Pilgrim Soldier

I’ve hesitated to write this as it means that I have to question someone who I don’t really want to question! In the current issue of the Journal of Aggressive Christianity (#48) there is an article by Commissioner Wesley Harris, someone who I normally seem to agree wholeheartedly with, with the same title as this post.

Without trying to put words into the Commissioner’s mouth, it seems that the article is suggesting that one of the causes for decline within The Salvation Army is that our meetings are no longer exciting to be in. It feels like he is suggesting that should the meetings only become exciting again, then we will recapture the fervour of our Army forebears. He recounts a couple of stories to illustrate his point and makes a good argument for his position.

Now without a doubt the Commissioner has a valid point. The vast majority of meetings that I’ve been in during my soldiership in this Army of ours have been anything but exciting. Certainly, this lack of excitement has led me close to leaving on occasions, but hope for more excitement in the future was not what kept me holding on.

Almost apologetically, I want to say that this is just too simplistic. It suggests that the most essential element of our Christian life is what happens on a Sunday morning/evening, which simply shouldn’t be true. Whilst I do believe that the spiritual temperature within the early day Army meetings was incredibly attractive to those who attended, it wasn’t what kept people going. Just like for me, hope of an exciting future wasn’t what kept them attending!

I suspect the thing that was most exciting wasn’t the worship or the evangelistic meetings. I suspect that it was the involvement they had with each other. The excitement was in being part of a movement that resembled more the early day church than anything had for quite sometime. There was excitement in being brothers and sisters in Christ, and being involved in each others’ lives.

It was a dangerous time! It was an exciting time! But above all it was a time where God showed His presence not only in the meeting place, but in the home, the workplace and the street. It was this that made the early Salvationists keep attending.

If we focus on excitement in our Sunday services this may keep a few coming. But if we concentrate on making the Christian life one of excitement (life in all its fullness perhaps?), that is intimately involved with each other on more than a Sunday-to-Sunday basis, reaching out into the community and spreading the Good News that is available for all, then we will see people coming in and decline will halt.