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Symbols & Rituals
by Major Wayne
Harris
It seems to me there is a serious problem within our ranks and
the question is just how serious is the problem and is it
fixable? Has The Salvation Army in Australia lost its way or
is it just floundering and in an age of unrest?
Has it become adoptive and adaptive rather than
transformative? To be in the midst of such a quandary is
disconcerting particularly when one is in their senior years.
The last eighteen months has meant
watching Sunday TSA meetings online either at our home Corps
or elsewhere in the world. While watching some of these
meetings I have noticed just how they have changed and how
many are no longer recognisably Salvation Army. This can be
seen in the decline in what would rightly be called TSA
symbols and rituals.
It seems many are unaware that symbols
and rituals have meaning and have an important place in what
it means to be Christian and TSA. The decline in symbol and
ritual is seen in the increasing lack of importance in many of
today’s Corps via an increasingly casualized uniform, the
Crest being replaced by the Red Shield, all in the push to be
relevant to a secular culture. In our worship in many places
the Song Book is no longer used, which means we symbolically
no longer sing what we believe as Salvationists; instead, we
sing somebody else’s beliefs and theology. Without its symbols
there is a paucity of what it means to be The Salvation Army
and without its symbols and rituals there is no longer a The
Salvation Army community.
Maintaining a clear understanding of
symbols and rituals is critical to teaching sound faith as
well as what it means to belong to TSA. Why, you might well
ask? It is because symbols integrated together as rituals
allow learning to occur within a framework that has already
been accepted, and to build upon symbolic and ritualistic
knowledge that has already been assimilated into our belief
system. Changing symbols not only changes who we are, it also
changes the message, which means we need to seriously consider
what is being done and why we want to do away with our symbols
and rituals and thereby disrupt who the Army is before
substituting them for something foreign that will harm the
long-term wellbeing of The Salvation Army as a community of
God’s people.
It is true to say that the thing we
fear most as an organisation is to be seen to be old fashioned
and therefore irrelevant to our secular culture. It seems that
within the current Army there are those who are willing to
continue down the road of adaptivity to Post-modernity in
order to appear ‘relevant’ in the hope that we and our message
will appear acceptable to our Post-Christian culture.
For the most part leaders who have done
away with Christian and in our case The Salvation Army symbols
and rituals have done and continue to do so under the guise of
making things ‘relevant’. The term however is all too often
used as cover for doing things that subvert not only the
integrity of the church, but the Gospel as well. The
downgrading and eventual loss of our symbols and rituals may
sound like a good idea at the time but trying to be relevant
to a secular culture does far more harm than good.
Does casual uniform make the Gospel
more relevant? What makes worship relevant? In our rush to be
relevant, especially in the area of social justice and
inclusivity, are we allowing the issues of the day to
transform the Gospel rather than allowing the Gospel to
transform the issues of the day?
‘Relevancy’, if we must use the word,
has to do with the ability to bring one’s past into the
present with meaning for the future. In order to do this, we
cannot simply throw out the past, nor ignore what our
conscious mind has deposited in our inner spirit from earlier
days. In order to do this, we need a bridge that enables us to
bring the past into the present, and on into the future. Our
symbols and rituals are the means of building that bridge.
Christian as well as The Salvation Army
symbols have, believe it or not, stood the test of time, even
through the darkest days of Christianity, which I would say
makes them more relevant than ever.
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