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Living Out Salvationist Charism
by
Eleanor Burne-Jones
Waking up to a
changing missional context is both painful, and a process.
Here in the UK, most of the churches are communities whose
collective culture is firmly fixed in modernity. An
increasingly yawning gap is opening up between them and the
world around them, as postmodernity takes over as the dominant
culture. At the moment, most of the believers in the churches
around me are people often well over retirement age. They were
brought up and lived their working lives in the modernity
culture that is fading away. A few churches are vibrant,
growing, and attracting people from all generations. I was in
one last Sunday where when the leader invited the young people
to leave for their groups, half the congregation left. It was
a beautiful experience to be part of such an energetic and
lively gathering of believers.
Many of the conversations around me wonder how and why so many
young people are connecting with a Christianity that is
presented in a clear and definite way, in a propositional way,
and without the nuances of critique and deconstruction so many
take for granted. The reality is though, that however full the
rented school hall was on Sunday for this five year old
Methodist plant, we would need at least six of them in this
town before ten per cent of the population was in church on a
typical Sunday. We are well into post-Christendom and
post-Christian culture here, even to the point now of being a
pre-Christian mission field in the generations under 50yrs
old.
A first thought may be that ‘We all need Jesus, and that’s all
we need to think about.’ But the way we gather, and the way we
form mission teams and see ourselves as missioners (or
missionaries to use the older term, but laden with
associations), and how we see ourselves and communicate that
to others are important if people in different cultures are to
make sense of us and decide to engage.
It took me three years of reading and conversation with other
students and leaders for the penny to drop that engaging with
people in postmodernity doesn’t just mean tweaking a program
in creative ways, or removing it from the church building and
relocating it in a trendy coffee shop. This adjustment will
impact how we do everything and how we think, in TSA it will
impact our structures (the easy bit) and our collective
culture (the difficult bit) and it will wonderfully engage and
stretch our imagination and creativity. Because the changes
required are so deep, I wonder if we will develop different
ways of being Salvation Army in different geographical
locations and even in different age groups. If this happened,
what would hold Salvationists together as one people, one
‘Save the World’ Army mission team’? I hold it will be the
charism of the Salvation Army, not a mission statement, or a
vision statement.
We will have to use the word ‘charism’ a little differently to
others perhaps, because we don’t typically think of ourselves
as a religious order, in which this word is more often used.
It is rather like looking at what makes someone ‘Franciscan’
in their thinking, spirituality, and service, rather than
asking what Order they are in and what their order focuses on
doing from day to day. What makes someone ‘Salvationist’ is a
question that is asking us to describe our charism. It’s is
about our shared spiritual heartbeat, it’s about what gives us
our spiritual energy and drive. It is what truly unites us,
and it is far deeper, more spiritual, more intently Jesus
focused, and more subtle and powerful than a mission
statement.
Being united by our charism frees us to think in more flexible
ways, ways that allow us to express our salvationism in
incarnational living as well as come-to-us attractional
church; ways that disciple everyone to go out and take part in
making disciples and planting churches rather than reserving
this for the elite; ways that expect pioneering ministries
from soldiers and that focus on covenant rather than church
‘membership’ and on the dynamic and developing ministry of
every soldier rather than focussing on clergy-styled officers.
My conviction, having explored the charism of Francis in a
Franciscan Order and then gone out to try to live it out, is
that understanding and coming to focus on our charism is key
to unlocking salvationists as pioneers, as people who make
disciples who make disciples, as church planters who create
church planting energy that goes global, as those for whom
being with and serving the poor is as natural as breathing,
our way of being disciples.
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