As the Salvation Army turns 150, what role does it have to play in secular society? Conclusion

Martin Fletcher - former foreign editor of the Times
- From FSAOF.blogspot.co.uk

From Buckingham Palace to Harlem's ghetto, from Sydney's Quayside to Hong Kong's tenements, from Moscow's Gorky Park to Kiev’s bloodied quarters, the Salvation Army brings the offer of healing to mind, body and soul; a new life of hope rooted in God’s eternal promises through Jesus Christ - but for how much longer? 
Dr. Sven Ljungholm FSAOF, UK

Conclusion

The Army is ageing as well as shrinking. There is little new blood – most officers I met came from Salvationist families, and some were third- or fourth-generation Salvationists. They were overwhelmingly white, a conspicuous exception being Commissioner Adams, a mixed-race South African. Adams, 58, is a fourth-generation Salvationist who was raised in Cape Town under apartheid, joined the Army at seven and is married to an Abba-loving Norwegian, Marianne, who leads the Army’s women’s ministries in Britain. 

He is a likeable, self-effacing man who discourages people from using his title. After becoming territorial commander in 2013 he relinquished his driver so that the man could minister instead. Adams earns scarcely £1,000 a month, only about £300 more than his officers, and he finds his smart, Army-owned flat near Tower Bridge embarrassing. “We could easily move into a council flat down the road,” he said.

Onward, Christian soldiers: preparing to perk up Oxford Street.

Photo: Tom Pilston for New Statesman

Adams is troubled by the falling membership: “An army needs soldiers.” Addressing the problem is a priority, he said. He believes the Army has become too inward-looking, complacent, insular, bureaucratic, white and middle-class. “The further from the source of a river, the more polluted the waters become. The further from the source of the movement, the harder it is to maintain that movement’s purity,” he said. “It’s been 150 years from our start so it’s a challenge for us to keep our principles and our focus alive . . . We need to get people back to basics. We’re not where we should be.”

He agrees that the Army should consider more fashionable uniforms and that it should reach out to gay people and racial minorities. “We’ve excluded instead of embracing . . . We’ve failed in our ministry to minorities,” he said. Adams wants the organisation to be more outspoken on some issues – the notion that the poor are responsible for their own plight, for instance – and says its failure to fight apartheid in his homeland still haunts him.

“We’ve hidden behind this thing about, ‘We don’t do cold evangelising any more. We don’t talk about the gospel overtly any more . . .’ We need to be sharing the good news about Jesus Christ. We’ve been neglecting this.”

Specifically, Adams wants more crusading soldiers and fewer “pew-warmers”. He would like fewer Salvationists to walk past beggars without stopping. “When we sing those Army war songs it must not just be a metaphor.”

More churchgoers should work in the charitable programmes, he said, and those programmes should have a stronger religious component, so that they address the spiritual as well as the physical needs of their beneficiaries.

“I would hope people were transformed, as opposed to changed. A social programme can change a person’s circumstances, but only the gospel can change a person from the inside out. 
The Salvation Army should be about transformation . . . We need to understand that people really can be changed by the gospel.”

On any given Sunday thirty years ago, Regent Hall held three services, and 500 worshippers would fill the old ice rink. Today it holds two and attracts roughly 150 people. But, like many other corps, it is trying to reach out. It has opened a coffee shop for weary shoppers, launched a community gospel choir, and still sends a brass band down Oxford Street on Sundays to entice people in.

And just occasionally lives really are transformed. An 83-year-old retired officer called Major Beryl told me how her father was walking along Oxford Street in the early 1920s, stopped to listen to the band, and was invited in. He accepted, found God, fell in love with a member of the congregation and married her in the Hall. They worshipped there every Sunday for decades, even during the Second World War when bombs were falling all around and the glass roof shattered.

Major Beryl’s father was “promoted to glory” while marching to the Cenotaph one Remembrance Sunday, but she kept coming. “Oh yes,” she chuckled. “This place has given me a lot to be grateful for.”

If you're in London the weekend of July 1st, come join us as we celebrate our 150th year of Christian service in another memorable milestone making  march down the Mall - 15,000 Salvationists from 126 countries will be on hand to wish you welcome and God's blessings!