The Salvation Army

Denomination·Founded 1865 CE·The Army works in 134 countries by its own count. It publishes country-by-country figures of officers, soldiers, adherents and corps in its annual Year Book rather than a single global membership headline; totals commonly cited run above a million and a half and are not independently audited. The number of people it serves through its social programmes is far larger and is a different thing entirely.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Salvation Army

Branch

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →
C Catherine Booth — who argued women into the pulpit before there was an Army. In 1859 she published Female Ministry: Woman's Right to Preach the Gospel, answering a preacher who had attacked women speakers, and then began preaching herself. Because of her, women have been officers on the same terms as men since the beginning, and a woman has held the office of General. Domain Female ministry, holiness preaching, the theology behind the movementStanding Called the Army Mother; her 1859 pamphlet is the reason the Army has always had women officers Meet them — context →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →
The shared center — held across the tradition
No baptism, no communion — not deferred, not private, simply not practised. The Army stopped in 1883. The reasoning was pastoral rather than theological: that the sign was being mistaken for the thing signified, that the sacraments had become an obstacle to converts who could not get past the water, and that a movement full of recovering alcoholics should not be passing wine. Go deeper — context →
Soup, soap and salvation — in that order, and the order is the doctrine. Booth's position was that you cannot preach to a man who is starving and that saving his soul while leaving him in the rookery is a fraud. In Darkest England, published in 1890, laid out a national scheme of shelters, farm colonies, labour bureaux and a missing persons service, and the Army built most of it. Go deeper — context →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death
The nature of reality

A world of souls to be reached, and a poverty that must be dealt with in the same breath as the preaching

After death

Resurrection, judgment, and the endless happiness of the righteous and endless punishment of the wicked — the eleventh doctrine says so plainly

Built on Hatchable