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Raison d'être
by
Captain Andrew Bale
Sometimes a nation invents a
phrase so perfect in its ability to describe something that
the phrase transcends the normal boundaries of language and
becomes international in usage. The French phrase, raison
d'être, which literally translated means "reason for
being”, is a good example.
This simple phrase goes far
beyond mere description, providing us with a methodology that
can be used to measure how well an object justifies its
existence. Once we have established an object’s raison
d'être it is relatively easy to assess its success or
failure in fulfilling that purpose. For example, it may be
said that the Church exists to love sinners into God’s kingdom
and thereby bring glory to Him. Some Christian denominations
meet this goal better than others do. A comprehensive
understanding of its raison d'être will enable a
denomination to identify whether or not it can justify its
existence and, if it can, to what degree. If areas of failure
are identified then strategies can be put into place to
increase efficiency and thereby bring it closer to the
fulfilment of its raison d'être.
With this simple phrase,
French philosophers have given us a means whereby we can
measure current performance against the ideal benchmark that
lies at the heart of any organisation. The phrase succeeds on
four levels: first of all it questions whether our reason for
being still exists. Secondly, if the answer is yes it reminds
us of where we ought to be in fulfilling that reason. Thirdly
it shows us where we actually are in meeting that objective.
Finally it produces within us an urgent desire to take those
steps required to achieve everything we were raised up to
accomplish.
In my second paragraph I was
very careful to use the words ‘it may be said’ in relation to
the Church’s raison d'être – although I believe the aims of
the Church are unequivocal, there may be some who have other
opinions. However, when it comes to The Salvation Army I can
declare without any fear of contradiction exactly what our
raison d'être is. The Salvation Army was raised up to save
sinners and to promote holiness and it achieves its aim
through offering all people everywhere, regardless of their
race, gender, prospects or social status,unconditional love.
The primitive Salvation Army saw itself as the cutting edge of
the Church, militant and in every way different from the
chapels and Churches that existed at the time. It sought to
take the gospel to the un-Churched, those on the very edge of
society, the oppressed and prostituted people who populated
the dark underbelly of polite society.
William Booth, Catherine
Booth and George Scott Railton, the founding triumvirate used
by God to establish The Salvation Army, were all very clear
about The Salvation Army’s raison d'être and the dire
consequences of failing to fulfil the same:
“If God bases any hopes on
anyone for the salvation of the world it must be on The
Salvation Army. If we are unfaithful, God will take our
candlestick out of its place. There are quite enough lifeless
organisations in the world without adding one more. I hope
that God will sweep it off the face of the earth if it should
ever become so”
“But, thank God, He has not
abandoned our nation to its fate. On the contrary, we are able
to show that He has during the last few years, been raising up
from amongst the publicans and sinners of our day an army of
deliverance, fired with His own burning love for dying souls,
and mighty through His power to the pulling down of Satan's
strongholds... there is not anywhere today another
organisation professing to undertake throughout the whole
world, a scheme of evangelisation especially directed to meet
the need of the most abandoned and godless part of the
community; and surely, therefore, we may fairly claim to be
the Lord's special force raised up for the emergency.”
“Oh!” people say, “you must
be very careful, very judicious. You must not thrust religion
down people's throats. Then, I say, you will never get it
down. What! Am I to wait till an unconverted, godless man
wants to be saved before I try to save him? He will never want
to be saved till the death rattle is in his throat. What! Am I
to let my unconverted friends and acquaintances drift down
quietly to damnation, and never tell them about their souls,
until they say, 'If you please, I want you to preach to me'?
Is this anything like the spirit of early Christianity? No.
Verily we must make them look--tear the bandages off, open
their eyes, make them bear it, and if they run away from you
in one place, meet them in another, and let them have no peace
until they submit to God and get their souls saved. This is
what Christianity ought to be doing in this land, and there
are plenty of Christians to do it. Why, we might give the
world such a time of it that they would get saved in very
self-defence...”
Generally speaking, far from
being a radical ground-breaking evangelistic invading force,
the contemporary Salvation Army (at least in the western
territories) is in serious decline. Of course, praise God,
there are always notable exceptions to the rule but the
general truth that cannot be ignored is that we are in
decline.
In the UK the decline in
officers has become a serious concern and featured in a rather
dramatic front page in the 25th February 2006 edition of
Salvationist. A page containing nothing but worrying
statistics, printed in large contrasting fonts, effectively
drawing attention to the serious decline in those responding
to ‘the call’. The page made the point that if things stay as
they are, then by 2016 just under 600 ‘officer-units’
will be trying to oversee 800 corps appointments. This ‘shock’
front page was sadly not the precursor of an article setting
out how this decline would be reversed but simply a sad
statement of the truth, perhaps designed to shake us out of
complacent lethargy and into action.
When we seriously consider
our raison d'être we are prompted to ask many difficult
and deeply personal questions and our potential answers
provide us with opportunities to improve and progress.
However, the practical restraints of space allow this article
to address only three:-
·
Does our raison d'être
still exist? Are there still poor, isolated, disenfranchised
people whom no one else is reaching with the gospel? In other
words, have we become obsolete as a consequence of our
success?
·
Is there a more effective
way of meeting our raison d'être? In other words, are
we becoming obsolete simply because we refuse to evolve?
·
Or, does our raison
d'être still exist, but for a host of reasons we are
unable or unwilling to fulfil it?
I’m assuming that I need not
waste too many words answering the first of these questions.
William Booth calculated the un-churched masses to consist of
10% of the population. Could anyone effectively argue that the
figure is not substantially higher today? In the UK today
what the early Salvationist pioneers called the ‘working
classes’ might more aptly be called the ‘benefit classes’. In
Dartford, where my wife and I currently serve God, the
un-churched are all around us. A walk down Dartford High
Street on market day produces a scene that would not be all
that unfamiliar to Railton or Cadman. Those we help on a
daily basis and those we lead to Christ are nearly all poor,
marginalised and almost forgotten. Could anyone really argue
that our raison d'être has been fulfilled? Can we rest
on our pitchforks content that ‘all is safely gathered in’?
Without doubt our raison d'être remains – so does the
prevalent decline within our ranks point to our failure in
trying to meet it?
When I was about seven years
old my father took me to Campfield Press in St Albans (the
Army’s own printing works). The busyness of the place
together with the noise and the smell worked together to
create a lasting memory. In particular I remember how one of
the typesetters using the type at his disposal, interspersed
with slivers of metal from the crucible of molten lead
attached to his work station, carefully spelt out my name. The
image of his typesetting machine conjured up by my memory
looks like a cross between an antiquated typewriter, a
primitive telephone exchange and a loom! Imagine my delight as
my ‘set’ name progressed along the production line and was
finally printed on proof reader’s paper. A typesetter in the
late 1960s possessed an envied occupation. From apprentice to
pensioner the craft of typesetting promised both steady
material reward and job security. The typesetter’s raison
d'être still exists, but modern technology has provided us
with infinitely more effective methods of publishing than
laboriously messing around with molten lead. Because there is
a more effective way of meeting the typesetter’s raison
d'être both he and his craft have become obsolete.
Are there better ways of
meeting our God-given objectives? Are there other
organisations better equipped than we are at reaching the
lost? Has our ‘candlestick’ been removed from its place and
given to some other more worthy denomination? Are there
examples of best practice that we would do well to follow?
Dare I say that most of the advances within the contemporary
Church in recent years are nothing more than the rediscovered
weapons that we as a movement once used effectively but
discarded in the name of progress?
We were using the ward
system long before cell Church poked its head out of the womb!
As for Alpha our system for making and following down converts
(welcome sergeants, recruiting sergeants, rolls, visitation
sergeants, recruits classes, soldiership classes) surpasses
anything Alpha has to offer! Add to that our Directory and
Corps Cadet Classes, our open-air meetings, pub-booming, slum
and gutter brigades, prison gate visitation, safe houses for
prostituted people, shelter for the homeless underpinned by
solid Christian pastoral support and pub raids and there is
very little the contemporary Church has ‘discovered’ that
wasn’t used by, or even initiated by, The Salvation Army. If
you were a Salvationist between 1878 and 1908 incarnational
ministry was the only type of ministry there was. We were
doing ‘Café Church’ and offering a sandwich alongside
salvation before cafés had been invented – Railton mentions
salvation tea-parties in Heathen England in 1877! As
for the ‘four spiritual laws’ how many tracts beginning with
‘How to…. Get saved… find holiness… win souls’ etc did the
early Salvation Army publish? If others are doing it better
than us it is unlikely that they have a found a new way but
simply that they have adopted and adapted the old way just as
the early Salvationists and before them the Methodists did.
Even today we continue to discard good proven methods of
evangelism on the grounds that they are past their sell-by
date, when the truth is more likely to be that we are too
timid or maybe even too lazy to modernise them and use them
again.
Whilst some might consider
such a point of view arrogant and insular maybe even
incestuous, greater people than myself have defended the
Army’s unique God-given ability to fulfil its raison d'être:
"Salvationism is a clear and
well-defined quality that represents distinctive features of
doctrine and service which distinguish it from all other
organisations and makes of it an entity entirely apart,
incapable of being blended with any other people. Any attempt
to harmonise it with methods employed by other religious
bodies destroys its effectiveness and renders it incapable of
achieving its purpose or continuing to develop its special
characteristics."
It would appear that our
raison d'être still exists and our inability to fulfil its
requirements is not simply evidence of our refusal to adapt.
This points, painfully, to only one conclusion. That is that
circumstances (either beyond or within our control) exist,
which are preventing us from functioning fully.
Is our reluctance to reclaim
our traditional ‘Cathedral’ (the open-air) down to the fact
that evangelism outside our halls just doesn’t work or because
taking evangelism outside our halls is a risk we don’t want to
take? When we look at the success of recent initiatives like
‘Street Pastors’ can we really argue that open-air evangelism
has become obsolete? Is our reluctance to wear uniform born
out of a genuine belief that it creates a barrier between us
and those we are trying to reach or is it that wearing a
uniform makes us both accountable and available? Do we wince
at the military metaphor because in a world of increasing
militarism it has developed negative connotations or is it
simply easier to be a member than it is to be a soldier?
When William Booth boldly
declared 'send the fire' in his stirring song and cried to
God, ‘Look down and see this waiting host, give us the
promised Holy Ghost, we want another Pentecost!' he wasn’t
talking about the unsaved but those within the ranks of his
newly formed Army who lacked power. Do we need another
Pentecost? Has our failure to fulfil our raison d'être
got more to do with impotent personnel than with outdated
methodology? Perhaps we might be encouraged to recall that the
first Pentecost happened in a meeting attended by a group of
fearful, sinful, doubting men and women prone to denial,
failure and cowardice. Although the weaknesses swept away by
Pentecost were personal to each individual disciple the
benefits were collective and beyond comprehension. Pentecost
didn't demolish the temple, or wipe out the Pharisees or edit
the law – it dealt with the individual. Revival can only ever
be the revival of the individual – the more individuals that
are revived, the fiercer the flames of revival will burn.
It is no wonder then, that
in spite of our many inquiries, The Salvation Army has been
unable to write a strategy for recovery, for the problem lies
not in the fabric of our movement nor in our methodology but
in the hearts of individual officers and soldiers. Indeed, God
can only revive The Salvation Army as he would revive any
denomination - one soul at a time.
When Paul speaks about the
Church, he uses the metaphor of a body. It is the nature of
cells, whether they be healthy or cancerous, to reproduce.
Decline will either continue or be reversed according to the
health of individual cells. There is nothing wrong with the
head or the heart of the Church; it is the unhealthy cells
that make up the body, through which the head and heart try to
operate, that bring about failure. Christ uses the even more
brutal metaphor of a vine where the unhealthy branches are cut
off and thrown into the fire.
Our raison d'être as
a movement is wholly dependable upon our success in fulfilling
our own raison d'être as individual officers and
soldiers as summed up in our covenants.
Until we are doing, in God’s
power, all we can to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ, to love and serve him supremely all our
days, to live to win souls and make their salvation the first
purpose of our lives, to care for the poor, feed the hungry,
clothe the naked, love the unlovable, and befriend those who
have no friends, to maintain the doctrines and principles of
The Salvation Army.. Until we can declare with unequivocal
integrity that we have fulfilled our own personal (and
voluntarily adopted) raison d'être then we will
continue our slow limp into obscurity. However, if we face the
truth, repent and seek God with all our hearts then he will
give us renewed success and greater victory – why? Because
that’s His raison d'être!
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