As with many of these articles, hear me out before you tell me how outraged you are that I would say such a thing.
Let me start by asking you four questions:
1. What is your Sunday service called? Is it called a Holiness Meeting or “Worship Service” (or perhaps even Church Service)?
2. Is Holiness lived and taught in your corps?
3. Is Holiness a focal point of your corps and it’s ministries?
4. What is the thrust of your local mission in your corps/appointment? Is Holiness a portion of this?
If you can’t honestly say “Yes” to these questions, then perhaps we ought to see where the grave of holiness is located in your building. The Salvation Army was a large part of the Holiness Movement. I do not believe that our numeric and spiritual growth stemmed from obedient officers or because we had a “tighter” core group of leaders in our Army world, instead I believe we as an Army, recognized and believed in the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives. I think the crux of our present age is that fewer and fewer soldiers have this realization any longer. Dare I say this is true for Officer and Soldiers in the corps. I am not questioning our salvation, for I think this remains intact, but I am questioning whether or not we believe in an Almighty God who still performs miracles in the worst of sinners?
Brother and Sisters in Christ, we cannot live and die by our seeker’s registry. This is a tremendous indication of changed lives, but it MUST not stop there. We ought not to simply celebrate the statistical measure of our seekers at the mercy seat. We ought to be discipling those newly saved souls. This is where I believe the Army has fallen short and is in dire need of changing. There has to be more than just converting people to Christ…once they get up from the mercy seat what do we do with them? Do we have measures of accountability? Do we have saints who can mentor and disciple them? Salvation at the altar is only the beginning!!
(Let me also interject for a moment that statistics can become a poor surrogate for a disengaged style of leadership. What I mean by this is, statistics by themselves can be a helpful tool when used correctly, but a harmful tool when context is not considered).
I digress…
The Holiness Movement is dead because we have worshiped at the church of numbers and figures instead of at the altar of transformation and grace. We have lost our movement and exchanged it for a growing organization dependent upon successful programming and business operations. Some of this cannot be helped. A growing Army requires more guidelines and policies to govern its structure, but at the same time I fear we have sacrificed our very soul in an effort to remain our country’s top charity or top nonprofit…but perhaps we have lost something much more vital within our DNA as an Army of Salvation.
The Holiness Movement is dead because we have exchanged The Holy Spirit’s leading at times for ambition, power and dollar signs. Many of our sacred spaces have been relegated to tiny chapels with no vision for growing souls and more vision for feeding stomachs. Please don’t misunderstand me, we do indeed reach lives for Christ by first feeding and clothing people, but what if we have become so focused on the feeding and clothing people that we have neglected the salvation? What if we have, in essence, told Jesus to wait in the vacant chapel while we filled the box of food for families? What if we have forgotten our hearts to God while we have been reaching out to man?
A Resurrection? 
I pray that we can bring the dead back to life!
I pray that we would wake up and recognize the deep need of a Holiness Army once more. I pray that we would wake up and recognize that in all of our strength and power and might we are nothing apart from the Holy Spirit’s leading. In my American slang, perhaps we have “grown too big for our britches” and in our pride and even arrogance we have begun to lead ourselves instead of allow the Holy Spirit to lead us.
Make no mistake, the enemy, The Father of lies is perfectly content in watching us self-destruct in our polarizing visions and missions and efforts. Satan would celebrate in our death as a movement in exchange for another social service organization or social club. But with God all things are possible! With His power we can come to life again in the places of dormant holiness and floundering mission. We do not need more meetings to do this. We do not need more programs to institute this. What we need are soldiers willing to commit to prayer and discipleship. We need soldiers committed to living lives of holiness, which is very contrary to the society around us today! We need an Army mobilizing on Holiness and not just a march in uniforms. There has to be an inward change before we can externally represent His presence in the streets!!
Lord resurrect our Army!
Resurrect this passion in me!
I want to be Your reflection
Resurrect your presence in me!
Something more for our Army world to ponder today!
Now, tell us what YOU think, leave your comments, questions and snide remarks below.
**Disclaimer: The thoughts and opinions expressed here are that of the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and opinions of The Salvation Army. Reader discretion is advised.**
We need to rid ourselves of the Church of the worship of music!
We as an Army are so good at creating programs.
everything, we can sit back and watch since they don’t need me anyway.” If you have doers in your corps, they will quickly become frustrated and perhaps seek somewhere else that they will be used. Stop micromanaging and start delegating leadership and other duties to others in your corps! Begin to create the environment of ownership.
As someone once pointed out everything is spiritual, there should be no compartmentalizing of our various tasks and that of holistic ministry. I know a financial planner in our community who makes a point of praying for every client that comes to visit him. He has even prayed with me there in his office. These prayers that he offers are not pithy cliche prayers either, but one can feel the presence of God while he prays for you and the present circumstances that you are facing. He considers his office not only the place he draws his paycheck from, but a chapel in which he ministers. Perhaps we have not made our officers our chapels of ministry. Perhaps we get so bogged down by what is required of us that we forget to include God in those spaces in order to make them sacred. Everything we do from the most mundane of things to the most important things ought to be considered ministry – not some laborious task to get accomplished.
When we pray for each segment of our officership and appointment, we will find that our hearts are attuned to the moving of the Holy Spirit. If everything we do is spiritual, then why do not pray in such a way? When we intentionally pray and make this a spiritual discipline we will be better equipped to make the necessary plans that our ministries so desperately need. 
Don’t stumble into your day or week having now idea what you wish to accomplish. Don’t wait until the last minute to pray for our congregation and those you minister to. Keep them in the forefront of what you are doing, after all, the paperwork and reports are all because they are vitally important to you and to God. Do not make haphazard plans at the last minute, throwing things together and hoping they all pan out…do yourself a favor and your soldiers a favor and make intentional, prayerful plans that will form and shape lives for Christ.
I catch myself doing this, and I recognize my own conviction here:
emphasis on the “important stuff” that consumes all of your time. I would imagine nearly 99% of us officers are guilty of this at one time or another. Show up and be present. Ask God to give you His eyes to see the needs around you. Spend time drinking coffee (or tea or water) with those who frequent your soup kitchen. Invest yourselves in the lives of people and do not stop with those who wear our uniform and within whom we already know. Step out of your comfort zone and be available to listen, serve and love.
This step goes hand in hand with #3.
“Dear Salvation Army” (How fitting I thought). First she expressed deep gratitude for us being there for her even when she was hurting herself with the abuse of alcohol and drugs. She was a meth addict and because of her addiction she committed some crimes and ended up being incarcerated. She continued to describe her dire situation of homelessness and utter hopelessness. She was more imprisoned outside on her own then she is now. Her letter ended with these words: “Because of your soup kitchen, food pantry and your clothing donations, I was able to survive. Your church gave me life everyday – Thank you for showing me, loving me, and sharing with me the love of Jesus Christ.”
We cannot simply declare that everything we do in the corps will be the place of my sacrificial living – NO! It is all or nothing. God doesn’t want our sacrifices in one area while other areas of our lives are still not surrendered. That’s like saying to your spouse, “I will be faithful to you in this city, but I can’t promise anything when I leave this city.” How can we love the Lord with all of our hearts when we compartmentalize our relationship to Him? If we are to be soldiers of the faith who are daily living sacrificial lives, we have to subject ALL of our lives under the sovereign, perfect rule of Christ. Consistency is not easy, and there will be constant struggles to bring these areas of our lives under control. But rest assured we have One who is with us – The Holy Spirit!
what we declare – and this takes work! We have to roll up our sleeves, so to speak, and intentionally, moment by moment surrender our wants and desires to God. We have to declare Thy Will be done, instead of my will. The work done on our knees in prayer before the Almighty will set the momentum going forward. If we neglect this spiritual discipline of prayer, we will jeopardize our entire sacrificial existence. This is a merging of our identities with that of Christ’s. When we do this, we are essentially saying “I want to be Imago Dei” I am not just imitating Him, I want to be Him in every way. There will be moments of stumbling. We will experience great stress in temptation, because surely the Father of Lies will begin to see how dangerous His people will become to his devious plans on earth. We will experience adversity, days of defeat, weakness – but these are only symptoms of us dying to our old-self.
hearts, minds and soul. You know that when you have been married for a long time – you and your partner take on the mannerisms of each other…sometimes you even begin to resemble one another. Holiness lived-out with the greatest of intentions and devotion will produce men and women of God who deeply resemble Christ in every way. -This is what Sacrificial Living looks like and is the evidence of a commitment to Holiness on the deepest of levels. Dare I say, but we as an Army have yet to even scratch the surface of real, tangible Holiness amongst its ranks. We talk a good game, but I fear we are no where near it yet.
troubling is that holiness is not being lived out or made into something real and tangible for the world to see. The notion of being set-apart is both vital and necessary for the purpose of entire sanctification. Being set-apart means that we wash the feet of those who have only experienced religion with strings attached. For we are not a religion, we are a movement that preaches about this holy relationship we can have with the Almighty! We are a movement (or at least we used to be) that lived out holiness and preached it from our pulpits. If this is missing in our corps and in our witness then perhaps we have lost a step and are no longer a moving, passionate movement…but instead could it be that we are static and floundering about trying to define our identity apart from Holiness?
General Frederick Coutts once said: “To pray together is to be shielded from evil, not only from the perils which beset the body, but also the dangers that assail the soul”
I believe that if that we are to experience a revival again as a movement, it will only come when we begin to take our prayer lives more seriously. This spiritual discipline is vital to both the corporate worship setting as well as the personal one done in those private moments. Let me ask you this, how often to you pray for your fellow soldiers and officers? How often do we lift up our concerns before the Almighty and continue to wait on Him? In our fast paced lifestyles we have grown impatient and we lack attention to prayer. We need more prayer warriors in our Army and less prayer worriers. We need authentic, vulnerable moments in our pews as much as we need real, genuine times of solitude in our homes devoted to prayer.
Somewhere along the line did we get ahead of Christ?
As an officer I know how often I have climbed into bed bone tired and sore with many things yet to accomplish and left for the following day. It is exhausting work and I pray we never miss the point of it all. I pray that we never forget the real reason that we celebrate Christmas – because all of this busyness can certainly consume the Christ-mas if we allow it to. Have we begun to dread this holiday, this advent season? Have we become workaholics and have we placed this about our worship of the Almighty? Most likely not, but there is certainly the danger here. We want to succeed in our goals, we want to work hard and accomplish much…but is God present in all of these goals and in our striving for success?
A song recently pulled me up short, and caught my attention.
1. Have an Identity apart from the Army
Another mark of a great Officer is the capacity for compassion and grace. This is closely related to the care of “Others”! Compassion and grace can often be set aside of efficiency and “getting the job done”. When officers run through their administrative duties as well as their pastoral duties, the first thing that seems to go is the capacity to slow down and care for people. Being a great officer means that one will take the time to hear about other people’s problems, to show compassion and to be involved in the lives of their corps members or those they lead. If an officer wants others to follow them, it won’t be conducted through declarations of power and asserting authority, it will be done by gentleness, kindness, compassion and genuine care. The great officers that I have known possess this certain type of seemingly endless patience and grace, that kind that I can only hope to achieve. Admittedly, I am often impatient, short with people, and sometimes my capacity for compassion is lacking…But I don’t want to remain here, no, not at all! I aspire (as I’m sure you do too) to be like those Officers that have displayed this remarkable characteristic to me (us).
Pastor's Ponderings 