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Joan Kroc's 1.5 billion dollar bequest recently put the Salvation Army on the front pages of many newspapers (and raised important questions about the potential effects of wealth on Christian organizations). But we didn't need the reminder—we've known all about the Army for a long time.

Or have we?

We tend to associate them with Christmas kettles, brass bands, and the upright, do-gooder stance gently mocked in the Loesser musical (and Marlon Brando movie) Guys and Dolls. Some of us have had more personal contacts: my wife and I still remember fondly the atmosphere of caring and peace in the Army-operated maternity hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where our first three children were born. And in our younger, poorer years, we both sported the latest student chic off the racks of the "Sally Ann" thrift shop on Halifax's grimy Gottingen Street.

But do we really know this high-profile national organization? It seems the Army has become such a cultural fixture that the New York Times was actually shocked to discover that it is a Christian denomination whose first allegiance is to its Lord and whose first mission is evangelism.

But these commitments have never been far to find. They were the founding principles of this Wesleyan church, and they drove its tremendous nineteenth- and twentieth-century growth.

Apostle to the masses
William Booth—the Salvation Army's co-founder with his wife, Catherine—was born on April 10, 1829, in Nottingham, England. As Norman Murdoch put it in our Issue #26: William & Catherine Booth, "The Booths were at best laboring class, with little education. His father, 'a Grab, a Get,' by William's definition, died when William was just 14. By that time William was helping to earn the family income by working as a pawnbroker's apprentice. Mrs. Booth ran a small shop in a poor Nottingham district where she sold household wares."

Converted at 15 by Wesleyans (British Methodists), Booth soon became caught up in the soul-saving fervor of visiting American Methodist revivalist James Caughey and the bold and systematic approach of Caughey's compatriot, evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. Murdoch tells how Booth set out with a group of friends to evangelize Nottingham's poor. "They held nightly open-air addresses, after which they invited people to meetings in cottages. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, visitation of the sick and of converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) all anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations thirty years later."

In the 1885 publication All About the Salvation Army, William Booth himself sketched the next phase of his ministry in the third person:

General Booth … became a minister of the Methodist New Connexion, and traveled in a great many parts of England, seeing great success in winning souls, until the year 1861, when he resigned his position as a regular minister, and gave himself up, with his wife, to evangelistic work. After this their labours were very largely owned of God, thousands being received into the various churches as the result. In the year 1865, Mr. Booth was led, by the Providence of God, by no plan or idea of his own, to the East of London, where the appalling fact that the enormous bulk of the population were totally ignorant and deficient of real religion, and altogether uninfluenced by the existing religious organizations, so impressed him that he determined to devote his life to making these millions hear and know God, and thus save them from the abyss of misery in which they were plunged, and rescue them from the damnation that was before them.

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February (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48