History & overview · every faith gets one
A church with ranks, a brass band and no sacraments at all.
Founded by William and Catherine Booth in the East End of London in 1865 and reorganised on military lines in 1878, with a General, commissioners, officers, soldiers, uniforms and a flag. It is a Wesleyan holiness church that decided in 1883 to stop practising baptism and communion entirely, on the grounds that the outward sign was being confused with the inward reality. It works in 134 countries and is better known for its social work than for the fact that it is a denomination.
The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined The Salvation Army in two case studies. In Case Study 5, on four boys homes in the Eastern Territory — Alkira at Indooroopilly and Riverview in Queensland, and Bexley and Gill Memorial in New South Wales — public hearings were held in January and February 2014 and the report was published in January 2015. The Commissioners found that The Salvation Army had not protected the boys from sexual abuse in each of the four homes, that more than a hundred claims had been received, that boys who reported abuse were in most cases punished, disbelieved or accused of lying, and that the organisation's policies and procedures were inadequate to oversee managers who were in some cases themselves involved in the abuse. Case Study 33 examined children's homes in the Australia Southern Territory. The Salvation Army apologised, participated in the Commission and joined the National Redress Scheme.
Why it is filed this way
The Salvation Army is a church that most of the public experiences as a charity, and it does not correct the impression very hard. Its officers are ordained ministers, its soldiers are church members under a covenant, and a corps is a congregation. It is a member of the World Council of Churches and of national evangelical alliances.
The founding
William Booth, a Methodist New Connexion minister who had left over the refusal to let him work as an itinerant evangelist, began preaching in a tent on a disused Quaker burial ground in Whitechapel on 2 July 1865, and with Catherine Booth built the East London Christian Mission. In 1878, correcting a proof that described the Mission as a volunteer army, Booth struck out volunteer and wrote salvation. The name and the military structure followed within months, and by 1880 the movement had reached the United States, Australia and Ireland.
Its founding is bound to William Booth and Catherine Booth — 1865 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world of souls to be reached, and a poverty that must be dealt with in the same breath as the preaching.
The divine. The Trinity, in the eleven doctrines adopted from Methodist New Connexion sources — orthodox Wesleyan theology, unremarkable in content and unusual only in the absence of any sacramental practice attached to it..
Death and after. Resurrection, judgment, and the endless happiness of the righteous and endless punishment of the wicked — the eleventh doctrine says so plainly.