Charting the journey of a Salvation Army Cadet
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.
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.
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.
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!
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