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Chosen to be a Soldier
from JAC Issue #22
by
John Cleary
Chosen to be a
Soldier,
Chosen
by God.
Chosen to be a
Soldier,
Washed in His
Blood.
Chosen to be a
Soldier,
Lost ones to save.
Chosen to be a
Soldier
In the Army
brave.
How long is it
since any of you have sung that chorus in a meeting. When you
sang it, was it as part of a ‘good old Army’ nostalgia trip,
or as a central expression of identity.
‘Then who
wouldn’t be a soldier,
An Army
soldier, a valiant soldier,
Every soldier
goes to war,
That’s what
we’ve enlisted for,
And we don’t
want any dummies in the Army’
How about the
confidence, almost arrogance of that lyric? Yet it is utterly
innocent and free of guile. Here is a vision of belief and
confidence. This is a song written and sung by a winning
team... A team sure in its vision certain of its goals and
convinced in its world redeeming relevance.
Who would
write such a song today without a whiff of irony and
scepticism?
‘Of this Great
Church
of the Living God, we claim and have ever claimed, that we of
The Salvation Army are an integral part and element – a living
fruit bearing branch in the True Vine’. (Bramwell Booth)
This statement
of Bramwell Booth is quoted at the head of Chapter Ten ‘The
People of God’ in Salvation Story Study Guide (SSSG). It
contains the major dilemma facing the Salvation Army today.
Who and what are we - a Church or a Movement? Part of the
Universal body of Christ, yes, but what kind of part? - A
fully-fledged denomination, or part denomination, part para-church
agency? Depending on the answers to these questions, another
set of questions arises. What is the nature of membership in
the Salvation Army, and what does it mean to be a Soldier?
These questions and others were among those addressed in The
International Spiritual Life Commission Report, reproduced in
SSSG.
In recognition of the unresolved nature of these questions
SSSG states, “There are differing understandings of what the
Army is, not only outside our ranks, but sometimes within
them. We need clarity about our identity and our mission
without which we cannot be effective.”
The Spiritual
Life Commission, recognising change was happening by default
across the organisation, recommended that means be explored
for recognising believers, who do not choose to be soldiers,
as members of the Body of Christ in the Salvation Army. It is
in recommendation nine, and can be found in Salvation Story
Study Guide.
Things are
changing rapidly; soldiership no longer has the resonance it
once had. Some would be happy to see the concept drift away
like many other distinctives of The Salvation Army, as a
symbol of an age that has past and a time that was different.
Yet I wish to suggest that soldiership is much more than a
useful device whose time has past, and that in fact how we
deal with the concept of soldiership will be critical to the
future of this part of the Church we call The Salvation Army.
I wish to further suggest that if there were not such a
concept, someone, somewhere in the church would be busy
developing something remarkably like it.
The Dilemma. Why is Soldiership an issue?
First there are Cultural reasons.
The external
culture has changed. When the Salvation Army was created the
military was high fashion, and life was lived on the streets.
Life was lived in communities, not in nuclear families. People
loved to belong. This was the highpoint of the great lodges,
such as the Masons, the Oddfellows, the Ancient order of
Buffaloes, The Rechabites and many more. For young people,
organisations like the Scouts and Guides were being
established. You were defined in society by your participation
in all those sorts of groups that gave you access to networks
of support and influence, because you needed them to survive.
Such was the
climate that organisations could put strong fences around
membership. People had to meet certain criteria before they
could be admitted. And people were very much prepared to sign
up and endure what today are seen as the most eccentric of
rituals to obtain the goods which that society promised.
Hence the paraphernalia of freemasonry and all the other
lodges.
People used to
believe in order to belong. They were so keen to belong they
were prepared to jump through the most demanding and even
eccentric criteria for membership.
How times have
changed.
The Military, except in certain circumstances, is not the
aspirational it once was. Two world wars and the threat of
nuclear destruction have seen to that. Today life at its most
successful is represented by privatised wealth, held behind
the closed doors of the nuclear family, fed on a personalised
multi-media diet of vicarious risk delivered by a tube into
your living room. A diet whose richness is determined purely
by your capacity to pay. Life in community is seen as an
extra, or even a burden, in the pursuit of private, personal
fulfilment.
The end of
life is no longer the good of the group or community, in which
your good is also guaranteed. It is now the good of the
individual to which the community must be subservient. If the
organisation does not meet your personal needs you leave and
find another or maybe none. You are conditioned by the media
to ‘try before you buy’. We will no longer accept the merits
of an organisation on face value. Today people wish to belong
first, to decide whether the organisation meets their personal
needs, and then to commit themselves. But that commitment is
always conditional on the organisation’s capacity to deliver
the goods. People are consumers; organizations like the
church are commodities. Now people demand to belong in order
that they might believe.
In summary, People used to believe in order to
belong. Now they belong in order to believe.
This
sociological shift adds greatly to the burden of organisations
like The Salvation Army who exercise strong entry control
through criteria such as soldiership, before the privileges of
full membership can be offered.
To this
general cultural burden is added an additional ‘post-modern’
sensibility - distrust of institutions. Institutional
religion is on the nose. Irrespective of the rights and
wrongs, the events of recent months surrounding the scandal of
the clergy and child sexual abuse, serve simply to demonstrate
how deep that institutional distrust is.
It is
interesting to note that historically in Australia, The
Salvation Army has been singularly exempt from that contempt.
The Salvation Army seems to have escaped the odium associated
with institutional organised faith. I think this is because
we have been seen to be first identified with the suffering,
and not concerned with theological correctness and point
scoring. The public function of the uniform has here served
us well. This faith of the public however cannot be taken for
granted.
Organisations,
like churches, are now just commodities in the rich
supermarket of communities. The Salvation Army is one that
stands out. However, its distinctive brand, whilst
recognisable and as loved as Vegemite, is one which very few
people have a taste for.
These are some
of the broad cultural issues confronting the issue of
membership in The Salvation Army.
Internal Issues
I wish to
suggest however that, partly as a result of this pressure, and
the general changes resulting in the way we think about The
Salvation Army as part of the Church Universal, a number of
issues are being exposed which centre on this question of
membership and are of central significance to the future of
the movement.
I am not the
first to raise these questions. This is but one contribution
to a continuing debate. Nevertheless, a debate must be held
and resolved quickly because the future of the Army as a
distinct part of the body of Christ is at stake.
The pressure
is beginning to tell already. As local corps, in an attempt
to make themselves relevant to their local community, have
begun to de-emphaise the movement’s distinctives, so they are
exposing the issue. If a corps begins to call itself a
community church, why should it be setting radically more
difficult hurdles to membership than any other local community
church? Soldiership and uniform become direct impediments to
the evangelical enterprise of making the congregation as
familiar and comfortable as possible to the local community.
If, the argument goes, we can make ourselves more attractive
by doing away with our branding as a corps and call ourselves
a church, why don’t we do away with the other brand
distinctives such as soldiership and uniform. Moreover, in
this context who can argue but that they are right?
In the past
couple of years several corps officers have approached me
concerned about how to deal with aspects the issue. It is
usually expressed in terms of alcohol and Adherency. First is
the number of young people growing up in the Salvation Army
who wish to be identified as Christians yet do not wish to
undertake the disciplines of Soldiership and uniform wearing,
because they wish to drink alcohol, and do not see a
scriptural problem with it. Then there are those, who wish to
regard the Salvation Army as their Christian home in the full
sense, and yet they are denied membership, because membership
is tied to soldiership, and as people who in the normal course
of life drink alcohol or smoke, they are barred from its
benefits. Adherency does not meet their needs, for though it
satisfies the organisation’s desires to count heads in a
meaningful way, it goes nowhere to satisfying their desire to
be acknowledged as fully participating members of the
community of faith called the Salvation Army.
Colonel Earl Robinson highlighted the dilemma in the Officer
Magazine of Feb 2002. Let me quote:
“A friend of
mine decided to change her place of worship from The Salvation
Army to a local Baptist church when she married a person of
that denomination. She chose, however, to retain her name on
the soldiers’ roll of her last corps rather then change church
membership. That did not make any difference to the areas of
ministry into which she was invited in the new church – as a
member of the choir, the worship team, and in taking up other
areas of leadership. She was apparently fully recognised as a
member of the Body of Christ in that congregation and able to
be involved fully at her new place of worship, even though she
did not become baptised by water or sign any documents about
new allegiance.
That is
somewhat different from what has normally occurred in The
Salvation Army…”!
Indeed, you
might say he is putting it modestly. If the husband had come
over from the Baptists he would have had to jump through a
number of hoops in order to participate. He would have had to
satisfy not just the ordinary criteria of membership in the
Body of Christ called the Church. He would have had to have
satisfied the criteria of ‘super-Christian’ and meet the base
line standards of soldiership such as total abstinence to
enjoy the privileges of Salvationist membership.
The problem has arisen in part because The Salvation Army has
begun to acknowledge ‘de Jure’ what has been for the best part
of a century the practice ‘de facto’ that we are no longer a
para-church movement with specific aims and objectives to be
achieved within the Body of Christ, but are now acknowledging
we are a denomination with the responsibility of meeting the
holistic needs of a worshipping community. Needs and
aspirations that stretch well beyond the specific mission
imperatives of a para-church movement.
As St. Paul
declares, within the body of Christ there people with all
sorts of gifts, evangelists, prophets, teachers, - not all
are cut out to be soldiers. Specialist criteria of membership
so appropriate to the aims of a para-church movement are
neither practically nor theologically acceptable for a
denomination, which by definition must be a reflection of the
whole body.
Once we own we
are a discrete denomination, the issue of membership becomes
critical. If this membership issue is not resolved we could
not only find ourselves short on members, we could find
ourselves heading into the dangerous waters of exclusivism and
sectarianism and ultimately heresy within the wider church.
This is in
part the reason why I suggest William and Bramwell never
wished to see us as a distinct denomination and also why
Salvationist leadership, even up until the present, are rather
shy on the issue.
In his book
‘Who are These Salvationists’ Shaw Clifton spends some time
with the question. He points out that it has been very hard
to pin down the movement on the issue. He says the
acknowledgement is as late as 1998 publication of Salvation
Story and even here it has to be inferred. However if you
check ‘Chosen to Be a Soldier’ first published in 1977 says
‘For practical purposes the Salvation Army has increasingly
come to be the church of its own people and of large sections
of the people’
Historical Background
The technical
word for this discussion in church terms is Ecclesiology. A
very useful term for this debate in the context of The
Salvation Army. According to the Salvation Story Study Guide,
“The term comes from the Greek word ekklesia (the church) and
logos (word, mind, or doctrine). The word ekklesia is
comprised of two other Greek words: ek (out of) and kaleo (I
call). The word was used in the pre-Christian period to
indicate the summons of an army for battle.”
Why have we
got ourselves into a pickle? We have come to see membership
and soldiership as the same thing. Was this always the case
and should it remain so? Why do we see membership and
soldiership as the same thing?
The truth is
the issue of membership of the Body of Christ was never
properly sorted out. It is part of that group of issues like
the sacraments, which we have held in suspension.
Historically it was never sorted out by that other great para-church
organisation from which the Army sprang, Methodism. John
Wesley established the movement called Methodists as a para-church
organisation within the Anglican Church.
According to
David Bebbington in ‘Evangelicalism in Modern Britain’ the
whole issue of ecclesiology was confused.
‘The
relegation of principle relative to pragmatism was evident in
church order. Methodism, as some of its nineteenth century
defenders delighted to insist, was totally flexible on this
subject. Wesley and his adjutants initially had ‘no plan at
all’… Above all, Methodists did not have to be Christians.
Admission as full class members was open to all who sought the
forgiveness of sins and not just to those already converted.
…There was no correspondence between joining the Methodist
organisation and entering the true church. The organisation
was merely an environment suitable to gaining converts.’
So, should we
just let the whole thing go? Simply establish criteria for
membership and let soldiership quietly slip into history.
Another solution could be to remove from soldiership its
distinctive demands and simply allow soldiership the same
criteria as membership. This amounts to the same thing,
consigning the concept of soldiership to the shrine of memory.
Priesthood of All Believers
My answer to
this rhetorical question is no, no, a thousand times no, a
thousand bands and a thousand drums, no! Conceptually,
Soldiership is brilliant. It is a practical recognition of the
priesthood of all believers delivered with style and real
substance. It came out of a Wesleyan theology that had
confidence in the dynamic and continuing love of the creator
for the whole of creation. It enabled an ecclesiology, which
was flexible and responsive to the moment. In fact it was an
ecclesiology which was in the true sense radical, going back
to the root of the word ecclesia.
The idea of
uniforms was not unique to Booth and the movement as is
pointed out by Ken Inglis in his book ‘The Churches and the
Working Classes in Victorian England’:
‘Booth was by no means the first crusader in Victorian England
to dress his followers in a uniform and organize them as an
army. The ‘Shakespearean Association of Leicester Chartists’
under Thomas Cooper, the ‘Hallelujah Bands’ from which Booth
gained some recruits, and the temperance organisation known as
the ‘Blue Ribbon Army’, all preceded the Salvation Army, and
may each have helped inspire it’.
Nor was the
idea of an activist corps acting as the spearhead of vanguard
of widespread social change unique. It was an idea explored
and developed by social thinkers as diverse as Marx and Lenin,
in the concept of the ‘Vanguard of the Proletariat’, and
Hitler in the militarisation of the whole of society.
What William
Booth recognised instinctively rather than intellectually was
the power of such an idea wedded to the deep theological power
of the priesthood of all believers. And what power it
unleashed. Here was a concept that took you from the gin
palace via the mercy seat to a new life, with steps for
guidance at every stage along the way. Within days you were
converted from a life of pointlessness and powerlessness to
involvement and activism in a world-redeeming mission, in
which you had an identifiable place. The details today seem
excessive and extravagant. Those early soldiership manuals
which to us in Corps Cadets in the early 1960’s appeared so
quaint, now stand in the light of history as brilliant
examples of practical guides to rebuilding lives of the sort
that the ‘Aerobics for Jesus’ generation is only just
beginning to comprehend. This is work of intuitive genius. It
has power. Such power and commitment is desperately needed in
today’s church for today’s’ world.
How do we
recover the genius?
First we need
to grasp fully the implications of what Earl Robinson is
suggesting. The implication of what Earl Robinson is saying
is that if you wish to express your commitment to the body of
Christ through The Salvation Army, then you should be able to
be a member on the same basis that you can be a member of any
other part of the body of Christ called the Church Universal.
The Spiritual Life Commission did not grasp this nettle;
perhaps because they are afraid of what this will do to the
concept of soldiership, ‘no-one will become soldiers any
more!!’ Well perhaps they won’t become soldiers because you
are no longer teaching what soldiership is. Perhaps the
approach that needs to be taken is – that soldiership is a
sub-category of membership, it is a special calling within
membership.
This helps us
in a couple of ways. It restores or regularises our position
with regards the rest of the church universal over the nature
of membership in the Church. Repent, believe, be born again.
Once you do that you are in, you are a member, like any other
section of the body of Christ of which we are but a part.
To those
people who fear that in going down this path we will lose the
concept of soldiership, I suggest if we stick to the concept
of soldiership as membership, soldiership is dead anyway, in
all but name, completely dead.
Introducing a
concept of membership as distinct from soldiership regularises
our position with the wider church and opens the possibility
of a revival of soldiership within the concept of membership.
In church
order terms, Salvation Army structures are very similar to the
Episcopal structures of the major denominations such as the
Catholic and Anglican, and some Methodists. The structure
works through several orders of ministry: Bishops, Priests,
Deacons, and People. This is directly comparable to the
Salvation Army structure where functionally you could compare
Bishops with D.C.s and above, and Priests with Officers.
This seemed to
be the rationale carried into effect when ordination was
introduced as a term used for officer commissioning in the
late 1970’s. What was at that time left unaddressed was the
issue of lay orders of ministry. Traditional Episcopal
structures recognise an order between full priesting and lay
membership, and that is the order of Deacon. The deacon is a
lay person who has taken certain vows and makes certain
commitments in time and resources to the church short of full
priesting. The parallels with soldiership are not hard to
draw.
The soldiers
of The Salvation Army are a fighting diaconate. A diaconate
far larger and more successfully deployed over the best part
of a century than any comparable model within the protestant
tradition. In the Catholic Church it fits comfortably with
such lay orders as the Christian Brothers. The Anglican
Church recognised this over 100 years ago, when in an act of
direct imitation they established ‘The Church Army’ as a
distinct order within Anglicanism.
We have to
find a way of reviving soldiership.
Perhaps one
way towards this is to formally recognise what de-facto has
been the case for almost a century. We are a distinct
denomination and need to accommodate the needs of a far wider
group of communicant members than a concept like Soldiership
does. Soldiership will be killed if it continues to be tied
to membership. Why? Because you will be forced to hold your
reasonable demands on soldiers to that of the lowest common
denominator of your members. Similarly membership will
continue to decline if it is pegged as soldiership because
less people will see soldiership as necessary to the living of
an ordinary Christian life. Both of these propositions are
unarguable, they are happening before our eyes and will
continue to do so unless the position is changed.
Would it not
be great if a C.O. could know of her soldiers at the start of
the year, that she had a committed portion of their time given
in stewardship to the Army? That the soldiers had said from
the beginning of the year ‘my spiritual work and worship will
be in and through the Salvation Army and to that end I will
commit to the Army X hours a week. That’s giving soldiership
meaning, that’s giving the corps officer a real force, that’s
giving a movement back the ability to wage war.
Uniform
Clearing up
the issue of membership also helps with another issue,
uniform.
Some are
saying that the uniform is a sacrament. However, I want to
say that the Salvation Army is a non-sacramental organization
for very good reasons that have to do with the human tendency
to wish to make objects sacred. We sacralize symbols. We
turn things into Gods, or images of Gods and hence render them
untouchable. This is why the early Army declared itself
non-sacramental. In sacramentalizing things, we allow their
symbolic value to gain primacy over their practical utility.
To sacramentalize the uniform is to fix the movement in
aspic. It will become impossible to change or modify or
relate to the real world because it is meant to represent the
unchanging values of the eternal world. This is nonsense.
The uniform
was created for very practical reasons. It was:
-
Non-discriminatory. Class distinctions
disappear. Rich and poor look the same.
-
Cheap
-
Practical
-
Durable
-
Distinctive
-
Attractive.
How many of
those would you tick with regard to Salvation Army uniform
today? Cheap? No. Practical? No. Durable? Yes, at a
price and if only worn once or twice a week. Distinctive?
Absolutely. Attractive, well perhaps to some, but certainly
not to the bulk of the public who generally regard Army
uniforms as quaint relics of a different age. This list may
not score very high on the early Army quotient for uniform.
Is there
anything wrong with uniforms per se?
What does
every kid wear every day. – Logo’s, almost everything they
wear is branded from the Nike shoes, the tee shirt, the
windcheater, to the Levi jeans. Kids love uniforms.
The Salvation
Army’s Australian Employment Agency, Eplus, wear contemporary
office uniforms with a Red Shield logo. The staff is pleased
to wear them. The badge is not the issue. It is the style
and type of uniform that is the issue. The question is what
sort of uniform, and for what purpose? Even such conservative
public institutions as the Military and the Police up-date
their uniforms more often than The Salvation Army.
Our uniforms
are our most immediate symbol of social engagement. That is
what the public see when they think Salvation Army. Our
uniforms need to be tied back to their foundational relevance
to the world.
If you were
serious about uniform you could go to the Commissioner and
say, ‘Commissioner we think uniform is important for the Army
and we love it. We want to ensure that it continues to be
worn by the maximum number of soldiers and is identified on
the maximum number of occasions. We wish to establish a
standing committee on uniform.’ The brief would be to review
the uniform every five years according to a set of criteria
similar to those outlined above and come up with appropriate
changes.
If this is
considered too adventurous the Army could leave the ‘dress
blues’ untouched for IHQ approved changes, and institute a
practical ‘undress’ uniform that would do for the real work
and witness of the movement.
Uniforms must
once again become evidence of engagement not symbols of
separateness.
Again, as with
soldiership, these changes are happening now and will
accelerate by default. The leadership of the movement can
either get in front of the game and guide it, or simply let it
run and pick up the bits later. To do the latter would be a
sign of utter corporate failure.
The Future
People need to
be attracted back into communities of belief. However, they
will not enter communities with strong barriers to entry. The
commercial experience of the past half-century has taught them
that their ultimate allegiance is not to the group but to the
self. The most appealing religious fashion of the moment is
not found in community but in self-realisation. Its most
extreme Christian expression is found in the so-called
‘prosperity gospel’.
Churches built
around community values are going to have to struggle
profoundly with this dilemma. For The Salvation Army with its
super-Christian criteria for membership and not particularly
attractive compulsory dress code, further states that to enjoy
the full benefits of belonging you have to jump through a
series of unappealing hoops which other churches do not put in
the path.
We will have
to respond by opening many of our traditional units. This
will inject a healthy dose of realism into our evangelical
enterprise. Bands and Songster brigades for example, have
long since ceased to be the front line of our evangelical
enterprise and have become tools of pastoral ministry.
Opening them to wider participation will enhance that role and
allow reorientation towards more effective evangelical
weapons.
We are going
to have to give people good reason to take on the disciplines
of soldiership. That discussion goes to a much wider agenda
than can be encompassed here. But just to touch on it by way
of ending this part of the discussion. The issues, which
caused Catherine and William Booth to shape The Salvation Army
out of the Christian Mission, have not changed.
The old parish
structures that Booth regarded as insufficient to meet the
evils of his time, are even less relevant today. The great
issues of Godlessness, and the saturation of the cities in
squalor have not diminished, they have now moved from the east
end of London onto a world stage.
The Wesleyan
spirit of evangelical revival was indissolubly linked to a
passion for social reform. The holy life was one lived in and
for the world, as Wesley once said, ‘There is no holiness but
social holiness’. It was this connection that gave the early
Army its energy and drive. It also produced its joy and
confidence. The devil’s kingdom could be brought down,
literally. The ‘Forts of Darkness’ could be identified in
every town and suburb. They were not just the brothels and
gin palaces, but the structures and institutions that drove
people to the gin palaces. As Salvationists worked for the
eternal salvation of their neighbours, they also fought beside
them for the reform of the sweatshops, prisons and streets in
which they lived and worked.
Today on the
world stage all those issues confront us. And all are
overshadowed by the daunting prospect of Global Environmental
destruction. Issues of Child Prostitution, Industrial
Exploitation, lack of access to Law for ordinary folk,
discrimination, industrial disease, poverty, hunger. All are
written on a global scale and all can be traced back to the
same issue of material greed, which underpinned the Darkest
England Scheme. Similarly they can all be overcome by the
same world-redeeming change of heart that is central to the
mission of the Salvation Army. But what is needed is an Army.
A passionate priesthood of all believers. A fighting
diaconate flowing out of the membership.
What’s the use
of being a soldier if you are not fighting a battle? The
sexual exploitation of children was a historic seminal issue
for the early Salvation Army. In February 2002, Child
Exploitation was on the cover of Time Magazine. It is a major
issue of international concern. Yet, on this issue today
Salvation Army is nowhere to be seen.
Yet, The
Salvation Army has the structures and machinery to deal with
such issues better than any other church including the
Catholic Church. We can marshal forces worldwide. In our
structure the General tomorrow, could raise this as a major
issue, have territories determine it as a priority, and get
Divisional commanders to co-ordinate through their officers to
get soldiers involved in local branches of the Campaign to End
Child prostitution. If there are no local branches soldiers
in the local corps can help establish one. This is core
Salvationist methodology applied to a core Salvationist
issue.
No other
church could do it. They would have to spend months working
through local committees diocesan committees, state
committees, national policy bodies, and finally national
assemblies, to get such a policy response up and running. And
then someone at a local area could decide they don’t like the
cultural or political leanings or personal style of someone
running a group in their area and say, ‘we’re not going to
have anything to do with them.’
The whole
rationale of the Army’s structure is designed so that it may
respond quickly to spiritual and physical crises around the
globe. The creation of that capacity was the chief motivation
for the transformation of a Mission into an Army. Its effect
was to unleash such power through the priesthood of all
believers as to create the shock troops of a world-redeeming
crusade. The battle’s just begun.
I opened with
an old chorus let me end with one. The tune may be dated but
the lyrics are as profoundly relevant as on the day they were
written.
The World is
needing us, Christ is leading us
Comrades let
us be true.
His love
constraining us, prayer sustaining us,
Faith will
carry us through.
His service
calling us none appalling us,
Deeds of
Valour we’ll do.
For souls are
needing us, Christ is leading us
Comrades we
will be true
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