The Missionary Era · 1865-1906 · East London, then world
The Salvation Army
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About This Movement
William Booth, a Methodist preacher who could not settle inside a denomination, gave up his pulpit in 1861, and by 1865 was preaching in the streets of London's East End to people the churches were not reaching and did not particularly want. In 1878 his Christian Mission renamed itself an Army — with a General, ranks, uniforms, flags and brass bands to drown out the hecklers. And its officers were commissioned regardless of sex from the beginning, on Catherine Booth's insistence and the published argument she had made for it in 1859. It fed and housed as much as it preached: In Darkest England (1890) laid out a whole scheme of shelters, labour yards, rescue homes and emigration, and the Army counted everything it did, soul by soul and meal by meal. Mobs attacked it, magistrates fined it, and by 1906 it was working on every inhabited continent.
Sources
- William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890); Orders and Regulations; The War Cry (1879-) (primary) — The movement's own program, internal discipline, and weekly self-record.
- Catherine Booth, Female Ministry (1859) and Papers on Aggressive Christianity (1880); the Hallelujah Lasses' testimonies and women officers' records (primary) — Catherine Booth's own defense of women's preaching. The Army commissioned women as officers from the start, making this an unusually large-scale institutional record of women's ministry.
- The ordinary-facing record: corps statistics, converts' testimonies in The War Cry, rescue-home and slum-sisters casebooks (primary) — This is the Army's own statistical record, down to individual converts and meals served. Keep in mind it's the Army's own bookkeeping of the poor it served, not an independent account.
- The opposition record: Skeleton Army riots in press and court records; anti-Army pamphlets; the 1885 Eliza Armstrong case record (primary) — This is hostile and legal material - opposition press, court records, and the Eliza Armstrong case file - not the Army's own account.
- Pamela J. Walker, Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down (California, 2001), with Norman Murdoch, Origins of the Salvation Army (Tennessee, 1994) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, 'The growth of voluntary religion' (Bebbington) with 'Women preachers and the new orders' (Holmes & O'Brien) (reference) — Exact chapter numbers for these two chapters could not be confirmed.