Charting the journey of a Salvation Army Soldier
Well, I finished ‘the uprising’ last night and would again say that it’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, possibly because it is written in a fresh, up-to-date style. It make not be a Brengle or Coutts type tome but it is full of no-nonsense, in your face, holiness teaching. It’s aimed at young people, but this 39 year old felt challenged by its call to holiness. I just wish I’d read something as accessible as it 20 years ago!
Thanks Stephen and Olivia for a great book!
In my post about ‘the uprising’ I included the quote:
“unless the Bride of Christ is holy, no one else in the world will meet the Lord. Without our holiness, they won’t see the Lord.”
I’ve found myself coming back to that quote a few times because I found I needed to give the thought more consideration.
The first thought I found myself having was about the make-up of the Bride of Christ. My understanding is that it is actually the Church universal, rather than the individuals that make up the Church.
However, this was followed quickly by the reality that unless the individuals are holy, then surely the Church universal can’t be! At the very least there would be implications for the local expression of the Church should the members of the congregation not be pursuing holiness. This for me is where the crunch comes!
I believe passionately that the only way to reach the lost and to fulfil the Church’s mission in the world is at the local level. And by local I don’t mean at the level of the town, but at the level of the street!
In a paper to the Incarnate conference earlier this year Geoff Ryan said that he believes:
that God cannot – or will not – present himself in a neighbourhood or a community or amongst a people, unless his people, The Church, are themselves physically present and sharing life with the community.”
This is a difficult statement and whilst on one level I agree, I disagree on another level. However, if we accept that at some level this is correct it makes sense of Olivia Munn’s quote from the book. If the Church is not fulfilling its divine appointment and mission within a particular location then how will God be seen in that place? The only way for the Church to fulfil its mission is through the actions of its individual members working both individually and co-operatively. Therefore if the people of God, both as individuals and as a community of believers are not holy then how can the light of God reach the communities they live and serve in?
When thought of like this it makes absolute sense that our individual and corporate holiness is the key to fulfilling the mission!
If you want to read one book on Holiness but can’t face the thought of reading Brengle or Coutts or even Wesley, then my suggestion would be ‘the uprising’ by Olivia Munn and Captain Stephen Court.
It is, quite simply, the best book on the subject that I’ve ever read, and I’ve not even finished it yet! The chapters are short and snappy and at the end of each are some quesitons you can work through to ask yourself or in a cell-group!
Some of my favourite bits so far are:
“…what needs to change is our view of normality. Normal humanity is looking out for yourself. Normal Christianity is living for the good of others, and doing anything for Jesus.”
“The holiness to which God calls us and for which he empowers us includes a perfection of intention and motivation that makes us blameless.”
“unless the Bride of Christ is holy, no one else in the world will meet the Lord. Without our holiness, they won’t see the Lord.”
The above are just a taster, to read more you’ll have to get the book yourself!
By the way, Stephen, if you don’t already know, blogs over at the armybarmy blog and Olivia does the same on her own blog.
The book is published by Australia Southern territory of The Salvation Army and should be available from wherever you buy your TSA stuff.
Churches are meant to be places that can change abnormal people into normal people. People who are shadows change into real people. People who are half-dead in their addiction to destructive habits of selfishness and egotism, change into rich, fully alive human beings, knowing how to love, even when it hurts. At the same time they are also to be places that transform the life of the communities and societies around them by this very same power.
So says Graham Tomlin on page 120 of The Provocative Church.
One question that I have that isn’t answered in this book is, “Why do we major on evangelism now when the early church didn’t?” Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that the early church didn’t evangelise, its simply that they didn’t make it the focal point of their teaching. One answer to the question could be that it is because so few of the people are involved in evangelism and I’m certain there are more than a few who would accept this premise.
However, I’m not so sure that we are focussing on a symptom rather than the cause. Pushing an agenda that highlights evangelism as the most important role of the church seems to distort what the church is really about. It is not about bringing people to a crisis point in their life and getting them ’saved’, it is about being a community in which people are transformed into people in whom the glory of God is seen.
Let me make it clear, I believe that the Salvation Army was called into being to reach souls for the kingdom. I believe that this is our first and greatest mandate. I am not though convinced that in your face evangelism is the ‘be all and end all’ of our effort. In fact I think that the real reason for our success was not our skill at evangelism, but rather our position of being firmly entrenched in the holiness movement.
Graham Tomlin’s book (and I promise this is the last mention of it for a while) actually is not so much a book about evangelism but is a book about holiness. He might not call it that, but the core of his argument is that for us to be truly evangelistic in our efforts for the Kingdom we must live holy lives. Without this basic holiness then ultimately no amount of evangelism will bring the numbers to the Lord that we would like. For me personally, this is why Jesus didn’t turn round and tell us to only get people saved, but instead told us to go and make disciples. Only disciples who seek to live the holy life that Jesus did; disciples who are being increasingly human; are going to influence a real and lasting difference in the lives of those asking the questions.
I’ve mentioned before that in my Google Reader I get a daily quote/thought from a sight called inward/outward. The quote that is provided is not always great and sometimes I disagree fundamentally with them. However, this morning’s is a Thomas Merton quote, and whilst I’m not in agreement with it, it did make me think. The part I want to share with you is this:
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It ‘consents’ so to speak, to God’s creative love. … This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do.
Merton goes on to say that every being gives glory to God by being the thing that He created them to be. In my opinion this is definitely a thought that shows Merton’s Zen influences, but I do think he has a point.
The problem though comes with us humans. Do we reflect God’s glory simply by being human? I would say that we don’t because in actual fact the majority of humanity are not ‘consenting’ to God’s creative love. We are not actually being who God created us to be and we’re certainly not obeying God.
As I said in my last post I’m currently enjoying reading Graham Tomlin’s The Provocative Church. There are numerous passages highlighted already, with quite a few scribbles in the margins, but here is one that I feel is pertinent to this post:
[loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength] means a reorientation of our lives towards learning to love God and learning to love other people, rather than the sef-indulgent and self-oriented lives we’re used to.
This is the message that I’m trying to get across in our morning meetings at the corps at the moment. We are working through the various Fruit of the Spirit and I’m trying to explain how these are the real signs of spiritual maturity, rather than what we do in church. For me the real test of an individuals holiness is the manifestation of these fruit. In my mind it doesn’t matter how much an individual expresses their love for God; it doesn’t matter how much they do in church. What matters is whether their lives are increasingly loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled.
This is how we, as humans, give the glory back to God. As we grow in the fruit of the Spirit, as we allow the Spirit to work within us and convict us of sin and shape us into holy people, then we become more like the people God intended us to be. So Merton has a really good point, but we have to allow the Holy Spirit to shape us in order to really reflect God’s glory.
In some ways this post is an extension of my previous one from Incarnate as it carries on our responsibility to live incarnational lives that whilst unremarkable in its events is noticably different in the way it is lived.
Both Stuart Murray-Williams and Gary Bishop (i’ve only really read their papers so far due to all the other stuff I’m reading) pick up on our need to live truly human lives. Murray-Williams says:
Maybe only God can live a fully authentic human life. But the incarnation of Jesus … demonstrates that God wants to live that fully human life through us…
and Gary writes that:
…very little has been offered which would encourage or equip the faithful in their humanity.
These two thoughts combined in my mind to create a couple of questions. Could it be that true holiness is found in becoming more like Jesus in his humanity? Is holiness really about becoming fully human in the way that God originally intended us to be when he created us?
One of the consequences of this sort of thinking would be that we would start to teach discipleship in terms of equipping people to live their lives. We could concentrate on making disciples who were sanctified in their attitude toward the world and were committed to bringing about the Kingdom, yet were fully immersed in living lives as God intends us to. It would stop us putting our efforts into what we shouldn’t be doing and instead free us up to do the things that we should be doing.
If we started to live in a way that reflected the full humanity that is our touchstone in living, then we would be taking our holiness out into the world, rather than separating ourselves from it. This is what Jesus did! He brought his holiness from heaven to earth and followed his Father’s will in all things. What better example can we ask for?
This seems to be a subject that I’m touching on in many of my interactions with people on the Internet recently.
From Facebook to blogs there are people who want to see The Salvation Army change dramatically believing that this will bring back the early Blood and Fire mentality back to the our mission. Voices call for us to be relevant to today’s society by allowing soldiers to drink or to bring back the sacraments or scrap the uniform.
The problem is that there are many who think the problems are all with the institution of The Salvation Army. If we change the hierarchy or the autocratic style of leadership or the way we do everything then things will improve.
Why can’t people see that whilst some of the problems that blight this Army of ours are structural, the main problem is in the hearts of many that call themselves Salvationists. If all of us were prepared to make the sacrifice that is the life of a disciple of Jesus then maybe we’d get back to the heart of our mission.
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