
that has so far seen the amalgamation of six Divisions, the
closing of one of our Training Colleges, the selling of three
Divisional camps, budget cuts across all Divisional and
Territorial Headquarters Departments by up to 30%, the closing
of numerous corps, and it is not finished yet.
In a church that is strives for success, hungers after power
and can never get enough money, what happens to the poor, to
the “last, the lost, the least”? There is an adage that that
“terrorism is the war of the poor and war is the terrorism of
the rich”. The “wretched of the earth” (Franz Fanon) seem to
be aligned with Al Quaeda, the PLO, and the popular people’s
movements. The church seems to be aligned with the globalism,
capitalism, consumerism, materialism and military might.
Something is very wrong.
In their book Political Holiness: A Spirituality of
Liberation, Pedro Casaldaliga and Jose-Maria Vigil, make the
following case for an alternative view of the mission of the
church:
“In Jesus, God emptied himself in kenosis. God did not
become generically human, but specifically poor, ‘taking the
form of a slave.’ (Philippians 2:7). He ‘lived among us’ (John
1:14), among the poor. He did not come into the world in
general - which would itself have been an ‘emptying’ - but
into the world of outcasts. He chose that social level: on the
margins, among the oppressed, with the poor. The kenosis of
the ‘in-carnation’ did not consist simply in taking on
‘flesh’… but also in taking on ‘poverty’, the poverty of
humankind.
The church, as a whole, if it wished to be increasingly
evangelical and more effectively evangelizing, will have to go
through this exodus and into this emptying process. It will
have to insert itself - with its human and material resources
and all its institutional weight - into the social situation
of the poor majorities, among the greatest needs of the poor,
on the periphery of this human world divided into rich and
poor. The mystical body of Christ has to be where the
historical body of Christ was.”
Conclusion
Brueggemann concludes that the church’s loss of identity
through the abandonment of the faith tradition is the internal
cause for our enculturation and acquiescence in the face of
opposing values of the world. Consumer culture is “organized
against history…there is a depreciation of memory and a
ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the
now, either an urgent now or an eternal now.” Any community
that is “rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical
hopes is a curiosity and a threat in such a culture”. The
Salvation Army is definitely a curiosity, but are we a threat?
“When we suffer from amnesia, every form of serious authority
for faith is in question, and we live unauthorized lives of
faith and practice unauthorized ministries,” concludes
Brueggemann.
The question is are we as a people of God living “unauthorized
lives of faith” with reference to the life of faith and the
journey of mission that God planned for us? Are we practicing
“unauthorized ministries”, away from the poor, in ghettos of
our own sociological and cultural comfort zones - playing at
being priests, when we should be shouting as prophets?
Do we, within our ranks of missionaries, “nurture, nourish and
evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the
consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around
us”, or do we acquiesce and sing the songs scripted for others
in the church and not our own songs, even in exile?
Do we truly understand who we are as a people, and whom we are
called to as a church? Are we truly children of the tradition
in the Army who have taken seriously the prophetic calling of
our movement in the shaping of our own fields of perception
and system of language? Can we, with proper urgency, discern
and articulate the points of incongruity of our church in the
culture of society and the culture of the wider church,
regardless of the cost?
I believe that if the Salvation Army is not willing to
re-engage the world prophetically and speak prophetically
within the Church, then there is no practical use for us as a
distinct people of God and no compelling reason for our
continued existence.
May we heed the words of the Spirit to the Churches in Ephesus
and Sardis:
“You have forsaken your first love. Remember
the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the
things you did at first…I know your deeds; you have a
reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up!
Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not
found your deeds complete in the sight of my God.” (Revelation
2:4,5; 3:2)
May God challenge The Salvation Army to live up to our
founding vision as prophets!
End Notes
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress
Press, 1978.
Casaldaliga, Pedro and Vigil, Jose-Maria. Political Holiness:
A Spirituality of Liberation, Orbis Books, 1995.
Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global
Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Needham, Phil. Community in Mission: A Salvationist
Ecclesiology, The Salvation Army, 1987.
Ortberg, John. Why Jesus’ Disciples Wouldn’t Wash Their Hands,
Christianity Today, August 15, 1994.
Ryan, Geoff. The Mission of The Salvation Army, The Officer,
January/February 2003.
Thompson, Steve. You May All Prophesy! MorningStar
Publications, Wilkesboro, NC. 2000.
This article originally appeared as a Miller Memorial
Lecture The Salvation Army Student Centre -
Asbury College March 6, 2005
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