The Strategy of a Missionary Evangelist: How William Booth Shaped the Salvation Army’S Earliest Work at Home and Abroad Andrew M

The Strategy of a Missionary Evangelist: How William Booth Shaped the Salvation Army’s Earliest Work at Home and Abroad Andrew M. Eason hen William Booth died, in 1912, a major newspaper this missionary framework, but at least Railton acknowledged Win England remarked, “The world has lost its greatest the vital role that Booth had played in this area. missionary evangelist.”1 Although eulogies frequently border The same cannot be said for subsequent treatments of the on hyperbole, there was truth to the paper’s assertion. Few of Army’s founding father, which have paid surprisingly little Booth’s Victorian contemporaries had done more to promote attention to the principles governing Booth’s approach to mis- the cause of Christianity around the globe. Most notably, he had sionary work. Non-Salvationist biographers from Harold Begbie played the pivotal role in transforming a fledgling East London to Frank Prochaska bear some of the blame for this neglect, since missionintoaninternationalreligious they have frequently portrayed Booth empire that, at the time of his death, as an ill-educated man driven more or “promotion to glory,” claimed a by instinct and practicality than by presence in fifty-eight countries and theory or religious doctrine.4 Yet even colonies.2 Consequently, the worD academic works written by Salvation- “missionary”wasafittingadjectiveto iststhemselveshavegenerallyfailedto place in front of “evangelist,” captur- articulateBooth’smissionarytenetsor ingthepassionandessenceofBooth’s the sources behind them, as is evident life and ministry within Protestant not only in the valuable books on the evangelical circles. The development Army’s first leader by historian Roger and expansion of the SalvationArmy Green,5 but also in the scholarly stud- may have been a collective affair, ies of Salvationist foreign missions by involving the sacrifices of countless Paul Rader, David Rightmire, Brian male and female Salvationists in Tuck, and EdwarD McKinley.6 I seek Great Britain and many other lands, to address this shortcoming in the but there can be little doubt that the existing literature by arguing that organization’s founding father was Salvationistworkathomeandabroad its foremost missionary. was shaped profoundly by Booth’s In this capacity, William Booth missiology, which was formulated proved to be an avid student of mis- and expressed with considerable sionary methods. While lacking the consistency between the mid-1860s formal training or extensive knowl- and the late 1880s. edge of a present-day missiologist, he was no unthinking combatant in the Principles of William war against sin and human misery. Booth’s Missiology On the contrary, Booth’s approach to missions reflected principles quite At the heart of William Booth’s evidently mined from the Bible and approachtomissionswerefourimpor- borrowed from others. The Salvation tant principles: evangelism, cultural Courtesy of The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, London Army’s first general was not an origi- adaptation, self-support, and self- William Booth departing for Palestine, 1905 nal thinker, but a discernible system propagation. These precepts, which lay behind his missionary activities, the substance of which was clearlyshapedandguidedBooth’searliestpersonalministry,soon passedontohisownfollowers.GeorgeScottRailton,aprominent went on to frame the work of all Salvationists around the globe. early Salvationist, alluded to something of this methodology shortly after his leader’s death: “Each extension of TheArmy into Evangelism. First and foremost, the Army’s founding father foreign lands might be reported as a fresh achievement of the advocated a missionary strategy based solely upon evan- General, for, although he never, of course, himself went as leader, gelism.7 The conversion of the lost was the raison d’être of he invariably chose the leaders, and so wisely directed the . Booth’s work, and such a motivation only intensified as his methods which were needed to adapt the work to various races inner-city mission was transformed into an army of salva- and circumstances.”3 Little has been written about the details of tion. As Booth exclaimed in 1879: “We publish what we have hearD and seen and handled and experienced of the worD of AndrewM.Easonisassistantprofessorofreligionand life and the power of God . soul saving is the great purpose director of the Centre for Salvation Army Studies at and business of our lives.”8 In support of this conviction the Booth University College, Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is Army’s leader went on to argue that only those engaged in the author of Women in God’s Army: Gender and the task of rescuing the souls of men and women from the Equality in the Early Salvation Army (Waterloo, fires of hell could be considered real missionaries.9 Critical of Ont., 2003) and coeditor of Boundless Salvation: conventional missionary methods that wed the Gospel message The Shorter Writings of William Booth (New to various aspects of Western culture, he advocated evange- York, 2012). —[email protected] lism alone in the foreign field. The role of the missionary was October 2014 183 simply to lead sinners to Christ, to convert people after the and chapels, acculturation was a prominent feature of Booth’s fashion of the apostles. Condemning the civilizing mission as earliest ministry on the British home front. costly, inefficient, destructive, and unbiblical, Booth argued Although accommodation to popular culture invited charges that it was up to converts to “clothe and house and educate ofsacrilegefromecclesiasticalquarters,theArmyleader’sresponse themselves.”10 At this stage in his life and ministry, he held to his Christian critics was typically the claim that “all our teaching stubbornly to the belief that the salvation of the soul was the and operations are continuously justified by direct reference to the only legitimate goal of foreign missions. Scriptures.”16 Above all, Booth considered the principle of cultural Refusing to separate the world into civilized and uncivi- adaptation to be consistent with the central aim of the Bible, the lized regions, Booth urged the church to view the missionary salvation of the lost. Here in particular he invariably turned to the task in more scriptural terms. Drawing inspiration from the words of 1 Corinthians 9:22, instructing his followers to become apostle Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill (Acts 17:22–31) and plea “with the Apostle [Paul] all things to all men in order that you for oneness recorded in Galatians 3:28, the Army’s founding may win them to your Master.”17 For Booth, accommodation was father rejected the notion that a Westerner was fundamentally a legitimate tactic when the end in view was redemption.An army of salvation was called upon to utilize all kinds of aggressive and sensational measures in its efforts to win the world for Christ. So Instead of divisions along long as a practice squared with the authoritative and infallible Word of God, it was viewed as acceptable. the lines of race, wealth, Booth’s understanding of cultural adaptation also owed and education, Booth something to Charles Finney, whose transatlantic revivalist campaigns and influential books inspired many Christians in encouraged Christians theEnglish-speakingworldduringthenineteenthcentury.While to divide the world’s there is no evidence that Booth ever met the famous American, he had taken the time to read Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of inhabitants into the friends Religion (1835) while employed as a pawnbroker’s assistant in and enemies of Christ. Nottingham.18 InterestinthisrevivalisttextwassharedbyBooth’s wife, Catherine, who declared it to be “the most beautiful and common-sense work on the subject I ever read,” in one early let- different from an Easterner.11 Just as every person was essen- ter to William.19 From Finney the Booths learned that Christians tially “vile and devilish” when alienated from God, each was should not be slavishly bound to traditional forms of revivalism, a brother or sister when joined to Christ. Cutting across the which relied more on divine readiness than on human initiative barriers of ethnicity and culture, this Pauline understanding and planning. Christians should employ innovative strategies to of the world gave no privileged place to the West. Instead of awaken those asleep in their sins, measures that might capture divisions along the lines of race, wealth, and education, Booth the attention of the unsaved.20 Claiming that God had set down encouraged Christians to divide the world’s inhabitants into no prescribed ways of reaching the spiritually lost, Finney urged the friends and enemies of Christ. For this reason he even experimentation and adaptation tailored to the specific audi- toyed with the idea of abandoning the language of heathenism, ences one wished to reach with the Gospel. This evangelistic which often was used by Victorians to denigrate the peoples and pragmatic mind-set, born of the Arminian desire to see all of non-Western lands. Painfully aware that so-called Christian people won for Christ, not only guided the Booths’ adaptive England had more than its fair share of sin and degradation, efforts at home but also became an equally distinctive part of the he found prevailing discourse about the natives of foreign Salvation Army’s modus operandi as it moved beyond Britain lands to be unfair and unscriptural.12 While never managing in the early 1880s.21 to discarD “heathen” terminology altogether, Booth’s pursuit of evangelism alone represented a significant departure from Self-support. Adaptation was aided and abetted by a thirD aspect the Victorian civilizing mission. of Booth’s missiology: an avowed commitment to self-support. By this he meant that “a large proportion of the money required Cultural adaptation. A second important principle of Booth’s to maintain and carry on the [Army must be] supplied by its own missiology was cultural adaptation. Outstanding Salvationists members.”22 Such a policy, incidentally, had been characteristic from Frederick Tucker in India to Gunpei Yamamuro in Japan of the home front even before the organization’s first missionar- added flesh to the bones of this particular practice, but Army ies arrived overseas.

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