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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