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Tradition and Innovation
by Commissioner Wesley Harris

The Salvation Army began with a happy mixture of tradition and innovation. There was an acceptance of traditions of Christian faith and conduct going back to the early Church. There were also some traditions from the particular church background which appealed to the Booths such as the practice of inviting people to kneel at the mourners’ bench or penitents’ form as in Methodist camp meetings. But with the traditions there were innovations, not the least being a willingness to take on quasi-military structures in order to further the essential mission.

 

American writer George Weigel contends that ‘tradition which in its Latin root (traditio) means handing on begins not with human invention but inside the very life of God, the Holy Trinity...Tradition and innovation (are) the table and the dynamic in the Church’.

 

Tradition is the offspring of history and while in earlier times Salvationists were sometimes too busy making history to record it adequately we are now more aware of the value of our historical heritage. General Frederick Coutts wrote, History is to a community what memory is to an individual. Without a memory I would be an ‘unperson’ unable to say whence I came or whither I was bound. History enables a community - whether an entire nation or a section of a nation - to place itself in relation to its own past, its present opportunities and the future prospects.

 

Devoid of a sense of history the Army could suffer from a kind of corporate Alzheimer’s disease and be unsure about its identity, confused about its role and largely ineffective. Traditions are important for our continuing life and self- awareness; without them we will hardly know what we are or where we are going. If tradition can be a dead hand it can also be a guiding hand. (In a corps or headquarters situation we may sometimes be impatient with those who say, “We have always done it this way” but it may be even worse when changes in personnel have been so frequent that there is little corporate memory and no-one to point to precedents which should be noted!) Wisdom was not born with our generation and all who went before us were certainly not fools. (If we get as many runs on the board as some of them did we may have reason to be grateful!)

 

Much that obtained in the past will obtain in the present. Not all old methods are broken tools to be cast aside. Some things are timely because they are timeless and to regard anything traditional as necessarily useless would be plainly silly. Yet, while appreciating the value of tradition, we should also recognise the danger of being petrified in the patterns of the past. To quote George Weigel again, “Tradtion, the living faith of the dead, must always be distinguished from traditionalism, the dead faith of the living”.

James Russell Lowell wrote,

 

New occasions teach new duties Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, Who would keep abreast of truth.

 

Paradoxically, the Army tradition is to be innovative. To be really ‘Army’ is to dare to be different sometimes. I remember when I was a young officer at a small south London corps a procession with fiery torches was organised through the darkened streets as a prelude to an evangelical campaign. An urchin boy said to me, “The thing I like about the Army is that you never know what is going to happen next!”

 

Half a century later that could still be said in many places where there is a willingness to do anything in order to win people for Christ. In New Zealand recently I saw a corps hall dubbed ‘the Shed’ which had on its outside wall a huge, well-painted mural depicting the various activities of the corps - sport, counselling, children’s meetings and so on. The idea was to make the place appear jolly and ‘user friendly’ and on enquiry I found that new people were being attracted and were getting saved which was what mattered.

 

Of course, what may be appropriate in one situation may not be advisable in another, but an openness to new approaches is needed everywhere. If we don’t innovate we are likely to enervate. William Booth is credited with the saying, “There should be continuity of principle but adaptation of method”. It is certainly a good maxim to bear in mind.

 

As an Army we began with a happy blend of the traditional and the innovative. Our forebears used the great hymns of the Church and they adapted some of the pop songs of the day. They were too smart to do otherwise. Breadth of expression may still be needed today. Take the sometimes contentious issue of the Army song book versus the use of projected ’Scripture choruses’. Christian toleration might indicate a judicious blend of the ancient and modern. But I have known cases where there has been a threatened walk-out by older comrades if any chorus not in the song book was used and other places where people have been denied any of the Army songs which have been their means of grace through the years.

 

There must be more than one contemporary application of the saying of Jesus, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13.52).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

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