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When William Booth and his associates met in London in 1878 to transform their evangelistic organization, the East London Christian Mission, into The Salvation Army, they announced their reason in no uncertain terms: “The Christian Mission has met in Congress to make War. It has organized a Salvation Army to carry the blood of Christ and the fire of the Holy Ghost into every corner of the world.” The first issue of their new, more militant magazine, at first called The Salvationist, described the fledgling Army as the people of God joined together “after the fashion most effective and forcible to liberate a captive world.” The Salvation Army clearly saw itself from the beginning as a great missionary enterprise.

It is possible, however, to divide into two phases the process by which this zeal became truly universal. At first, the Army’s leaders saw their work as not so much to spread the gospel far and wide as to spread it, so to speak, up and down: they intended to reach those depressed portions of English society that Booth believed had been neglected by other Protestant churches. The Army’s mission was vertical rather than horizontal. In 1878 and 1879 when William and Catherine Booth and their close associates spoke of carrying “the Standard of the Cross into every part of the world” it was to the dark and dismal parts of the “world” of London and other great cities that they referred.

William Booth himself, and almost all of his pioneer associates (with the exception of his wife, who came from a prosperous family) had come to Army work from social backgrounds that ranged from the respectable working class, at best, to the ranks of the desperately poor. Their evangelical and social projects for the urban poor attracted the financial support of the occasional wealthy donor, and—much more rarely—a person from a good social background would actually join the Army. Frederick de Lautour Tucker, a high ranking colonial official who became an officer in the Army and later Booth’s son-in-law, is a notable example; George Scott Railton, an educated man whose father had been a minister, is another. With a handful of such exceptions, however, the Army’s early leaders had been poor. They knew poverty, its terror and futility, and they knew how little the light of the Christian gospel had penetrated the vast, dismal acres of city slums in which they had passed their lives. They now felt called to return there with the Good News that God and The Salvation Army loved all people alike.

Soon, however, a marked change took place in the way Army leaders envisioned the dimensions within which they believed God was calling them to operate. Almost no sooner than General Booth and his officers had unfurled the Army banner in the backstreets of “Darkest England,” than they were confronted with invitations—demands in some cases—to “open fire” on “the lands across the seas.” In October 1879 Booth wrote to his officers that God was using the Army “to mightily shake this whole land and to gather out of it a multitude of people to serve Him in the still mightier task of shaking the nations of the earth.” This second phase of Army missionary work—geographic, rather than social—began in three ways.

Spontaneous growth. There was spontaneous growth outside Britain; the most notable example came in the United States. In 1879 the family of a Salvationist silk worker named Amos Shirly immigrated to Philadelphia and promptly began to hold Salvation Army services in the streets and in hired halls. These services were successful, and many converts joined the Shirlys’ little, unofficial movement. Eliza Shirly, the daughter, who had been an officer in England, formally petitioned the General to send official “reinforcements” to take over the family’s growing mission in the name of God and The Salvation Army. In response to this plea, General Booth dispatched George Scott Railton and seven “Hallelujah Lasses,” who landed in New York City in March 1880 to begin official Salvation Army work in the United States. The process by which the Army launched its activities in Australia later in 1880, in Canada in 1882, and in New Zealand in 1883, was remarkably similar; in each case Salvationist immigrants started informal, little missions and wrote to London to request official adoption.

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