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Four Anchors from the Stern
by Harold Hill

This article first appeared in the Practical Theologian, 2007

The Salvation Army as “a Church”: a Dissuasive 

You will recall that when the ship in which Paul was sailing had come through a great storm, the sailors sounded a rising sea floor. To save the ship from drifting onto rocks in the darkness, they threw out four anchors from the stern and waited for the morning.[1]

I think the Salvation Army’s drift to “denominationalism” also runs onto a shoaling shore in a fog of confusing definitions and I would like to throw out four anchors from the stern. While the organisation’s mission statement has until recently described it as “an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church”, there is now a tendency for it to be described as “a world wide evangelical Christian church”. Certainly, we are part of the Church, members of the body of Christ. That is altogether different from being a church.

My four anchors are the Salvation Army’s own history, the doctrine and history of the Church, the sociology of the Church and, finally, Scripture.

My first anchor: the Salvation Army’s own history.

We are familiar with the way in which the Army began as what today would be called a para-church agency, assisted by people from diverse church communities. In the manner of such bodies it eventually became an independent entity.

The change probably came about as early as 1867; Sandall calls that year “the turning point”.[2] In that year the East London Christian Mission was named, acquired a headquarters, hired a theatre for Sunday meetings and increased its number of “preaching stations” to six, began to hire workers (nine by the end of the year), established a system for processing converts, printed its first documents (combined articles of faith and bond of agreement), began giving social relief to the poor and issued its first financial statement. It was also the year in which many of the former supporters left and went back to their churches, replaced by new converts and other enthusiasts like James Dowdle, and the year in which members of the mission are first reported as taking the sacrament together. It was becoming an independent community of faith. We might call that “a Church”.

But they did not call it “a church”. They called it a “Mission”, and later on an “Army”. They also liked to call it a “Movement”; that seems a little free-flowing for anything so tightly organised though there was at first an element of spontaneity about it. In Maud Booth’s words,

“There are sects and denominations enough. This is an Army, a band of aggressive men and women, whose work of saving and reclaiming the world must be done on entirely new lines…”[3]

And for a century, they stoutly resisted any notion that they might be “a church” although they were happy to be counted a part of the church. At the same time the Army increasingly resembled a conventional church denomination, and eventually, as we entered the 21^st century, it finally, unambiguously, described itself as “a church”.[4] Colonel Earl Robinson plotted the course of this process in his paper for the Johannesburg Theological Symposium in 2006 through a series of quotes.[5] Major David Noakes has helpfully summarised these as follows in his paper for the 2007 Australia and New Zealand Tri-Territorial Theological Forum:

• William and Catherine Booth:  Not a church, an army.

• Bramwell Booth: Part of the Church.

• Albert Orsborn: Not a church but a permanent mission to the unconverted.

• Frederick Coutts: Not a church, but implies it.

• Clarence Wiseman: Pointed to the need for an ecclesiology, doctrine of the Church.

• 1969 Handbook of Doctrine: Makes direct reference to the term “ecclesia”.

• Philip Needham: The Salvation Army is a true denomination and integral part of the church.

• Salvation Story (1998): Chapter 10: “People of God – the Doctrine of the Church”.

• John Larsson (2001): A watershed had been reached in transition from a movement to a church.

• Shaw Clifton: Emphatically states the Army is a church rather than merely a part  
  of the universal Christian Church.

All of this illustrates that we have not stood aloof from that organising principle which can be demonstrated from every part of the church and in every age: that doctrine follows praxis. We like to assume otherwise; that we do what we do because it is principled, or theologically sound, or God’s will. Alas, whatever we do, we eventually come to sanctify it with the belief and claim that this is what God intended, even though we might originally have adopted it for quite pragmatic, or even questionable, purposes. It is called “tradition”, or “the guiding hand of the Lord”. It becomes inscribed on tablets of stone. It sets like concrete.

Of course, when other people do that, and claim for example that Jesus ordained the three-fold orders of bishops, priests and deacons, or that the Pope is infallible, well of course, that is different. From their vantage point, when we do it with the sacraments for example, well that is different too.

Now who am I to try to turn back the clock? Organisations come fitted with a ratchet clause; they don’t back up. Some people are mildly scathing about those who want the Army to revert to being a Christian Mission. Well I am not urging that, but through the ages, every movement for reform and innovation has sought validation from the original Founding Vision, so here goes.

The reasons those founders resisted being a church – are they valid today? Has the wheel turned and their time come again? Here were some of their arguments:

• William Booth said, “We are not and will not be made a Church. There are plenty for anyone who wishes to join them, to vote and to rest.”[6] Thus he dismissed churches as characterised by democracy and a passive laity, neither of which he intended would have a place in his Army.

• Booth also spoke of not wanting strife with the churches or to be in competition with them. When interviewed by Sir Henry Lunn in 1895 on the Salvation Army position on the sacraments, Booth claimed, perhaps a little disingenuously, that “we came into this position originally by determining not to be a church. We did not wish to undertake the administration of the sacraments and thereby bring ourselves into collision with existing churches.”[7]

• In Heathen England, George Scott Railton inveighed against sectarianism as ingrown and insufficiently evangelistic:

Shall we ever sink into a sectarian spirit of selfish care about our own, and cease to spend all our strength for the good of others?” Answering the hypothetical objection, “But this is making a new denomination – a new sect,” he responded, “Well, and supposing that it is. Is there any harm in doing so? Is there not a need for just such a ‘sect’ in many cities?… But we deny that we are in any proper sense a sect… We are a corps of volunteers for Christ, organised as perfectly as we have been able to accomplish, seeking no Church status, avoiding as we would the plague every denominational rut, in order perpetually to reach more and more of those who lie outside every Church boundary.[8]

• Catherine Booth also argued that the clericalised attitudes prevalent in churches meant that the unsaved were left unsaved:

“Yes, thank God, we are teaching the Churches that others

besides clergymen, ministers, deacons and elders can be used for the salvation of men. The multitudes have too long been left to these. As a clergyman said to me the other day, ‘There are 35,000 souls in my parish, what can one do?’ What indeed! Set the carpenters and the washerwomen on to them, saved and filled with the Spirit!”[9]

The essential, underlying argument was that of “adaptation of measures” (Charles Finney and Catherine Booth), or “being all things to all men, if by any means we might win some” (Paul). The Army’s target group, those Railton said “lie outside every Church boundary”, the socially disenfranchised British underclass, did not relate to and never had related to the Church or churches, so the founders deliberately chose not to identify themselves in that way.

Now we can say, that was then and now is now – we have moved on. These early arguments against being a church tended to pillory inadequate kinds of church – and would be refuted and held to be no longer applicable by many evangelical churches today. (Just as some of our still-repeated arguments against the practice of the sacraments as “formalism” or dependence on external means might be denied by those practising sacramental worship today…) Despite the concern Booth expressed to Henry Lunn, we not been deterred by the thought that some churches might see us as competitors in the religious market either.

The fact is, however, that many Salvation Army corps have come to resemble the kind of churches the founders did not want their Army to be like, and many of us as Salvationists to resemble those church-members. This has come about as part of that same transition which has led us to think of ourselves as “a church.”

My argument from our history then is not just that our founders did not conceive of the Army as a church because it did not appeal to the people we sought to serve and evangelise. It is firstly, that our community today in our part of the Western world, the word “church” suffers from the same disadvantage today. And secondly, that our becoming more church-like has not necessarily meant becoming more effective in our mission; sometimes, the reverse. As the Archbishop of Sydney once said to a Divisional Commander, “Mr Salvation Army, you've got it all going for you, you lot. Why isn't it happening?” If it isn’t happening, might the founders’ arguments against “churchliness” still carry some weight with us?[10]

My second anchor: the doctrine and history of the Church.

Sometimes the claim is advanced that the Salvation Army exhibits “the marks of the church” – whether these are the traditional yardsticks of “one, holy, catholic and apostolic”, or more involved criteria such as the no fewer than twenty adduced by Earl Robinson in the paper to which I have already made reference – and that therefore we are a church. Certainly we should exhibit the marks of the church, if we really are a part of it. Praise God we do! But these are marks of the church, not of a church. We can’t go from “these are the marks of the church” to “we exhibit these marks” to “therefore we are a church”. The syllogism is flawed.  We need to define what we mean by “the Church”, “a church” and “a part of the Church”.

Salvation Story defines “the Church” as “the fellowship of all who are justified and sanctified by grace through faith in Christ.”  It goes on to define “a church” as “an evangelistic body of believers who worship, fellowship, minister and are in mission together”. It affirms that “Salvationists are members of the one body of Christ. We share common ground with the universal Church while manifesting our own characteristics… [we are] one particular expression of the Church.”[11] 

Salvation Story’s definitions of the church and a church are good as far as they go, but they do not address the question of the relationship between the two except by implication. They leave unexamined the fact that there is in practice another level of entity between the two – that of separate (even rival, competing, disagreeing) associations or families, of churches. We are on safe Biblical, theological and ecclesiological ground when we speak of a church as a local congregation and of the church as the whole church, but it is more difficult to justify the denominational entities except as the product of history. They are a concession to realpolitik, rather as Jesus spoke of Moses permitting divorce “because of your hardness of hard.”

Sometimes the view is expressed that the “real” church is spiritual, and quite independent of human, sociological structures, so it is unimportant how it is structured. The Army has never subscribed to that theory; the body of Christ is clearly incarnate and has structure and organisation. Further, the Army accepts that the Church’s unity is manifest in diversity (“with other Christian denominations and congregations”, as Salvation Story puts it) rather than in uniformity, and the Booths very early forbade criticism of any other body.[12] The difficulty lies in making this paradox work. Lack of uniformity would not be such a worry, but unhappily too often the diversity is displayed in disunity. We do not maintain the Lord’s Table, so unlike the Roman Catholics we cannot refuse any one access to it – but I do know senior officers stripped of their soldiership and rank after their honourable retirement for accepting ordination in “another denomination”. To adapt G.B. Shaw’s Bill Walker in Major Barbara, “Wot prawce unity nah?” Sometimes our actions speak louder than our words.[13]

Since fairly early times there have been rival factions of Christians: witness the great schisms which took place over discipline and doctrine, setting rival Donatist and Catholic, Arian and Catholic, Nestorian and Catholic, Celtic and Roman Catholic and eventually Orthodox and Roman churches squaring off against each other over the centuries. They could be compared with “denominations” in our modern sense in that they were rival associations of local churches, in some cases occupying overlapping territory and each claiming to be more correct than the other – the true church.

Most of what we now call denominations are a comparatively recent phenomenon; the heirs of the reformation. Although the Pope still claims that all save the Roman Catholics Church are “defective” in some respect,[14] these churches seldom anathematise one another today, being usually content with a slightly smug assumption of superiority. It is difficult to generalise about the origins of these groups – personal disagreements, social and national interests, theological controversies have all played a part.

In the now-ebbed high tide of ecumenism in the mid-twentieth century, it was held by many that the history of denominationalism in the church demonstrated the “scandal of disunity”, a betrayal of Jesus’ prayer “that they may all be one”. To my mind that is still is a dissuasive against it. Claiming to be a denomination consciously buys into that disunity. It attempts to sanctify that status quo. Our doctrine meekly follows our praxis.

We make no apology for not practising the sacraments. We happily swim against the tide of general church doctrine and practice in positing our own spiritualised interpretations of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, on the ground that they represent a valuable witness to the rest of the church. So why are we unable to hold the line on this, no more peculiar but equally important distinctive mark, that we are not a “denomination”? Probably because it is the line of least resistance. We resist conforming to something arguably derived from the Scripture but collude with something evolved in the era of the Enlightenment. In this we pass up the opportunity to maintain a witness to another great principle – the unity of the Church, a refusal to accept the divisions of the Church as final.

Obviously I am not claiming that our choice of vocabulary will heal the divisions amongst God’s people; only that this take on the doctrine of the church gives us an opportunity to bear witness to something important. Have we ever claimed more than that for our stand on the sacraments?

My third anchor: the sociology of the Church.

My third anchor is the pattern of decline and renewal, repeated at intervals throughout the history of the Church. Evangelicals might explain these in terms of the waxing and waning of evangelical faith and fervour. Sociologists examine more objectively the patterns of human behaviour, and can also help us to make some sense of the church’s past.

The life-cycles of organisations, including religious ones, follow a sigmoid curve from movement to institution as they grow. They tend to plateau and enter a period of decline, from which they may or may not recover. Commonly, with the onset of decline, some schismatic or renewal movement strikes out upon a new trajectory of growth before eventually repeating the pattern.

In the Catholic Church, various orders and groups from monasticism in the second century to Opus Dei in the twentieth, as well as heretical fringe movements, have been the loci of such renewal. In Protestantism, itself such a movement in origin, sectarian groups have flourished. Such reactions against the institutionalising of the original movements seek to recover their founder’s vision and validate their new departure by the past. The original theorist of sectarianism, Max Weber, referred to their adherents as “spiritual virtuosi”, the athletes of spirituality. They make the rest of us feel somewhat uncomfortable. Usually the sectarian offshoots themselves institutionalise in due course – in Protestantism such groups are usually known as denominations. Sometimes, usually in response to the new offshoot, a large segment of the church experiences a measure of rejuvenation, as in the sixteenth century Counter-Reformation or with the “third wave” of the charismatic movement of the twentieth century.

Bryan Wilson summarised the characteristics of the sect as:

A voluntary association; membership is by proof to sect authorities of some claim to personal merit – such as knowledge of doctrine, affirmation of a conversion experience, or recommendation of members in good standing; exclusiveness is emphasized, and expulsion exercised against those who contravene doctrinal, moral or organisational precepts; its self-conception is of an elect, a gathered remnant, possessing special enlightenment; personal reflection is the expected standard of aspiration…; it accepts, at least as an ideal, the priesthood of all believers; there is a high level of lay participation; there is opportunity for the member spontaneously to express his commitment; the sect is hostile or indifferent to the secular society and to the state. [15]

The Salvation Army would admit to many, though not all, of these descriptors and it can be readily seen that the movement fits this pattern in origin and development. Some sociologists have described it as a “conversionist sect”[16] on account of its over-riding sense of mission, or an “established sect” [17] because it seemed to retain many sectarian characteristics long after it might have been expected to discard them. (Real life is seldom as tidy as the sociologists prescribe.)

I find this sociological analysis helpful in trying to get a handle on what has happened and is happening to the Salvation Army. The Army, like most renewal movements, has gradually institutionalised and its leadership has become clericalised. At the same time it has retained some of its sectarian character and some of its soldiers have to some degree retained, or attempted to recover, its earlier revivalist ethos. The institution has of course moved inexorably in the direction of accommodation to the world and assimilation into the generic church, both in representing its officers as “clergy” and more recently by describing itself as a “church”. So now that the wheel has turned full circle, and we have our own renewal movements, our virtuosi, the neo-primitive Salvationists, the 614 movement, seeking to recover the original vision.

General John Larsson, addressing a 2001 International Theology and Ethics Symposium in Winnipeg, Canada, stated that “A key question for us is how we make the transition from a movement to a church in such a way that we do not lose the original dynamic that brought the Army into being. Or if we have lost something of that dynamic, how do we regain it?”[18] Unfortunately “loss of original dynamic” may describe an essential difference between “movement” and “church”. Werner Stark quotes Bramwell Booth writing to Railton, “I am convinced that we must stick to our concern, and that we must also keep up its so-called extravagances. They, and they only will save it from drooping down into a sectarian nothing.”[19] Stark comments, “What Booth wanted was precisely what Trotsky wanted: a permanent revolution.”[20] Finke and Stark comment, “When successful sects are transformed into churches, that is, when their tension with the surrounding culture is greatly reduced, they soon cease to grow and eventually decline.”[21]

In this “watershed in its self-understanding”, as General Larsson has called it,[22] the Salvation Army’s leaders have a choice as to what traits in its DNA they will promote as dominant and what aspects will be relegated to the status of recessive genes. The “neo-primitive” ideals call for an emphatic rejection of clerical status and a turning away from the trap of denominational identity. Those directions offer a chimerical security, whereas the Army’s true vocation is as an egalitarian, counter-cultural movement. This sociological analysis of the Army’s role in the church therefore argues against its being content to be called a church.

My fourth anchor is Scripture.

Are we to say that denominational diversity is quite acceptable? By what criteria is this situation to be judged?  Some would argue that there is no reason to suggest that the disunity manifest in these separate denominational groups, cooperating at best and competing at worst, is contrary to God’s intention. This applies to ecclesiology the dictum of Wallenstein, “Anything not forbidden is permitted,” rather than the reverse, laid down by Calvin (and George Orwell). If our first doctrine, that Scripture is the “Divine rule of Christian faith and practice”, is to be maintained, then denominational diversity might be judged by Scripture.

Does Scripture have anything at all to say about denominational diversity?  In the New Testament, the word “Church” is used in more than one sense. It meant the local community of faith, and also the whole company of those who name Jesus as Lord, wherever they might be. Early on, there were varieties of local church; Hebrew-speaking Christian synagogues and Greek-speaking ecclesia. There were churches that met in the houses of their leaders, and were named for them. Then Paul wrote to churches in various geographically scattered places. They even had local variations in pattern of government until gradually the three-fold orders of bishop, priest and deacon became general in the second century.

However, unlike so many of today’s churches, these churches recognised each others’ ministries and shared the one table. They were all the church. That is the New Testament, Apostolic, sub-Apostolic picture, and it persisted long after the canonical ink had dried. The only way in which the expression “a church” could be used of New Testament times is with reference to a local congregation of “the church”.  The concept of some local congregations being associated in a bond that excluded some other local congregations simply would not compute. When eventually that unity fell apart in schism, they viewed that as a scandal to be resolved rather than an achievement to be celebrated.

In Scripture the solitary example of a literally denominational situation is that which Paul cites in 1^st Corinthians 1:10-17. There he condemns the division into sects claiming over against their rivals to be followers of Paul or of Apollos, of Cephas or of Christ! Paul specifically accused them of being, literally, “denominations”. That sounds more like a forbidding than a permitting – a binding rather than a loosing. Tested against Scripture, denominations are a confession of our sinfulness, borne with shame, to be repented of rather than aspired to. Is that what we’re so anxious to claim to be?

To offer one further Biblical reference, an analogy rather than an injunction, it seems to me that our aspiration to church identity and clerical status is like the elders of Israel begging Samuel to give them a king so that they could “be like the nations round about”.[23] According to at least one strand of Biblical history, that didn’t turn out too well.

Do all these arguments fly in the face of reality? All right…I admit it. There is no doubt that legally (in most countries) and sociologically we are “a church” in that we exhibit all the marks of a denomination. It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck… so why do I still resist calling it a duck? Because I believe that names still have some power. They represent meaning. We tend to be shaped by the discourse we adopt. It’s the collective application of Proverbs 23:7: “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”

Since I’m attempting to propose an alternative reality, what might we call that reality? General John Gowans recalls the Methodist historian Gordon Rupp saying to Salvationists in the 1960s, “You are our Franciscans. We Methodists began as a mission. We have become a Church. May the Army always remain a mission.”[24]  “Mission” may not be a term to conjure with but the evidence tabled from sociology suggests that we could make a claim to be a Protestant “order”, which would be one way of defining that missional, not-a-denomination, state.

This argument has been rejected on the grounds that “order” pre-supposes a subordinate relationship with some other ecclesial body – like that to which the Salvation Army might have been reduced had the Anglican-Salvation Army talks of 1882 succeeded.[25] That of course is the status of most existing orders, though Taizé seems to have established itself with general acceptance in the ecclesial no-man’s land between the great confessions.  So how about the suggestion that the Salvation Army is an order of the whole Church, the catholic church, rather than of any particular denominational branch of the body? That would involve no concession of independence. That is in fact what our traditional claim to be a “part of the church” has amounted to; we’ve just never used that particular word to describe it. Why have we given it away? We fit the criteria exactly. Now I am not arguing that we should use the word “order” ourselves. We already have a perfectly good word, a proven “brand”, to borrow the ubiquitous advertising jargon: we are an Army.

This is not a conservative response, a reluctance to let go of what we’re used to, but a radical response, in the true sense of going back to our roots – which means back to the future. It can be dismissed as “make-believe” – except that believing does indeed make it so!

In sum then, we are an example of a revival movement which has institutionalised and settled down, finally coming to claim status as a “church”, a denomination. This is seen as appropriate, an achievement, a reason to congratulate ourselves, and necessary in order to maintain and consolidate our status. I suggest otherwise. If status is what concerns us (and if so, that’s a worry in itself), our claim to be an Army, a permanent mission to the unconverted, has not involved any fatal disability or disenfranchisement in the eyes of the “churches” or the community over the past hundred or more years. Safeguarding some degree of ambiguity on the question has not threatened our integrity.

So: I argue that the Army’s own history, the history and doctrine of the church, the pattern of sociology, the Word of Scripture, all testify against any great need to be “a church”. Our own history provides us with a clear precedent for retaining our identity without resorting to denominationalism; the history and doctrine of the church provide an ecclesiological and theological base, the sociology of religious movements provides a rationale, and Scripture provides a mandate.

In the morning the sailors cut the ropes and drove for the beach. Well, we’ve already done that: my dissuasive is too late. But I’m still perched in the stern, trying to yell above the wind that beached vessels do not always set sail again.

Questions:

1. Is this just nitpicking about words without any practical application? In what ways does this analysis not make sense? Please refute my arguments.

2. If it were a helpful thing to “back up” in this matter, how might the Salvation Army do that?

3. If the Salvation Army cannot, how else might it be renewed as a denomination?