Charting the journey of a Salvation Army Cadet
“They killed him on a tree but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen.” Acts 10:39-40 (NIV)
My favourite part of Easter is the story of the Road to Emmaus. Here were 2 people whose lives had been shattered and were amongst the first to see the risen Lord! What must have been their thoughts about this stranger who shared their journey? What must have been their feelings when they realised who he was?
The last few days have been a mad rush in order to get the poster/leaflet ready for this year’s Self-denial Mission Appeal in Latvia which will be held on 28th May. Unfortunately, with 2 different languages for my text to be translated into it just hasn’t happened! That means I’m finishing for Easter with the files still on my hard drive instead of at the printers.
This year is a really important one for the Mission Appeal in Latvia. After 3 years of running the appeal we are, for the first time, really pushing the sacrificial aspect of the Army’s Mission Appeal and are encouraging people to give something up during May.
I’m also going to be introducing some new ideas over the next few months to try to broaden the understanding of Latvian Salvationists in terms of our international work and mission. At the same time I hope to educate people that the work the Army does is so much more than the often narrow perception that can be held.
I visited the IHQ website yesterday and discovered that General Clifton’s address from his Welcome and Dedication Meeting is up on the web. It’s there as a webcast but has also been put up in written form. It is well worth reading and the language is visionary. If you want to read it you can find it here.
Just wanted to welcome you over to the new home of my blog. I’m being hosted by my good friend Patrik Olterman who you can read here
My thanks goes to him for the work he’s done to get this up and running!
If you’ve been redirected here from my old page then I’ve made quite a few posts on this new site! If you want to read them click here and you should be able to get up to date!
I found this excellent quote by someone called Esmée Chengapen over at opensourcetheology.net
“If we view poor people as not having enough to eat, a place to sleep, the unspoken assumption is to provide the missing things and the poor will no longer be poor. If they do not have the relevant skills or knowledge, then providing education and if the poor simply learns enough, they will no longer be poor. We, as followers of Christ, then add the knowledge of the gospel to our programme for the poor.
“This has been the traditional approach of the church, however it creates a “Santa Claus” picture of the communities of faith and the poor become passive recipients of the church’s generosity. This approach has two negative consequences: it demeans the poor and it temps us to play god in the lives of the poor.”
This is the danger we face whenever we ‘do mission’ without first understanding the community we want to work in. All to often we impose our thoughts of what the community is need of upon a group of people, instead of talking to people to find out what their needs are. The biggest reason for this is that we often don’t live in the communities that we are trying to help, and instead of understanding the situations have become somewhat philanthropic in our attitudes towards them.
Over on Gordon’s blog there is a quote from Catherine Booth where she calls us to be a “living embodiment of Christianity …. if The Salvation Army is not going to be that, may God put it out!”. Gordon goes on to say, “I’m worried because if that embodiment has been allowed to become humanitarianism, that embodiment is partial and represents the ’sham compassion’ that Catherine was so vehement about in her age of philanthropy.”
I suspect that we have already crossed over this line and are guilty of the ‘Santa Claus’ mentality. Consequently, this may well be one of the ’sins of the camp’ of which we need to repent. If we’re not prepared to then maybe God is already in the process of ‘putting us out’!
Yesterday we had our monthly meeting of leaders here in Latvia and following a period of teaching we were asked to pray about various things.
During this prayer period I felt the Lord directing me to Revelation 3:1-6 which says:
“To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you. Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. He who overcomes will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out his name from the book of life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
It appears to me that this pretty much describes The Salvation Army (and probably much of the Church) in the West. To illustrate we spend a considerable amount of time looking at various strategies for extending the Kingdom of God through TSA here in Latvia, but I wonder when we are going to take the step of faith that is required to see the fruit of these talks. Commitment is there in the leadership group but we don’t seem to be able to communicate it to the masses. What’s worse is that we have a fairly good reputation for being a place where things are happening, but are not really seeing any growth and although our spirituality is increasing , some of our congregations are in decline.
This seems to be pretty much the norm that I see in my readings across the Army’s blogosphere! Only in a few places do we seem to be fulfilling the mission that God has given to us. It reminds me of the Keith Green song “Asleep in the Light” which says:
“The world is sleeping in the dark, That the church can’t fight, cause it’s asleep in the light, How can you be so dead, when you’ve been so well fed, Jesus rose from the grave, and you, you can’t even get out of bed, Oh, Jesus rose from the dead, come on, get out of your bed.”
Our new General has already said:
“…but perhaps God is saying ever so gently and ever so lovingly: ‘I love you, Salvation Army, but would you please look within and see if there is sin in the camp and if there is anything that causes the blessing to be withheld we must deal with it.’”
What concerns me though is that prophetic voices have been asking the question for sometime now, but still we have by-and-large continued in our sinful ways. There nearly always came a point when the Old Testament prophets stood up and basically said “There is sin in the camp and God says repent or be exiled/lose my blessing.” Maybe now is the time for the General (because I suspect that is what it will take) to stand up and say what the sins of The Salvation Army are! This might not make him popular but its what is needed!
I saw the following quote from the Dalai Lama on Phil Laeger’s website and it got me thinking.
“It is fascinating. In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences — yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don’t bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours…”
“I don’t think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice - which brings no real freedom.”
This lack of resilience that he mentions made me think that maybe he is also describing the Church in the west. Last week someone said to me that our corps needed a projector and computer so that we were more effective in our ministry. My immediate thought was “Why?”. There are a number of different tools that enable us to see how our church is performing in different areas, which in the wrong hands just become a way of comparing ourselves to other churches and we have so many different choices when it comes to where to attend worship on a Sunday that it is almost mind-blowing at times.
I believe this has led us to be less resilient. I suspect that should there be a sudden crackdown on Christianity many of those who go to their Christian club on a Sunday to worship would simply find something else to do. When you here the stories of the persecuted church I suspect that most of us probably wouldn’t be able to cope with the trauma of persecution because our faith is simply not real enough!
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