Is the Salvation Army a Church?

1. Is the Salvation Army a Church?

The Salvation Army is a church. Its own mission statement describes it as an international movement and an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church, its local congregations are called corps and meet on Sunday for worship with preaching, hymns, prayer and an appeal for conversion, and its full-time ministers are the officers who wear the uniform. The charity shops, the shelters, the disaster canteens and the Christmas kettles all grew out of that church, and Salvationists understand them as one mission with two hands.

The confusion is understandable and the Army has largely accepted it. Most people meet The Salvation Army at a soup line, a thrift store or a red kettle outside a supermarket, where nobody is preaching at them. The uniform reads as a charity uniform. The word "Army" reads as an organisation rather than a congregation. A body that spends its public life serving people who have not asked about its theology ends up known for the service. Salvationists tend to treat that as a compliment.

Three things follow from taking the Army seriously as a church. Its doctrine is a Protestant doctrine in the Wesleyan holiness line, inherited from Methodism and traceable back through John Wesley. Its members are members of a denomination, sworn in under a flag, with a covenant they sign. And its most unusual feature is a theological decision rather than an oversight: The Salvation Army performs no water baptism and celebrates no Lord's Supper, and it has held that position deliberately since 1883.

The Salvation Army publishes its own figures annually in The Salvation Army Year Book, which reports work in more than 130 countries together with counts of officers, senior and junior soldiers, adherents and corps. Those totals are compiled by the Army from its own territories and are not independently audited. Where this page gives numbers, they are the Army's own reported figures.

2. William and Catherine Booth in the East End

The Salvation Army began in 1865, when William Booth started preaching in a tent pitched on a disused burial ground on the Mile End Waste in Whitechapel, in the East End of London. He called the work the East London Christian Mission, later simply The Christian Mission. The audience was the population that Victorian church life had failed to reach at all: dockers, costermongers, prostitutes, the chronically drunk, families in one room, people who would never have crossed the threshold of a respectable chapel and would not have been welcome in the rented pews if they had.

William Booth (1829 to 1912) came from Nottingham, was apprenticed to a pawnbroker at thirteen after his father's business failed, and converted as a teenager under Methodist preaching. He was ordained in the Methodist New Connexion and served as a circuit minister, but the Connexion wanted him settled in a circuit and he wanted to be a travelling evangelist. He resigned in 1861 and worked as an independent revivalist until the East End work took hold. His theology at the tent was Methodist theology, and the crisis he preached for was conversion.

Catherine Booth (1829 to 1890), born Catherine Mumford, was the theological mind of the partnership as much as its conscience. She was a serious student of Scripture and of Wesley's writings from childhood, and in 1859 she published a pamphlet defending a woman's right to preach, written in answer to a minister who had attacked the American holiness teacher Phoebe Palmer and later circulated under the title Female Ministry. Her argument was that Scripture nowhere forbids a woman to preach and that the texts usually cited against it address disorder in a particular congregation rather than gender as such. She began preaching herself the following year, was in demand as a preacher in respectable West End halls, and raised much of the money that kept the mission alive. Her position was written into the movement's structure: women could hold any office and any rank.

Why the Booths Aimed at the Poorest

The Booths worked on a simple observation about their own society. The churches of Victorian England were organised around a class of person who owned a decent coat, could read a hymn book and could pay for a seat. The people the Booths cared about had none of these, and were made to feel it. So the mission met in theatres, penny gaffs, market squares and old warehouses; it used street bands to draw a crowd, because a brass band could be heard over traffic and outside a pub; and it put converts to work preaching within weeks of their conversion, on the principle that the person best placed to reach a drunkard is the drunkard who was rescued last month.

That method produced ferocious opposition. Through the early 1880s a loose movement calling itself the Skeleton Army attacked Salvationist marches in towns across England, breaking up meetings, throwing stones, rotten food and worse, and injuring large numbers of Salvationists. Publicans had an obvious interest in the disruption, since Salvationists were persuading their customers to sign the pledge, and some of the mobs were openly financed. Salvationists were also prosecuted for obstruction and imprisoned. They kept marching.

3. The Military Turn of 1878

The Christian Mission became The Salvation Army in 1878, and the change of name brought with it the whole apparatus of ranks, uniforms, flags and orders that the world now recognises. The Army's own account of the moment is that William Booth was reading a proof of the annual report which described the Mission as "a volunteer army", that his son Bramwell objected that he was a regular soldier rather than a volunteer, and that Booth struck out "volunteer" and wrote "salvation". Within months the Mission's conferences had given way to a command structure with Booth as General.

The military metaphor was chosen for reasons the Booths could state plainly. An army moves. It can be sent where it is needed and does not wait for a congregation to issue a call. It expects obedience, which allowed a movement of newly converted working people with almost no formal education to act decisively without long committee meetings. It expects sacrifice, which suited a mission whose members were being stoned in the street. And a uniform in Victorian England did something no sermon could do: it gave a laundress or a docker a recognised public identity and the confidence to speak in a market square.

The Flag, the Crest and the Music

The Army flag carries a crimson ground, a blue border and a yellow star bearing the motto "Blood and Fire". The colours were given a plain catechetical meaning: crimson for the blood of Christ shed for sinners, yellow for the fire of the Holy Spirit, blue for the purity of God. The crest sets the letter S, for salvation, against the cross of Christ, ringed by a sun for the light of the Spirit, crossed swords for the fight, a crown of glory, and the same motto. Salvationists are enrolled under the flag, married under it and buried with it, so the flag does much of the visible work that other traditions give to a church building.

The brass band belongs to the same instinct. The first Salvation Army band was recruited in Salisbury in 1878 when a builder and his sons brought their instruments to protect the preachers from hecklers, and bands quickly became standard equipment. Booth is widely reported to have asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, and Salvationist songwriters set gospel words to popular melodies without embarrassment. The result is one of the largest bodies of brass band music in the world and a musical tradition that is genuinely the Army's own.

Governance After the Founder

William Booth held autocratic authority as General and named his own successor, his son Bramwell Booth, who took command in 1912. That arrangement broke down in 1929, when the Army's High Council, a body of senior officers, removed Bramwell Booth from office on grounds of ill health and elected Edward Higgins in his place. The Salvation Army Act of 1931 settled the change in law. Since then the General has been elected by the High Council rather than appointed by a predecessor, and the office is held for a term. International headquarters remains in London.

4. Officers, Soldiers and Corps

The Salvation Army's structure translates ordinary church offices into military terms, and the translation is exact enough that the vocabulary can be read straight across. A corps is a local congregation with its own hall, its own Sunday worship and its own programme of pastoral and social work. A division is a group of corps under a divisional commander. A territory is a country or group of countries under a territorial commander. Above them all sits international headquarters in London and the General.

What Soldiers Promise

The Soldier's Covenant is a written commitment signed in public. It includes assent to the eleven doctrines, a promise of faithfulness to Christ, support of the corps by giving and service, and a set of specific abstinences: no alcoholic drink, no tobacco, no non-medical use of addictive drugs, no gambling, no pornography, and no dealing with the occult. The abstinence pledges are not treated as conditions of salvation. They are treated as the obligations of a soldier who works among people destroyed by exactly those things, and who cannot credibly ask an alcoholic to stop while drinking himself.

Women Officers From the Start

Women have been eligible for every rank in The Salvation Army since its founding, which in 1878 put it far ahead of nearly every other body in Christendom. Catherine Booth's argument in Female Ministry settled the question before the Army existed, and the early Army sent out large numbers of young women officers, known in the press as Hallelujah Lassies, to open new corps alone in hostile towns. Evangeline Booth, the founder's daughter, commanded the Army in the United States for three decades and was elected General in 1934. The Catholic Church takes a different view of ordained ministry for reasons set out in the guide to the Catholic priesthood, and the difference matters to the sacramental question below, since Booth's refusal to create an office his women officers could not hold was one of his stated reasons for dropping the sacraments entirely.

5. The Eleven Doctrines

The Salvation Army's statement of faith is a list of eleven articles, fixed in its Deed of Constitution of 1878 and printed in the back of its songbook, where every soldier can find them. They were not composed from nothing. The Christian Mission had adopted a shorter list in the 1860s, expanded it as the movement grew, and settled on the eleven in the deed that created the Army. Assent to them is part of what a soldier signs.

Stated in the Army's own order and substance, the eleven doctrines affirm:

1. That the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God, and that they alone constitute the divine rule of Christian faith and practice.
2. That there is only one God, who is infinitely perfect, the Creator, Preserver and Governor of all things, and who is the only proper object of religious worship.
3. That there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, undivided in essence and co-equal in power and glory.
4. That in the person of Jesus Christ the divine and human natures are united, so that he is truly and properly God and truly and properly man.
5. That our first parents were created in a state of innocency, and that by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness, so that all have become sinners, totally depraved, and justly exposed to the wrath of God.
6. That the Lord Jesus Christ has by his suffering and death made an atonement for the whole world, so that whosoever will may be saved.
7. That repentance toward God, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit are necessary to salvation.
8. That we are justified by grace through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and that he that believeth hath the witness in himself.
9. That continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in Christ.
10. That it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, and that their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
11. In the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, the general judgment at the end of the world, the eternal happiness of the righteous, and the endless punishment of the wicked.

The eleven doctrines as summarised here follow the wording of The Salvation Army's Deed of Constitution of 1878, reproduced by the Army in its Handbook of Doctrine and printed in the back of The Song Book of The Salvation Army.

What a Catholic Notices in the List

A Catholic reader will recognise most of it. Articles two, three and four are the faith of Nicaea and Chalcedon, which places The Salvation Army firmly inside trinitarian Christianity and clearly apart from the bodies covered in the guide to nontrinitarian churches. Article six is Arminian and universal in scope, and Catholics agree that Christ died for all. Article eleven affirms the resurrection of the body and a final judgment, which Catholics confess in the creed every Sunday.

Three points differ. Article one makes Scripture alone the rule of faith and practice, where Catholic teaching holds that Scripture is handed on inside a living Church with a teaching office charged with interpreting it faithfully, as set out in the guide to Sacred Tradition. Article five uses the language of total depravity, which Catholics reject in favour of a nature genuinely wounded by original sin yet retaining real freedom and a capacity for good under grace. Article nine states that continuance in salvation depends on continued obedient faith, which is close to Catholic teaching and directly opposed to the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints; on this point the Army and Rome stand together against Calvinism.

The most telling feature of the list is what is missing. There is no article on the Church, no article on ministry, and no article on the sacraments at all. A statement of faith that says nothing about baptism was drafted by people who had decided the question was not going to define them.

6. Wesleyan Holiness: The Theology Underneath

The engine of Salvationist theology is Wesleyan holiness, the teaching that God does more than forgive a sinner and intends to make him actually holy in this life. William and Catherine Booth were Methodists formed in the nineteenth-century holiness revival, and the tenth doctrine, that it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, is the Army's whole spirituality compressed into a sentence.

John Wesley taught that after justification, in which God forgives the sinner and receives him, there is a further work of grace he called entire sanctification or Christian perfection: a cleansing of the heart from the disposition to sin, so that love of God and neighbour becomes the settled spring of a person's actions. Wesley denied that this meant freedom from ignorance, mistake or temptation, and he insisted it could be lost. The holiness movement of the 1800s, in which Phoebe Palmer was a leading American teacher and a direct influence on Catherine Booth, pressed this into a definite second crisis, an experience to be sought, claimed and dated, often at a public altar.

The Army built its meetings around that pattern. A Salvationist expects two decisive moments: conversion, when a person kneels at the mercy seat and is saved, and sanctification, when a person kneels again and offers everything to God without reserve. Holiness meetings were held on Sunday mornings and salvation meetings in the evening, and the structure survives in many corps. The tenth doctrine quotes Paul directly.

Where Catholic Teaching Agrees

Catholic teaching agrees with a great deal of this, and often puts it more strongly. The universal call to holiness is Catholic doctrine, taught by the Second Vatican Council in a whole chapter of Lumen Gentium, which states that all the faithful of every rank are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity. The Church holds that grace really transforms the person rather than merely covering him, that charity can grow without limit, and that the saints are the evidence. Catholics also agree with Wesley that a soul can fall from grace, which the ninth doctrine says.

Two differences are worth naming. Catholic teaching does not promise a single datable experience that removes the inclination to sin, and it treats sanctification as the work of an entire life, ordinarily completed in purgation after death for those who die in God's friendship still imperfect. And Catholic teaching locates the growth of that holiness in the sacramental life: the grace of baptism, the forgiveness of confession, the Eucharist as food for the journey. The Army wants the same destination by another road. What that road leaves out is the subject of the next two sections. For the underlying Catholic account of grace and human cooperation, see the guides to salvation, faith and works and free will.

7. Why the Army Set the Sacraments Aside

The Salvation Army does not baptize with water and does not celebrate the Lord's Supper, and this was a decision taken in 1883 rather than a practice it began with. The Christian Mission had celebrated communion in its meetings through the 1870s, and some early Salvationists were baptized. William Booth set both aside across the movement in 1883, and the Army has held that position ever since. Understanding the decision means taking the reasons seriously in the order Salvationists give them.

The Salvationist Case, Stated Fairly

• Salvation depends on Christ, and no ceremony can add to it. The Army's seventh and eighth doctrines make repentance, faith and regeneration the necessary conditions of salvation, and justification the work of grace received through faith. Nothing in the list makes a rite necessary. Salvationists reason that a thing Scripture does not make necessary should not be made a boundary marker of a church.
• Converts were resting on the rite. Booth's pastoral experience was of a Victorian religious world in which enormous numbers of people had been baptized as infants, took communion at Easter, and lived lives untouched by any of it. He judged that the rites had become a substitute for conversion, and that the surest way to stop a man hiding behind a ceremony was to remove the ceremony and leave him with the question.
• Wine and the rescued drunkard. The Army's converts included very large numbers of people delivered from alcohol at real cost. Putting a cup of wine in their hands at the front of a hall, in the emotional heat of a meeting, was judged pastorally cruel and dangerous. This argument weighed heavily at the time and Salvationists still cite it.
• Baptism divides, and the Army could not afford it. The mission was drawing converts out of Anglican, Methodist, Baptist and Congregational backgrounds whose churches disagreed sharply over whether to baptize infants or believers and whether to pour or immerse. Booth wanted a movement in which that argument could not start.
• No office his women officers could not hold. Every church around the Army reserved the administration of the sacraments to an ordained ministry that women could not enter. Booth had women officers commanding corps. Rather than create a two-tier ministry in which a woman could lead a congregation and not preside at its table, he removed the presiding.
• The whole of life is sacramental. The positive form of the Army's position, and the one Salvationists prefer to lead with, is that grace is not confined to two ceremonies. Every meal can be a communion with Christ, every act of obedience a participation in his death and rising, and the whole of a life offered to God is the sacrament. Salvationists call this sacramental living.

Two points of fairness are owed here. The Salvation Army has never taught that the sacraments are wrong, that other churches sin by celebrating them, or that a baptized Christian is worse off for it. Its official position is that it does not practise them, that it holds no judgment against those who do, and that Salvationists who wish to receive communion in another church are free to do so. And the Army has revisited the question about itself. Its International Spiritual Life Commission, which reported in the late 1990s after two years of work, examined the sacramental question directly, affirmed the Army's continuing position, and encouraged Salvationists to explore what a sacramental understanding of the whole of life demands of them.

How This Differs From the Quaker Position

The Salvation Army arrives at roughly the same practice as the Religious Society of Friends by a very different route, and the difference is instructive. Friends set aside the outward rites from the beginning, in the 1650s, on the theological ground that Christ's inward baptism has superseded the outward one; Robert Barclay argued that case from Scripture in his Apology. The Army kept the rites for eighteen years and then dropped them on largely pastoral and practical grounds, while keeping preaching, hymns, a written creed, a commissioned full-time ministry and a strong visible ceremonial of its own. Friends removed the ceremony; the Army replaced it. The Quaker argument, with the Catholic reply to it, is set out in the guide to Quaker beliefs and meetings, and readers comparing the two bodies should read both pages together.

8. The Catholic Answer on the Sacraments

The Catholic answer to The Salvation Army begins on the Army's own ground. The first of the eleven doctrines makes the Scriptures alone the divine rule of Christian faith and practice. Judged by that rule, baptism and the Lord's Supper are both commanded by Christ in words that a reader has to work to soften, and they are practised without hesitation by the apostolic Church that the New Testament describes.

Christ Commanded Both

At the Last Supper Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it with an instruction attached.

Paul hands the same command on to a Gentile church twenty-odd years later, describes it as something he received from the Lord, corrects the Corinthians for celebrating it badly, and tells them that as often as they eat this bread and drink the cup they proclaim the Lord's death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). A church that has stopped doing it has stopped doing something the New Testament shows the apostles doing and telling their congregations to keep doing. Paul's remedy for the Corinthian abuses is instruction and self-examination rather than suspension of the rite, and that is the precedent for Booth's pastoral problem.

The command to baptize is equally plain, and it closes Matthew's Gospel: the risen Christ tells the eleven to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). Peter's first answer to the crowd at Pentecost is repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins (Acts 2:38). Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God (John 3:5), holding water and Spirit together in one sentence.

The Text That Answers the Pastoral Argument

The sharpest passage is Acts 10. Peter is preaching in the house of Cornelius when the Holy Spirit falls on everyone listening, and the Jewish believers present are astonished to see Gentiles praising God. If the inward work makes the outward rite unnecessary, the story should end there.

Peter has just watched the inward baptism happen in front of him and he calls for the water anyway. Nothing in his reaction treats the rite as a formality that a genuine conversion has made redundant. The Catholic reading of that scene is the ordinary one: Christ gave his Church visible signs that really do what they signify, and the visible gift of the Spirit makes it impossible to withhold them. The Catechism states the principle directly, that the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us (CCC 1131).

Why God Uses Matter

Underneath the individual proof texts lies the reason Catholics find the sacramental question so serious. God has chosen to reach human beings through matter, and he chose it definitively when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Christianity is the religion in which God took a body, was carried in a womb, used spit and clay on a blind man's eyes, ate fish after his resurrection and let a doubting apostle put a hand in his side. A God who does that is unlikely to consider water, bread and wine beneath him. The sacraments carry the logic of the Incarnation forward into the life of the Church, and they answer the way human beings are actually made, as creatures of body and soul who learn through what they can see, taste and touch.

Taking Booth's Objections One at a Time

• On rites without conversion. Booth's diagnosis was largely correct and the Catholic Church says so in its own words. The Catechism teaches that the sacraments confer the grace they signify by the power of Christ's action, and immediately adds that their fruits depend on the dispositions of the one who receives them (CCC 1128). A sacrament received without faith or repentance does not sanctify a person against his will. The Church's remedy is to demand conversion of the one who approaches, which is why confession stands between grave sin and communion, and why Paul tells the Corinthians to examine themselves before eating.
• On the recovering alcoholic. This is a real pastoral problem and the Church has a real answer to it. Catholic teaching holds that Christ is wholly present under either species, so a communicant who receives only the host receives the whole Christ, and in ordinary parish practice most Catholics receive only the host. A person in recovery is under no obligation to touch the chalice. The concern is genuine and the remedy does not require abolishing the sacrament.
• On the divisions over baptism. The disagreements Booth wanted to avoid are real, and they run between believer's baptism and infant baptism and between immersion and pouring. The Catholic Church's position resolves them by accepting far more than most parties expect: any baptism with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is valid, whoever performs it, whatever the mode. The guide to baptism sets out what the Church holds the rite to do.
• On the ministry of women. Booth's instinct that no member of his movement should be treated as second class was a good instinct, and Catholic teaching agrees that baptismal dignity is equal and that the priesthood is a service rather than a rank. The Church reserves priestly ordination on grounds it holds to be a matter of Christ's own choice rather than of worth, and it has honoured women as Doctors of the Church while denying them ordination. The argument is set out in full in the guide to the Catholic priesthood. Removing the Eucharist from a whole denomination is a very heavy price to pay for a question about who presides at it.
• On sacramental living. Catholics should agree with almost everything Salvationists mean by this. The whole of life is meant to be offered, work and meals and sleep included, and the Church calls the laity to consecrate the world from within. That offering is fed from somewhere. The Eucharist is what the Second Vatican Council calls the source and summit of the Christian life, the meal that makes the rest of the offering possible.

None of this puts Salvationists outside God's mercy, and Catholic teaching is explicit about that. The Church teaches that God has bound salvation to the sacraments while remaining free himself, and that those who seek the truth and do God's will as they know it, without having received baptism through no fault of their own, are entrusted to his mercy (CCC 1257 and 1260). The Second Vatican Council teaches that elements of sanctification and truth exist and operate outside the visible bounds of the Catholic Church, and that the Spirit of Christ uses separated communities as means of salvation (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). Applied here, that means the Salvationist's conversion, holiness and service are real works of God. What Catholics say alongside it is that Christ left his Church means of grace he intended to be used, and doing without them is a real loss. The framework is explained in the guide to Catholic ecumenism.

9. The Mercy Seat and What Replaces the Rites

A Salvation Army hall has no altar and no font, and the empty space where they would be is occupied by a plain wooden bench across the front of the platform, called the mercy seat or the penitent form. People come out and kneel at it. That bench is the visible centre of Salvationist worship, and the Army's ceremonial life is organised around it in much the way a Catholic parish is organised around the altar and the tabernacle.

The name comes from the mercy seat of the Old Testament, the golden cover of the ark of the covenant where the blood of atonement was sprinkled and where God promised to meet Moses and speak with him (Exodus 25:22). Salvationists use it for conversion, for the offering of a life in entire sanctification, for the settling of a decision, and for grief. Officers make an appeal at the end of a meeting and wait. The Army is clear in its own teaching that kneeling at the mercy seat is not a sacrament and confers nothing by itself, and that the bench has no power. It is a place to pray where other people can see you do it.

Dedication, Swearing-In and the Other Ceremonies

The Army also has ceremonies at the points in life where other churches have sacraments, and the parallels are close enough to be worth listing plainly.

The table shows something worth noticing about the Army's decision. A body that removed the two sacraments Christ commanded did not thereby become ceremonially bare. It produced flags, uniforms, ranks, covenants signed in public, swearing-in under colours, dedications, brass bands and a bench that functions as an altar. Human beings appear to need visible, bodily, public acts at the turning points of a life, and a church that removes the ones Christ gave will grow others in their place. Catholics can make that observation gently, since it supports the Catholic argument rather than embarrassing the Army: God made us the kind of creature for whom outward signs matter, which is a large part of why he gave us sacraments.

10. In Darkest England: The Social Work

The Salvation Army's social work began as evangelism and grew into one of the largest charitable operations in the world. Its founding document is William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out, published in 1890 with substantial help from the journalist W. T. Stead. The book set out a costed national scheme for the destitute of England: city colonies with shelters, food and workshops, a farm colony to train people in agriculture, an overseas colony for emigration, a missing persons bureau, a legal aid department, a bank for the poor and a labour exchange. Some of it was built, including the farm colony at Hadleigh in Essex, and much of the rest shaped the Army's work for a century.

Booth's argument in the book is one Catholics should find familiar. He wrote that it is useless to preach salvation to a man with no food and nowhere to sleep, and that the Christian who wants to reach a starving person must first deal with the starving. The Army calls this soup, soap and salvation, in that order. Booth refused to treat the physical and spiritual work as separable, and he refused equally to let the social work become a substitute for preaching Christ.

Four Things the Army Actually Did

• The match factory at Bow, opened in 1891. Match workers using white phosphorus contracted phosphorus necrosis of the jaw, a disfiguring and often fatal industrial disease. The Army opened a factory using the safer red phosphorus, paid better wages, and took journalists and members of Parliament through the East End to see the conditions in the other factories. The campaign contributed to the abandonment of white phosphorus in the British trade.
• The rescue homes and the age of consent. Catherine Booth's daughter-in-law Florence Booth ran homes for women leaving prostitution. In 1885, working with W. T. Stead, Bramwell Booth took part in the investigation that became Stead's newspaper series on the traffic in young girls in London. The public outcry helped force the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Stead and Bramwell Booth were prosecuted for the method used to demonstrate the trade; Booth was acquitted and Stead was imprisoned.
• The Christmas kettle. The red kettle began in San Francisco in 1891, when a Salvation Army officer, Joseph McFee, set out a crab pot on the Oakland ferry landing to collect money for a Christmas dinner for the poor. The idea spread across the United States and then internationally, and it remains the Army's most recognisable public act.
• Disaster relief and addiction recovery. The Army's mobile canteens and shelters at fires, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes date back to the Galveston hurricane of 1900 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the pattern has continued since. Its residential addiction recovery centres, funded in the United States largely by the network of thrift stores, are among the largest such programmes run by any private body.

The programmes described here are documented in The Salvation Army's own published histories and archives, in William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), and in the public record of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 and the Eliza Armstrong trial. Figures for the Army's present scale come from The Salvation Army Year Book, which the Army compiles from its own territories.

The Catholic Judgment on the Work

Catholic teaching supplies every reason needed to admire this and to imitate it. Christ identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner, and makes the final judgment turn on how they were treated (Matthew 25:31-46). The Church teaches that the poor have a claim in justice rather than only in charity, and that the goods of creation are destined for all. Catholic social teaching, set out in the guide to Catholic social teaching, says everything required to produce a match factory at Bow. Catholics who want to see what the doctrine looks like when it is acted on with total seriousness can look at their own tradition, at figures like Mother Teresa, and they can also look honestly at the Booths and admit that a small Methodist splinter with no money got there first in the East End.

11. Charity or Church? What the Answer Changes

The question most people actually type is whether The Salvation Army is a charity or a religion, and usually there is a practical reason behind it. Somebody is deciding whether to donate, whether to volunteer, whether to take a bag of clothes to the shop, or whether the family's Christmas kettle money is funding a church. The honest answer is that The Salvation Army is a church that runs a charity, that the two are legally and financially organised in various ways in different countries, and that the mission is single.

In the United States The Salvation Army is recognised as a church by the Internal Revenue Service and files as a religious body rather than as an ordinary public charity. In the United Kingdom the Army operates through registered charities and is at the same time a member church of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. In most territories it holds both identities at once, because in law a church usually is a species of charity. Nothing is hidden in this. The Army's public materials describe it as a church, and the officer serving soup is an ordained minister in uniform.

What That Means for a Donor

Three things follow for anyone deciding what to do with a donation. The money supports a Christian organisation whose staff pray with the people they serve and whose officers preach. Service is not conditioned on conversion, which is the Army's stated policy and its long practice: people are fed and housed without being required to attend anything. And the same body that runs the shelter runs Sunday worship down the corridor, which some donors regard as the whole point and others would rather know in advance. Knowing it in advance is the reader's right.

The Controversies, Named Plainly

The Salvation Army has been publicly criticised, mainly over its handling of sexuality and its position as a religious employer. Its official position holds that sexual activity belongs within marriage between a man and a woman, and it has been accused by critics of discrimination in employment and in services, which the Army denies and answers by pointing to its non-discrimination policies in service provision. The Catholic Church holds a comparable position on marriage and faces comparable criticism, so Catholics are in no position to use that against the Army. A separate and heavier matter is that the Army, like the Catholic Church and like many bodies running children's homes in the twentieth century, has faced abuse claims and inquiries in several countries relating to institutions it operated. Any Catholic writing about another church's failures should say plainly that his own church's record on this is worse in scale and better documented, and the site treats it directly in the guide to the Church scandals.

12. What Catholics Should Take From the Army

A Catholic can hold two conclusions about The Salvation Army at once without strain. The first is that the Army is missing something Christ gave, and the missing thing is central rather than marginal. The second is that the Army does several things Catholics are commanded to do and frequently do badly, and that watching a body with less doctrine act on more of it should produce imitation rather than defensiveness.

Three Things Worth Copying

The Army goes to the people who will never come to it. Booth's insight was that the Church of his day had arranged itself for people who were already comfortable, and that reaching anyone else meant leaving the building. A parish that waits for the poor to walk in has already lost the argument. Catholic parishes have the doctrine of the Mystical Body and the whole tradition of the corporal works of mercy behind them, and the question is whether anyone in the parish is on the street with it.

The Army expects a decision. Salvationist worship builds to a moment where a person is asked to do something, come forward, kneel, sign, hand over a life. Catholic teaching is emphatic that conversion is required, that faith must be personal, and that habit is a poor substitute for it. A Catholic who has received every sacrament and has never once consciously given his life to Christ has something to learn from the mercy seat, and the sacraments themselves are what make that decision possible rather than optional. The reasons people drift away from parishes without any such moment are examined in the guide to why people leave the Church.

The Army does not use the poor as a marketing exercise. Its social work is enormous and its self-promotion is modest, and the officer running a night shelter is usually paid very little and living on site. That combination is a rebuke to the strand of religious broadcasting the site examines in the guide to the prosperity gospel, and it is a standard for Catholics too.

And the Thing to Say Honestly

The Catholic conviction is that Christ gave his Church the Eucharist as his own body and blood and told the apostles to keep doing it until he comes, and that baptism is the door he named. A church that has laid both down has laid down the ordinary means by which God feeds and washes his people, whatever it has built in their place. Salvationists are not being accused of bad faith in this. They made the decision for pastoral reasons in a specific crisis in 1883 and have honoured it since. The Catholic answer is that the crisis called for reform of how the sacraments were received rather than the removal of the sacraments, and that Paul faced the identical problem at Corinth and chose reform.

One thing in all this presses on the reader rather than on either institution. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and readiness is required now rather than later. A person reading this page has a real question in front of him about whether he is receiving what Christ actually left his Church, and putting that question off is the only genuinely dangerous option on the table.

Related Topics