Tag Archives: Christianity

What I Have Learned from the Salvation Army

08 Thursday Feb 2024

Posted by in Holiness, Life

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Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to the Salvation Army Officers of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Division on the theme of “Holiness unto the Lord.”

If you are not familiar with the Salvation Army’s structure, officers in the Army are the equivalent of clergy in most churches. So, this was like a retreat for all of the active clergy in the Salvation Army serving in Arkansas and Oklahoma. I love the schedule at Officer’s Councils (at least at the Divisions in the Southern Territory where I’ve been a guest). There are typically two sessions of worship and teaching in the morning and then the rest of the day is unscheduled. 

It is a blessing for pastors to have time away where they have time and space in the schedule to truly rest, relax, and reconnect with each other. This is a rare gift and I’ve not experienced that kind of intentionality given to actual rest, rather than busyness and business at this kind of gathering.

The Salvation Army also does hospitality exceptionally well. My goodness! Unpacking this would be an entire post of its own. I’ll just give one example: one time the Army not only flew my entire family to be with me because it was my daughter’s 10th birthday, they also ordered a special cake and balloons that were waiting for her when we arrived. They have loved us so well!

I want to share a bit about my connection to the Salvation Army and what I have learned, so far. This is a bit vulnerable for me to share. I am not intending to boast in Kevin here. I am intending to give glory to God. I also hope it may help some of you recognize when the Lord provides similar places of blessing in your lives.

The Lord has blessed me with a special connection to the Salvation Army. It started at a moment when I did not expect it all. And it has truly been a sheer gift from the Lord.

The first invitation I received to speak at an Army event was as the Commencement speaker for Evangeline Booth College, in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of the summer in 2021. I went to that event very naïve. I knew a little bit about the Salvation Army. I knew, for example, that they were founded by Generals William and Catherine Booth in England. I also knew that they had strong connections to the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition and that their impressive social work came out of this heritage.

I also knew that Ezekiel Elliott sometimes jumped into a giant red Salvation Army kettle after he scored a touchdown on Thanksgiving back when he played for the Cowboys.

I didn’t know much more than that, however, when I spoke to the Cadets (students) who were graduating from Evangeline Booth College.

This first Salvation Army event came at a strange time in my life. I had just resigned a tenured faculty position at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. After stepping away from this position, I didn’t think I was going to be doing much of this kind of speaking anymore. Something about that moment brought focus, freedom, and courage to speak very candidly about the need for the Army to remember that its identity is first and foremost an army of salvation through Christ. They are also a people committed to holiness and full salvation. I pressed them to remember that they were raised up to be an intentionally strange people and that they should not lay aside the things that set them apart from the world to hope to receive the world’s approval.

For me personally, it felt like one of the most bold and true talks I had ever given. I think a piece of this was that I kind of assumed this was a one-off opportunity just before we moved away from Atlanta. 

It can be easier to be bolder with strangers than with friends.

In ways I could not have known, however, the Lord blessed me by giving me favor with the leaders of the Southern Territory who were there that day. I did not have the opportunity to visit with them at length at Commencement. But, that event led to further opportunities to minister within the Salvation Army and get to know its leadership.  

Since speaking at Evangeline Booth College, I have spoken at Bible Conference in the summer of 2022, Officer’s Councils in three different divisions (Kentucky-Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Arkansas-Oklahoma) and at a Holiness week at the College for Officer Training in the Eastern Territory in Suffern, NY.

Every single one of these experiences has been a tremendous blessing to me.

Last week brought some things together for me that I want to share:

First, I want to publicly thank the leadership of the Salvation Army for loving me and my family so well during a challenging time for us. Lt. Colonels Tom and Julie Louden, currently serving as Divisional Commanders for Kentucky and Tennessee, first invited me to speak at Evangeline Booth College’s Commencement. They also prayed for us many times throughout this season and even sent a care package to my kids at Christmas in 2022.

Just as encouraging to me, I have been surprised in the best way by the wisdom and moral courage I have found among many of the leaders of the Salvation Army, especially in the Southern Territory, where I have had the most engagement. I have often been looking for wisdom, moral courage, and leaders who provide godly spiritual covering for the people under their car. I have seen that in the leadership of the Southern Territory in ways that have strengthened and encouraged me.

Finally, I want to share what I think could most easily be misunderstood as boastful. But I am going to risk it in hopes of giving glory to Jesus Christ and his work in my life. I also want to share it here in case it helps you recognize the places of abundance in your life.

The Salvation Army has been for me what a dear friend of mine calls a “land of my anointing.” I did not see this coming or expect it at all. But again and again I have come back from Salvation Army events and said to my wife, “I feel like the Lord prepared this particular people for exactly what he has put in me.” I am learning to simply trust and receive this as a gift from the Lord. 

When I minister in Salvation Army contexts, I consistently receive feedback that things I’ve sensed or said have landed, often beyond what I could have expected. I think every time I’ve spoken at an Army event I have received testimony that I have spoken prophetically in ways I didn’t anticipate. This has been humbling to me because it has not come from my own wisdom or hard work. It has simply been the Holy Spirit’s work moving to bless his people.

These experiences have helped me learn to pay attention and intentionally listen for the Spirit’s guidance and direction anytime I preach or teach. It has been so much more fun working with the Spirit than trying to do it on my own!

I have seen the Lord move in powerful ways renewing the strength of officers to recommit to the fight for souls, press into deeper relational connectedness particularly through reclaiming Wesleyan class and band meetings, and even blessing officers with the gift of entire sanctification. I’ve also seen God’s heart for officer families.

I have been able to invite people to receive the gift of entire sanctification in multiple contexts. And the Lord has moved in miraculous and transforming ways. At the last Salvation Army event, I heard a powerful testimony to entire sanctification just before I preached on 1 Thessalonians 4:1-6 and 5:23-24. I then invited people to receive the gift of entire sanctification in faith that Jesus has already done everything that is needed to break the power of canceled sin in their lives. 

I used a specific image that was given to me by the Spirit in the moment and multiple people testified that the Holy Spirit fell on them in a powerful way through that image. This was especially humbling for me because when the image was brought to mind, I did not like it. It seemed corny to me. But I offered it because I felt the weight of the Spirit on it. 

What a great reminder that the Lord knows so much better than I do!

Two people have testified to me that they received entire sanctification through the Spirit’s work at that session.

God is so good!

I am learning to gratefully accept that the Lord in his wisdom has made the Salvation Army a place of particular anointing in this season of my life. It has been fun and a joy.

I don’t know how long this season will last. I am aware that I am not in control of any of it. I just know it has been a blessing to me in a rough stretch. I am thankful for what I have seen the Spirit do over these last few years. I have learned so much and am grateful for all of it.

Is there a place for you that consistently seems to be synced up with the Holy Spirit? Where there always seems to be fruit beyond your expectations in a way that is clearly separated from your performance or achievement? Look for your land of anointing. Is there a place, a people, or a topic, where the Lord consistently brings his blessing to your work?

When you see it, receive it in humble and joyful submission to the Lord.

I know for me it has been a gift to see such a concrete sign of how God has intended to use the things he has put in me for his purposes even before I could have anticipated any of it.

To God be the glory!

When Methodist Distinctives Aren’t

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Christian Living

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Methodists, particularly United Methodists, have a very bad habit of making sweeping statements about what makes the Methodist tradition distinct or unique. The main reason this is a bad habit is because when Methodists do this they are often claiming ownership of things that are basic to Christianity or that are at least at the heart of the values or beliefs of other parts of the Body of Christ. When Methodists do this, it makes us look oblivious at best, and obnoxious and arrogant at worst.

Since joining the faculty at SPU two years ago, I have had more interactions with Christians who are not United Methodists than I had previously. More than once, I have heard someone ask why Methodists claim something as a distinctive of their tradition when it is a basic Christian affirmation. Just yesterday, a colleague pointed out that Methodists do not have the market cornered on holiness.

I am trying to do a better job of being more humble and accurate in what I claim as a distinctive of my own branch of the Christian family tree. I have also become more sensitive to just how often Methodists make rather grandiose claims about the marvels of our own tradition.

Here are the three most common ways I have heard people describe Methodism’s distinctiveness that are not unique to Methodism.

1. Methodists believe in grace.

Asserting that grace is a distinct belief of Methodism would understandably be offensive to other Christians, because they believe in grace too! Ask your brother or sister in Christ from a non-Methodist tradition whether they believe in grace and let me know when you find someone who says no.

John Calvin talks extensively about grace in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Here is one example, that is particularly important for Methodists to read because it refers to the role of grace in both justification and sanctification:

Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life. (Institutes, III.XI.1)

Grace is very important to Methodism because it is very important to Christianity. When Methodists claim that we are distinct because we talk so much about grace, we look foolish to other parts of the Body of Christ and damage our own commitment to having a “Catholic Spirit.”

2. Methodists allow you to use your brain.

This affirmation, when I hear it, seems to do two things at once. It is a way that Methodists congratulate themselves on being so educated, open-minded, and tolerant. At the same time, it indirectly insults people whose views are less sophisticated than we perceive ours to be.

While there are some parts of Christianity that don’t affirm the role of theological education to the degree that most Methodists do, every classic Christian theologian I can think of would insist on using your mind to love God.

Faith seeking understanding did not originate with Methodism!

The way that I sometimes hear Methodists talk about our being unafraid to use our minds smacks of a kind of elitism and arrogance that is disappointing, particularly when coming from members of my own ecclesial family. And it is all the more problematic (and ironic) because it is sometimes used as a way to dismiss someone else’s beliefs without actually using one’s brain to make a reasoned argument as to why something is wrong and something else is right.

3. Methodists are connectional.

The ideas behind this are more complicated, but this is basically an assertion that Methodists are distinct because we are a church that is connected to each other in a variety of different ways (conferences, itinerant preachers, general boards and agencies, etc.).

Intentionally or not, this affirmation implies that other denominations are not interested in working together or connecting with each other. Though the polities are not the same, I imagine that the Roman Catholic Church, or the Eastern Orthodox Church, or the Anglican Church (and others) would see themselves as a connectional church in a way quite similar to Methodists.

Could it be that a distinctive of Methodism is taking credit for things that belong to the legacy of the global church? I hope not. Maybe every tradition succumbs to this temptation. As a Methodist, I have found myself wrestling with the pretension of my own tradition over the last two years.

Have you noticed the tendency of Methodists to claim basic Christian beliefs, values, or practices as uniquely Methodist? What other claims of distinctiveness that aren’t actually distinctive of Methodism would you add?

Consumerism: The Major Threat to American Christianity

05 Tuesday Feb 2008

Posted by in Book Review

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Now I understand Matt’s enthusiasm for Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church. (Check out this post and this post that Matt wrote.) I may try to write a more organized review later, but for now I just need to tell you to go out and get this book if you haven’t already read it.

Sometimes you read something that you just need to go ahead and post. Hirsch’s thoughts about the threat consumerism poses to Christianity is one of those things:

  • “I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism” (106).
  • “Christianity has become a mere matter of private preference rather than that of public truth” (108).
  • “This is our missional context, and I’ve come to believe that in dealing with consumerism we are dealing with an exceedingly powerful enemy propagated by a very sophisticated media machine. This is our situation, but it is also our own personal condition – and it must be dealt with if we are going to be effective in the twenty-first century in the West” (109).
  • “I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will” (111).

This section just hit me pretty hard. Consumerism has become so much a part of our culture, even within the church, that we often don’t even recognize it. Hirsch encourages the Church to remember that “discipleship is all about adherence to Christ” (106). And that should impact everything we do, and how we do it.

Finally, please know that this is not the essence of this book. There is so much more, this is just something that really hit me as I was reading it and wanted to put it out there.

So, what are your thoughts? Is consumerism the major threat to American Christianity? Is Hirsch overreacting?

Christian Responses to Colorado Shooting

13 Thursday Dec 2007

Posted by in Ministry

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I stumbled on some passionate discussion about the shootings last weekend in Colorado.  It helped me to think a bit more about what had happened.  I have to admit, I thought it was very surreal to hear the senior pastor of New Life Church calling the security guard who shot and killed the armed man (though an autopsy later revealed the fatal gunshot was his own) a hero.  I was also surprised that a basic premise of that church was that it was good to have an armed security guard on site, who was prepared to shoot to kill. It strikes me that it is a sad reflection on the church when the best response we have to offer to a sick and hurting world is to take out the sick and hurting people if they threaten us. I don’t have anything to add to the discussion beyond what has already been said, but I want to draw attention to Dr. Ben Witherington’s post, and a response to that post, which I am much less sympathetic to, at the methoblog.  In some ways, I can identify the most with Andrew’s post about the shooting at Thoughts of Resurrection, which mostly conveys deep sadness.  

Being Open-minded is Overrated

13 Thursday Dec 2007

Posted by in Ministry

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When I was getting ready to go to seminary, I remember many people giving me the standard don’t lose your faith pitch. I remember wondering why so many people were worried that learning something was going to damage my faith. I also remember thinking it was slightly disturbing that so many people seemed like they would be more comfortable with an uneducated pastor than an educated pastor. It felt like the unexpressed fear was really that their faith couldn’t stand up to close scrutiny.

I went to seminary figuring that I had a lot to learn. I wanted to get as much out of the experience as I could, so I decided to hear people out on every possible subject. I tried to start from scratch. The one exception was that I was going to consider everything as a Christian. In other words, my identity as a follower of Jesus Christ was not up for discussion, because by this point in my life it had become part of who I was – not something I was trying to intellectually dissect.

For the first year and a half of seminary, I felt like open-mindedness was the number one virtue that was preached to me. The biggest sin you could commit, or so it felt, was to view what someone else was doing with a clean conscience as wrong or a sin. Now I want to be clear: I learned a lot during my time in seminary. Taking the time to really try to understand where people were coming from on different sides of controversial issues was very important to my development as not just a pastor, but more broadly, as a Christian. (Though, I also have to admit that I am sure I didn’t do a perfect job of understanding where people were coming from on either side of many controversial issues.)

Nevertheless, I did get to know and become friends with many different people with many different experiences. These were positive experiences for me. But they were not life-changing or life-giving. I know many people would disagree with me on this, but for me, trying to understand where everyone else was coming from was not causing me to grow in my relationship with God. In many ways it was an important step in learning to love my neighbor, but I don’t think that just accepting someone where they are at is the goal of Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself. (My goal for my own life is certainly not just to accept myself where I am at.)

The most transformative experience for me in seminary was the result of taking Methodist History and Doctrine and reading John Wesley’s sermons. I realized that this was a person who expressed much of what I intuitively felt about God. I always had a deep sense that the Christian life was a life of trying to give all that I knew about myself to my best understanding of who God was (though even that articulation has been strengthened by Dr. Doug Strong, one of my mentors in seminary). This meant that I expected to grow in my faith throughout my life because my understanding of God and where I was spiritually were both continually changing.

Around the same time that I took Methodist History and Doctrine, I was invited to join a Wesleyan band meeting. This was a group of five men who met weekly to confess their sins to one another, to vocalize the forgiveness we find in Christ, and to pray for one another. It was a powerful group that brought Wesley’s understanding of how to practice Christian faith to life for me. So I came to realize that I was Wesleyan theologically, and I was Wesleyan practically. Or, I could embrace a Wesleyan doctrine and a Wesleyan discipline.

What does all of this have to do with being open-minded? These experiences have led me to the conviction that it is crucial in the postmodern matrix to be able to identify where you are standing. Many people seem to get confused by all of the options that face them and just sort of exist in this plurality of choices. But for me at least, I found that I only had something to say, I only could confidently say I had a contribution to make, once I knew where I was coming from.

In other words, there is a sense in which close-mindedness may be more difficult and more important than being open-minded in the twenty-first century mainline church. Now, I would not take this to extremes. We are called to love our neighbor, even when we disagree with them. We would never harm those whom Christ died for with our words or our actions. But, do you see what I am saying? I think there is a sense in which we need to know where we stand before we have much of anything to say. I feel like I have something to offer when I talk with another Christian, or someone who is not a Christian because I am speaking not just as Kevin, but I am trying as best as I can to represent the Wesleyan tradition, which I am convinced is the best path to the life that God created us for.

Sometimes in our efforts to be open-minded we forget that we actually believe something is true about the world.  It seems that in far too many places the church has lost its passion for transforming the culture that it is sent in mission to, and I can’t help but wonder if that is because we have become so open to anything and everything that we have lost our voice.  We just don’t know that we have anything to say.

What are your thoughts or reactions? I would love to hear your response.

Owning the Authority of Scripture

12 Wednesday Dec 2007

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I started reading Ted Campbell and Michael Burns’ Wesleyan Essentials in a Multicultural Society yesterday. In the second chapter, “Biblical Authority in a Relativist World” I came across this excellent challenge:

We need to ask ourselves, though, if we in fact own the authority of Scripture over our own lives and over the lives of our congregations. A practical test is to ask “Do you expect to be changed when you read the Bible?” If one does not really expect to be changed by reading the Bible, then for all our talk about biblical authority, we do not really own it. To own the authority of the Bible is to face the reality, every time we open it, that God will have a fresh, new message for us, one that may challenge us very deeply (21).

I think Campbell and Burns effectively point out how often we as Christians talk about the authority of Scripture without actually behaving as if Scripture really did have authority over our lives. At a very basic level, if Scripture is to have authority over our lives, we need to at least spend time reading it so that we know what it actually says.

I don’t know about you, but this passage convicts me not just to say that the Bible is authoritative, but actually to own its authority over my life.