Pilgrim Soldier

Back in June I made a conscious decision to put aside my normal reading practice, which was to read for entertainment sakes, and read more Christian books. I’ve found this difficult as I have always tended to race through the books I read, which is nigh on impossible with Christian books as you invariably miss something.

So at the weekend I moved onto the next book in my burgeoning library, Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. No-one I know personally has read this one, but it seems like it is one of the must-read books at the moment.

And so I start to read and almost immediately come to a comment that struck me like a hammer!

Here’s what often happens: Somebody comes along who has a fresh perspective on the Christian faith. People are inspired. A movement starts. Faith that was stale and dying is now alive. But then the pioneer of the movement [...] dies and the followers stop exploring. They mistakenly assume that their leader’s words were the last ones on the subject, and they freeze their leader’s words. They forget that as that innovator was doing his or her part to move things along, that person was merely taking part in the discussion that will go on forever. And so in the commitment to what so-and-so said and did, they end up freezing the faith.

What struck me is that I see this amongst some of the different expressions of Salvationism that we see in today’s Salvation Army. All too often people are returning to the past and looking at what William Booth, Catherine Booth, George Scott-Railton, etc have to say about a subject and categorically state that these are the pinnacle of the Salvationists’ expression of Christian faith. It’s argued that if we return to this way of thinking then all the problems of the Salvation Army as a denomination will be solved.

The problem is that whilst there is an element of truth within that we cannot ignore that almost 100 years have gone by since most of this stuff was written. Yes it’s true that much of our first love appears to have been beaten down by the struggles of living in an increasingly secular, media led society, but there have always been a faithful remnant who have looked at how we Salvationists can keep our faith both relevant and moving forward.

Now if I make it sound as if I want to change the Army I’ll get in trouble, but that’s not what I want anyway. I want to see people challenged in their faith.

Simply reiterating the past will not make better disciples. Instead we need to take the teaching of the last 140+ years (plus of course the previous two millenia), start looking ahead and work out what is needed to live our lives in today’s world. We need an ever increasing number of people who will challenge themselves to find out how discipleship in the 21st Century should be expressed.

What does it mean to be a Salvationist or any other Christian? What should we be doing to make this world a bit more like Heaven and less like the fallen world we live in? How can we live holy lives and encourage others too, when the pervasive nature of 21st century media is all around us?