The General: William Booth

We will be “ringing the bells” again this year and I thought it would be good for us to know a little history behind the Salvation Army.  By the way, there is still some slots left to sign up. 

William Booth was born in economic and spiritual poverty, yet he founded a worldwide organization dedicated to their eradication.

by Norman H. Murdoch

Few would deny William Booth the title “The Prophet of the Poor.” He is best known today as founder and first general of The Salvation Army, an organization that exists to bring a better life to the poor through both social and spiritual salvation.

Booth urging sinners to repent. Booth preached in naphtha-lit tents on disused burial grounds (shown here), haylofts, rooms behind a pigeon shop—anywhere to fulfill his famous words, “Go for souls and go for the worst!”

Pawnbroker’s Apprentice

Yet Booth did not come to this high appellation by a direct route; he was not to the manor born. Rather he was born in relative poverty, in Sneinton, a Nottingham, England suburb, on April 10, 1829. One biographer described William’s father, Samuel, as “an illiterate speculative builder.” His mother, Mary Moss Booth, was Samuel’s second wife. The Booths were at best laboring class, with little education. His father, “a Grab, a Get,” by William’s definition, died when William was just 14. By that time William was helping to earn the family income by working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice. Mrs. Booth ran a small shop in a poor Nottingham district where she sold household wares.

Life-Changing Influences

After his father’s death, a Wesleyan couple invited William to attend chapel. William’s family had not been religious, although they had had William baptized at the Sneinton parish church (Anglican) two days after his birth. William’s conversion at age 15 cannot be fixed in time or place. Various biographers describe it as coming in the streets of Nottingham, in the Broad Street Wesleyan Chapel where evangelist Isaac Marsden was leading a revival, or in a small prayer meeting. William did recall a long siege of conviction after he had made a profit in a transaction with a friend. He remembered the relief he felt when his guilt was removed.

Soon after his conversion William had another life-changing experience: hearing American revivalist James Caughey, who led “a remarkable religious awakening” at Nottingham’s Wesleyan Chapel. The rush of souls to hear the gospel led Booth to see that “soul-saving results may be calculated upon when proper means are used for their accomplishment.” Booth went on to make a lifelong commitment to the scientific revivalism methods of Charles G. Finney.

With Caughey’s example fresh in mind, Booth and a group of friends set out to evangelize the poor of Meadow Platts. They held nightly open-air addresses, after which they invited people to meetings in cottages. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, visitation of the sick and of converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) all anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations thirty years later.

Mission to Military Movement

In 1854 William was ordained in the Methodist New Connexion. By 1861 he found that “settled ministry” did not suit him, and he resigned. He and Catherine became itinerant evangelists in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands, Britain’s “burned-over” districts.

Booth had seen no career for himself in urban evangelism when he left the New Connexion. But an invitation for Catherine to preach in London in 1865 led him to accept support from lay-run East London missions as a temporary solution to his vocational quandary. He soon organized his own East London Christian Mission which, by 1870, resembled a Methodist society. His mission failed to attract the “heathen masses,” however. So in 1878, he energized it by giving it the name “salvation army,” an idea he borrowed from the successful British Volunteer Movement in which thousands of working-class men found that civilian soldiering during their leisure hours gave them new status.

The Salvation Army struggled to win converts in London’s East End and other urban areas in which Irish mobs attacked Wesleyan intruders into their neighborhoods. So Booth again found a popular idea that solved his problems. Women Salvationists, working in slums since 1883, convinced him that reform activities would save sinners from a heathen urban environment and breathe new life into his mission.

Booth agreed, which ultimately led him to become both the leader of a worldwide evangelistic mission and a renowned social reformer. At the time of his death on August 20, 1912, the Salvation Army had become a family-run Christian empire, with seven of the Booths’ eight children (one daughter was retarded) taking leadership positions. (Four of these were women, and one, Evangeline, became the Army’s fourth general in 1934.) William Booth bequeathed to his son Bramwell the generalship of the Salvation Army, a religious and social service organization whose 15,945 officers “occupied” 58 countries and colonies. Today, following the pattern established by the first general, the Salvation Army marches on with over 25,000 officers in 91 countries.

Bibliography:

Christian History Magazine-Issue 26: William & Catherine Booth: Salvation Army Founders (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1990).