In preparation for some teaching I’m going to be doing here in the corps I’ve been glancing through the excellent SA courses over at armybarmy.com. In the first session of SA201 there is a wonderful comment:
“Mission is to a movement what rice is to Chinese food. Without it, there’s just a bunch of vegetables lying around.”
My immediate reaction was to think of the Army I belong to and ask whether or not this is the experience we have. Thankfully in an increasing number of places mission focus is increasing and the fruit of people’s labour in the Spirit is being seen.
Another quote from the same source is a citing of William Booth which says:
“What is a Salvation Army Corps? - To this I reply that it is a band of people united together to attack and Christianise an entire town or neighbourhood. When an officer receives an appointment from headquarters, it is not contemplated that he shall deal merely with those who are already gathered within the walls of certain buildings, or with those who are already enrolled in our ranks, or with those who may be induced to come inside them; but it is intended that he shall be an apostle of the gospel to all those who live around. When you reach a station assigned to you, if it has not been done already, you should take your stand in that hall, or theatre, or tent, and draw a line around the breadth of population you can hope to reach, and make that your parish, and aim, with tears and prayers, and the trumpet blast of truth, and the power of the Holy Ghost, to convert and sanctify and enlist and disciple every soul within it.“(emphasis mine)
This is our mission and should be the mission of all Christians. Yet the important bit is to recognise the difference between getting people “born again” and Booth’s objectives! It is not enough for us to get people to proclaim Jesus as their personal Saviour and then move onto getting the next ‘convert’. Instead, we must follow the command of Jesus to go and make disciples and lead them to a life of committed discipleship rooted in holiness.
How sad that the spirit of the second embedded so uncertainly in the reality of church culture in the army. I wonder why? The cultural gravitational field of Christendom? Or an inevitable decline in energy level that follows the birth of any movement?
It shows he totally understood already what people are arguing for now as they navigate the meltdown church decline in the UK. It makes sense to search hard for to define that missional ‘DNA’ code without which we founder. The trouble is the shifts between being out in where God is moving in the neighbourood and being wrapped up in ‘church’ are actually quite subtle. It can come down to a lack of conversations, to the language we use, to the unspoken assumptions, to the agendas of meetings, to the way we evaluate what churches and ministries do, and to the way we look at resources, human, material and financial.
I suspect both of the reasons you list are part of the reason for the drift away from discipleship, but I also think that our insular thinking made it inevitable as well!
I agree, I’ve noticed that. Where did it come from?
Why?