JAC Online

Chosen To Be A Soldier
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)[1]

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[2].  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.”[3]

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’[4]

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.”[5]

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.’ [6]

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’.[7]

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:

1. Non-discriminatory.  Class distinctions disappear. Rich and poor look the same.

2. Cheap

3. Practical

4. Durable

5. Distinctive

6. 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