We Must Go Forward!
General Paul Rader
High Council Speech 1994
As together we look toward the year 2000
and beyond, are we not sometimes gripped by the sense that we
may well have begun a final march to Armageddon? Sometimes the
signs seem starkly evident. If not toward the final
confrontation with an evil empire on the Plain of Megiddo,
then Armageddon in the streets of our strife-torn cities. In
homes rent by bitterness and moral failure. In the clash
between moral relativism and biblical morality. In the
relentless invasion of our homes and the minds of our young by
the godless media. In the battle for decency and justice for
the poor, the homeless, the hungry stripped of their dignity.
Along the border of Tanzania and Rwanda and now in Zaire a
million Rwandans have fled their homes.
These times call for a fighting force –
furiously aggressive – a militant Army, disciplined and
determined to proclaim Jesus as Lord amid the meanness and
misery of our world. These times call for an advancing Army –
an Army of aggression. Our field is the world and that world
is aflame! Our sinning, suffering planet is exploding in
crisis, while also bursting with opportunity. The stranglehold
of communist domination has been broken for millions.
Events such as those in North Korea – for
40 years cut off from the whole of the free world, including
the South, just minutes away – gives some glimmer of hope for
a final breaching of the Bamboo Curtain. And what shall we say
of China, and Bramwell’s promise to his dying father to
remember China? Africans are turning Christward in
unprecedented numbers, and the evangelical church awakening in
Latin America desperately needs the balancing emphasis of the
Army’s ministries of clear gospel proclamation, social concern
and Christly compassion. And what of the challenge of the
increasingly secularised societies of Europe and North
America? A very different challenge.
Can we believe that this is a day, an hour,
for retrenchment? Is this a time for settling down
comfortably, for bringing up the drawbridges over the
defensive moat and hunkering down against the storm of an
unfriendly world in our citadels of safe spirituality and
Salvationist camaraderie, isolated and effectively neutralised
as an aggressive spiritual force? It was the Army Mother’s
greatest fear for the future of the Army. What would the
Founder say to us here? I think he would say one word:
‘Forward!’
I am not a proponent of mindless
expansionism. I recognise wehave commitments to our existing
work, often struggling financially, which we cannot afford to
ignore. But I am committed to strategic advance. And I believe
resources can be found to meet the challenges before us. We
must go forward:
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forward in finding cost effective,
supportable means for entering new areas of ministry;
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forward in developing more adequate,
equitable and strategically responsible patterns of
funding – and we must work for understanding and ownership
of strategic commitments, within zones, surely, and around
the world;
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forward in compassionate and creative
response to the AIDS pandemic. In this regard the IHQ
technical assistance team is breaking fresh ground;
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forward in our efforts to find and
enfold the lost and then to enlist them in our great
cause;
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forward in aggressive and innovative
approaches to evangelism and corps growth, including the
more effective use of the media;
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forward in our efforts to sensitise
and mobilise our people to confront the moral crises in
our communities;
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forward in our commitment as an Army
– east and west, north and south – to world
evangelisation.
We must ask ourselves, how big is our world
and our understanding of the place of the Army in it? How big
is the ‘world’ of our people? Is it as big as our Saviour’s?
We must move toward understanding our place – the place God
envisions for us in the ‘do-able’ task of world
evangelisation. It is only as internationalism becomes for us
all an experience of joining hands across the world to march
forward together in fulfilment of our Lord’s Great Commission
that we can continue to generate the resources for global
advance in mission.
We must advance in a continuing renewal of
faith and spiritual vigour, reflected in the vitality of our
response to the word of God and its authority, and our
capacity for sacrificial commitment. I believe we should
revisit the use of small, task-oriented elite forces within
the Army – special forces which, for a limited time, might
give themselves to high-risk, sacrificial, innovative
evangelistic strategies and services – whatever it takes! It
might serve to raise the whole level of our commitment and
help to break us out of a defensive and conservative mode,
lest, in some places, we die of our own dignity!
We must move forward together in all our
rich cultural diversity, women and men, the young and the
aging and those in mid-life searching for ministry
opportunities which might give their lives new meaning. We
have much ground to cover on the issue of women in ministry.
But one senses that there is much greater unanimity among us
and a rising tide of commitment to finding solutions. Clearly,
action is required.
The young continue to be our greatest
challenge and our most profitable investment in our future as
a Movement. The remarkable thing is that against the tide of
the culture and its obsession with things, thrills and getting
their own way, young people continue to respond to the call of
God and come bearing the reproach of Christ. Not in the
numbers we would like. But they come.
I continue to feel that there is great
merit in the idea of convening a cost-effective International
Youth Forum, perhaps somewhere in the developing world, with
less of an emphasis on costly extravaganzas and more on
confronting young people with the challenge of the word of God
and the world of human need – perhaps along the lines of the
student missionary conventions which have been held in
different parts of the world. Summer service corps have proved
to be a valuable recruiting tool for officers. I would explore
the possibility of forming international youth service corps
teams, which could bring together teams of Salvationist youth
from both supporting and supported territories.
We must share a common strategic vision as
we move aggressively toward the 21st century. The All-India
Strategy Commission concept should be utilised elsewhere. Much
will have been learned from that initial effort at such an
approach. An International Conference of Leaders must be
convened at the earliest feasible date, hopefully before the
autumn of 1996. It should focus on strategic priorities. Sure
theological foundations are critical if we are to move with
confidence into the future. I would favour the convening of a
consultation on the theological foundations of Army identity
and mission. Among other things it might well address the
issue of our ecclesiastical identity and the extent to which
we may wisely identify the local corps with the New Testament
concept of the local church. But let us be Army! Were there
not one, God would raise up a Salvation Army for just such a
time as this. We are only a ‘people of power’ if we are pure,
continuously renewing our confidence in the privilege of all
believers to experience the cleansing, empowering and
en-gracing spirit of holiness, sanctifying our hearts by faith
and calling us to a lifelong questing for higher ground.
If we find ourselves where God wants us to
be in the year 2000 – ‘should Jesus tarry!’ – in strength and
deployment, in understanding and efficiency, in purity and
devotion, then we must advance on our knees. I would issue a
worldwide call to prayer and intercession, which can be
coordinated with established territorial emphases, with a
focus on worship, spiritual combat, claiming of new ground in
prayer by actual visits and on-site prayer offensives in
spiritual oppressive and resistant areas targeted for advance,
on concerts of prayer and a renewed emphasis on the soldiers’
disciplines in prayer.
Let the Army in the developing countries of
the world and those areas emerging from spiritual and
political oppression teach the developed and increasingly
secularised nations of the West the secrets of prayer, its
discipline and dynamics, which they have learned in the
cauldron of suffering!
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