Pilgrim Soldier

Slowly but surely I’m working my way through Restoring the Woven Cord which is about various aspects of Celtic Christianity and how they are relevant to today’s world. Interestingly, I’m noticing that I don’t agree quite so readily with some of the ideas that the author puts forward as I did when I read this through 10 years ago. Shows just how much we change over the years!

Yesterday I read the chapter about Evangelism and how the Celtic Church and of particular interest was the following quote:

…the Celtic church was utterly given to mission. It thought, lived and breathed mission. It could understand no Christianity that did not include mission. It had no interest in bureaucracies and institutions that existed simply to support the church. It had a wild, childlike, simple and overwhelming passion to see me, women and children of these lands and beyond find faith in Jesus Christ and it gave itself utterly to that end.

This reminded me so much of the earliest days of The Salvation Army and I couldn’t help but wonder why we lost this lifestyle. This is a subject that has been covered a great many times and I don’t want to go there fully. However, I think that the book has something to say about one of the reasons why the Celtic church managed to maintain the passion, where the Army fell down.

The church grew so fast because these cells were so wonderfully flexible and unrestrained by any institution, that they could easily multiply.

It is in this area that we got bogged down in my opinion! Now anyone who has studied Army history will acknowledge that William Booth was something of a control freak and that those that crossed him found themselves pushed out. Despite this there was a wonderful freedom in expression in much of what happened in the earliest days. Unfortunately, this wasn’t sustained for a multitude of reasons and we started concentrating on creating a culture. If this had been solely about building a Kingdom culture then that would have been wonderful but we ended concentrating on Salvationist culture which is not the same thing!

Thankfully we are seeing a rediscovery of a focus on mission, that isn’t restricted simply to proclamational evangelism. This again was a hallmark of the Celtic church, although they always made sure that the gospel was presented in some way. The keys to their success though was that they operated according to the Holy Spirit’s leading, were people marked by personal holiness and remarkable humility, and were also adaptive to culture. If we can be people marked by the same traits maybe we could all regain the same focus that the Celtic church did!