“Rekindling the Passion”
by Captain Marion Platt
1st
Generation, Blood and Fire Salvationist, Captain Marion Platt
is the Corps Officer of The South Atlanta Ray and Joan Kroc
Corps Community Center.
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In the early days of The Salvation Army, all of the flammable
elements were present in one place. There existed in the East
End of London the tinder of human suffering and brokenness; in
every bar, factory, and on every street corner, cords of
combustible humanity lay exposed and captive to the power of
sin. Nevertheless, the rich wind of God had already begun to
fill the streets, preparing the atmosphere for revival. And in
the heart of William Booth, passion and vision began to strike
and scrape against one another like flint and steel, producing
a spark which eventually ignited the desperately dry kindling
of humanity, and was blown into a flame which spread around
the world in just a few years.
The Salvation Army came into being in an era when the urban
church was, for the most part, neglecting its missionary
calling.1 The Victorian church establishment of
that day had become an exclusive group of respectable
church-goers, unconcerned (at least in practice) with seeking
the lost, or welcoming them into their communities of faith.
Church congregations in that day were largely unprepared or
unwilling to accept “riff-raff, derelicts, prostitutes, and
other undesirables” into their fellowship. Sunday worship was
for the respectable in society, and those who were
disconnected and disenfranchised were rarely welcomed into
church rituals and membership.
William Booth set out to remedy this situation by inviting
those who were shoo-ed from the church, to give their lives to
Christ and become “soldiers” in his movement. Fueled by a
passion to make disciples of men, women, and children, Booth’s
soldiers intentionally “invaded” neighborhoods where social
evils were prominent, built relationships with the population,
and engaged injustice on its own turf. The early Army was
committed to Kingdom growth; not only did this “unchurchly
church” gather for worship, but the soldiers of the early Army
deployed into the streets of their communities to thrust the
Gospel message upon humanity, and to put compassion into
action in practical ways. William Booth was once quoted as
saying, “What is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose
whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle
to keep themselves alive?” Thus the early Army’s pragmatic
approach to presenting the Gospel, and its desire to provide
basic human needs to the impoverished, led to the
establishment of many charitable ministries, to include soup
kitchens, shelters, schools, and children’s homes.
In American culture, the church of today may be guilty of many
of the same sins of the 19th century church, and even now,
struggles with a poor reputation. Congregations have fled
impoverished, inner-city communities in favor of wealthy, tidy
suburbs, or “walled themselves in” to their church buildings.
Here’s a question to consider: what would inner-city
communities be like today, if we had stayed the course? Would
we appear to be “insignificant, out-of-touch, and irrelevant”,
as we are accused of being today? The Western Church in this
age appears, to the outside observer, to be preoccupied with
organizational prosperity and slick marketing and media, and
not overly concerned with the salvation of men, women, and
children.
In many communities, Army corps congregations have succumbed
to this kind of neglect, yet gravitate toward a preoccupation
with Sunday Worship attendance and statistics, leading
exhausted officers to embrace an “any and all means necessary”
approach to get people behind the doors of the church on a
Sunday morning, and their appointments on the “Top Ten”
report. According to Reggie McNeal, author of The Present
Future, “You can build the perfect church—and they still won’t
come.”
Is Sunday Church attendance the litmus for success? It
definitely was not for the early Church, or for the early
Army; it’s probably not a good success indicator for today’s
Army, either. I would say that the early Army’s success was
due in part to their reluctance to confine their worship and
witness to a particular time and place. A study of history
seems to suggest that early success was based on how many
soldiers, moved by compassion and a Great Commission (see
Matthew 28:19), got outside the church building, and into the
streets and homes of the people of their community. Catherine
Booth, in her lectures on Practical Religion, spoke of Jesus’
Kingdom-building strategy this way: “He chose men from amongst
the people to be workers together with Himself, and sent them
out into the byways and hedges, the fields, the marketplace,
the seashore, and the hillside; in short, He sent them
wherever the people were to be got at. Oh! if the Church had
steadily adhered to the tactics of our Lord, who can tell
whether the kingdoms of this world would not long since have
been subjected to His sway?”
Jesus came preaching a gospel of reclamation. In the first
chapter of Acts, He reiterated His intention to send the
church beyond their known world, saying to His followers,
“…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you;
and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea
and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. 2” The
early church was successful as they were empowered by the Holy
Spirit, and sent out into the world around them. In the same
lecture, Catherine Booth challenged soldiers to “become all
things to [the people] in order to win them. If they will not
come inside our consecrated buildings, we must get at them in
unconsecrated ones.”
Our movement wasn’t called into being just to imitate an
ineffective church model; it seems that the Lord raised up The
Salvation Army as a remedy to that. Nevertheless, “We have
stood to our stereotyped forms, refusing to come down from the
routine of our forefathers, although this routine has ceased
to be attractive to the people, and may, in many instances, be
the very thing that drives them away. 3” In this
age of fancy Army facilities, slick church-growth campaigns,
and “40 days of This, That, or the Other Thing”, I wonder if
the present-day Army is neglecting its rich heritage of
soul-reclamation and Kingdom-building.
Human suffering, Godlessness, and all manner of social evils
are normative in communities surrounding Salvation Army
worship halls; there’s a high probability that all of the
combustive elements which were present in the East End of
London in the mid-1800’s, are present in Army communities
today. Fortunately, the richness of God’s grace and mercy is
there, too. The present day Army’s challenge is to allow the
Holy Spirit to rekindle the passion in our hearts (He’s the
only one who can do it), to rediscover the vision of the early
Army (through courageous and thoughtful dialogue), to get
ourselves and our comrades into the community, and to fan
those 144 year old sparks and embers back into flame.
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1 Needham, Phil. Community In Mission: A
Salvationist Ecclesiology. (The Campfield Press, 1987) 4.
2 Peterson, Eugene. The Message Bible. (Navpress, 2003) Acts
1:8.
3 Booth, Catherine. Lecture. Practical Religion: Aggression.
101, Queen Victoria St. London. 1879
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