Ephesians 6.10-20 , John 6.56-69
The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 22 August 2021: Austwick
‘Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’
Week by week the Church celebrates in prayer some of its saints of the past. This weekend we’re invited to recall William and Catherine Booth, the founders of the Salvation Army. So my theme today is the Booths and their struggles with the powers.
William Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham to Samuel Booth and Mary Moss. His father was wealthy for the time, having successfully engaged the powers of the banks to set himself up that way. But - as you know - investments can go down as well as up. When the powers turned against Samuel, the family descended into poverty. In 1842, he was bankrupt. His school fees now unaffordable, aged thirteen, William was apprenticed to a pawnbroker.
At the pawnbrokers, the youthful William Booth saw again how the same powers which built up wealth for some sent many others into poverty, and began to understand the struggles and the needs of the poorest in society. Having found salvation in Methodism, Booth trained himself in writing and in speech, became a Methodist lay preacher, and followed a calling to be an evangelist: his one desire was to take up his armour as a soldier of God in the battle against the powers.
The powers-that-be in the Methodist Conference knew that William Booth’s passion and his best work was in running evangelistic campaigns, but despite this they kept assigning Booth to pastoral jobs he was unsuited for. In 1861, his request to be freed for full-time evangelism being refused yet again, Booth resigned from the Methodist ministry to become an independent evangelist. William described this as ‘a heartbreaking business’ for he and his wife Catherine, going out into the world with their four little children, ‘not knowing what to do or where to go’ or where their income would come from, but, he said, they ‘trusted in God’ as they went in the direction he led them.
Catherine’s struggle against the powers embraced a cause which is still a leading issue in our day: that of women’s equality. A Methodist by upbringing, having married William in 1855 Catherine became active in the work of the church he led at Brighouse, speaking in children's meetings, and, with William's encouragement, publishing a pamphlet, Female Ministry: Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel, which powerfully argued for women’s natural and moral equivalence with men, asserting that there was no scriptural reason to deny women a public ministry and maintaining that ‘what the Bible urged, the Holy Spirit had ordained and blessed and so must be justified’.
Partnering her husband in their work Catherine became a powerful preacher, reportedly ‘eloquent and compelling in speech, articulate and devastatingly logical in writing’. Many have agreed that no man of her era, including her husband, exceeded her in popularity or in spiritual impact. In her celebrated work with alcoholics she wore the helmet of salvation; in her work with converts the shield of faith; in her campaigning on women’s civil rights the belt of truth; and in her lobbying of Queen Victoria to seek legislation for safeguarding females, in the form of the Parliamentary Bill for the Protection of Girls - there Catherine displayed the breastplate of righteousness.
In the early 1860s William and Catherine set up The Christian Revival Society in London's East End, their struggle against the powers taking on a new form as they fed, served and preached to the city's most derided, forgotten and powerless people, including alcoholics, criminals and prostitutes. The general public, the Methodist churches, and their new evangelistic peers, might each have empowered, supported and encouraged the Booths, but they scoffed at them, turned their backs on them, and chose to disagree with their methods and distance themselves from their ministry.
Still, the Booths were not defeated by the obstacles others placed in their way. Dressed for the battle against the spiritual forces of evil in that time, they formed the Salvation Army.
William’s best selling book In Darkest England and the Way Out compared what was considered 'civilised' England with 'Darkest Africa' which in 1890 was considered poor and backward. Booth observed that much of the population of London and greater England were no better off in quality of life than those in the underdeveloped world. In this we find William wearing the belt of truth.
William proposed a strategy to apply the Christian Gospel to society’s social problems. We might call it his breastplate of righteousness. This involved establishing homes for the homeless, fallen women and released prisoners, agricultural training for the urban poor and emigrants, aid for the poor and alcoholics, poor men's lawyers, banks, clinics, industrial schools and even a seaside resort.
Always clear that the movement they founded was not a socialist or communist society, the Booths were unambiguous about their mission being inspired and grounded in the gospel; that, in walking the way of Christ, they wore shoes to proclaim the gospel of peace.
And they wore the shield of faith, to quench the flaming arrows of the evil one. Through the lean early years of their mission, against much opposition, The Salvation Army persevered. And their faith brought growth: by the early 1880s, the Army’s operations had begun to extend worldwide.
Wearing the helmet of salvation the Booths were clear that the only hope for mankind’s deliverance from misery, either in this world or the next, was ‘salvation by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ’, and that their work relieving temporal misery was just a means ‘to make it possible for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord.’
And finally, wearing the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, William Booth wrote of how he judged his own character ‘by the standard of truth set up in my soul by the Bible and the Holy Ghost’, which helped him test against hypocrisy and the temptation to follow his own route, not God’s.
Will you be encouraged by the story of the Booths? You and I may not see ourselves as warriors for the Lord battling each day against the powers of the world. But the struggles of life they encountered are the same sorts of struggles which engage us. Our world with its challenges big and small, is little different from the world in which they lived. And the faith which inspired them is the same faith we share. The armour of God - truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, the word of God - these are God’s gifts to us, which will save and protect us as we try in our own ways, in our own places, to live our lives faithfully and well. We can pray for them daily and they will come.
Yes, the power of God which gave the Booths strength for their struggle is the same power which is available to us, which we can receive as we pray - in whatever way we pray. For the gospel which the Booths declared boldly, is the same gospel through which Christ offers us salvation.
Note
This sermon is a rewrite of Ephesians 6: William Booth and his struggle with the powers, preached in Liverpool in 2009. I lament my exclusion of Catherine from that talk, for her struggle against the principalities and powers speaks at least as strongly as William’s into the challenges of our present time. Source materials:
- The Authoritative Life of General William Booth, by George Scott Railton, Chapter III: Lay Ministry, and Chapter V: Fight Against Formality (online).
- Wikipedia: William Booth.
- Wikipedia: Catherine Booth.
- Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, PROPER 16B.
- Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium and all of Wink’s writings on ‘the powers’: for an introduction to his vital work see Ted Grimsrud, Transforming the powers: the continuing relevance of Walter Wink. Open Democracy, 23 January 2018.
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