Daily devotions

Friday

The General retires

From the Salvation Army International web-site:
'FOLLOWING a period of personal reflection and prayer, General Linda Bond has decided that she should relinquish the Office of the General with effect from 13 June 2013. The General’s decision to step down comes after 44 years of ministry.'

Monday

Vision for the Lost or Lost Vision - PART FIVE

- Harold Hill on fsaof.blogspot. com - "Can the vision be re-found? Yes! But it will look different.
The alternation of renewal and decline as the context within which we have attempted to place our visionary theme reminds us that entropy and dissolution are not the whole story. In the Salvationist micro-climate, we may occasionally have our equivalent of what in the Catholic Church Karl Rahner called a “winter period”, and we may regret the repetitive pattern of institutionalisation and decline, but we can rejoice also in the reiterated springtime which, God-willing, ensues. May the Holy Spirit give renewed vision for our times
."

Vision for the Lost or Lost Vision - PART FOUR

- fsaof.blogspot. com - "As Arbuckle goes on to say, after describing how prophetic movements become human institutions, “When this happens, new prophetic movements within the Church and/or re-founding people arise within existing congregations to challenge them to return to the radical demands of the Beatitudes.

Vision for the Lost or Lost Vision - PART THREE - Harold Hill

From fsaof.blogspot.com:

The Salvation Army emerged in the late 19th century as the latest body of Enthusiasts, those Max Weber called the virtuosi, the dazzlingly skilled, the spiritual athletes. The Army was widely recognised as a de facto new religious order within the church.

The poet Francis Thompson in an essay on “Catholics In Darkest England” wrote, “Consider what the Salvation Army is. It is not merely a sect, it is virtually a Religious Order…”

But, as Gerald Arbuckle writes of Catholic Orders:
"Historically, once these movements cease to be prophetic, though in Church law they may remain religious congregations, they are no longer authentically religious. By sinking to the level of purely human institutions they have lost their reason for being."

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