Salvation Army

Salvation Army. In 1865 William Booth and his wife launched the ‘Christian Mission to the Heathen of our Own Country’ in Whitechapel (London), and this mission expanded into the Salvation Army (1878). It was both a religious community and an evangelistic agency. Its doctrines were those of evangelical revivalism: sin, conversion, justification by faith, hell, and heaven. At the ‘holiness meetings’ of the army, the emotional scenes and sudden conversions were reminiscent of early methodist revivals. The aim was to reach out beyond the established churches to working-class non-worshippers at their own cultural level. The officers and soldiers (i.e. members) of the army were themselves working men and women, who had experienced conversion and practised self-denial. At their open-air meetings, with bands and banners and sales of the War Cry, they sometimes met with violent opposition. From the late 1880s the army turned to social action, establishing slum posts, night shelters, and schemes for assisting the unemployed. The military organization of the Salvation Army ensured strict discipline of the members under the dictatorship of Booth and (later) his family. A tribute to the success of the Salvation Army was the foundation in 1882 by the Church of England of its own Church Army.

John F. C. Harrison