Salvation Army Founder's Day

Salvation Army Founder's Day

When the Salvation Army celebrates Founder's Day, it marks the birthday of William Booth, the remarkable Englishman who began the organization.

William Booth was born on April 10, 1829, in Nottingham, England. His father, not very successful in his own trade as a builder, wanted a secure future for his son and therefore apprenticed him to a pawnbroker to learn what was a lucrative profession in 19th-century England. Behind the pawnbroker's counter, young Booth was barraged by situations of human misery and economic suffering; it was an experience that influenced his whole life's work. Another factor, equally important, helped mold the man and his career. When he was about 15, Booth experienced religious conversion in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. He felt particularly drawn to preaching, and while he was a pawnbroker's apprentice he served locally as a Methodist lay preacher.

At age 19, his apprenticeship over, he sought work in the pawnshops of Nottingham. Failing to find a position, in 1849 he finally moved to London, where he found employment with a pawnbroker in Walworth. There, too, he dedicated his hours after work to preaching. However, he wanted to be involved in more evangelical work than was possible in his duties as an official lay preacher, so he began holding open-air meetings, a move that did not sit well with his local minister. Booth subsequently joined the Methodist New Connexion, the first group to secede from the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and after completing his studies he was ordained as a minister in 1858.

Catherine Mumford (1829–1890) was one of the group that left the original Methodism, and she and Booth were married in 1855. Catherine Mumford Booth was as remarkable as her husband. Brought up by religious parents, she was schooled in the theology of the day. Because of poor health in adolescence, she received most of her education at home. The invalid youngster grew into a strong-minded woman, an untiring social worker who spent her time and energies for and among the poor and championed social causes such as women's rights. Her belief that women had the right to preach the Gospel was outlined in the cogent pamphlet “Female Ministry” (1859), and she set an example by beginning to preach in her husband's church at Gateshead, in the north of England, in 1860. Her talent for oratory, combined with her religious convictions and her dedication to social causes, later made her a well-known speaker at meeting halls in London's West End. It was because of her urging and support that William Booth gave up his secure life as a Methodist minister to embark in 1861 on a career of itinerant evangelism, which he felt was his true vocation.

After four years of traveling and preaching throughout England, Booth severed all connections with formal religion, largely because his plan for taking the Gospel message to city slum dwellers was too radical for his church to accept. He became an independent evangelist and settled with his family in London in 1865. Invited to speak at open-air and tent meetings in London's East End, a slum district notorious for its crime rate, human degradation, and misery, Booth made his first appearance there on July 2, 1865. The Salvation Army consequently regarded that day as its founding date.

Before long, Booth was regularly leading outdoor meetings in the East End and getting a tremendous response. His religious zeal and genius for organization instilled in the people he reached the desire to reach out and help others in turn. His movement, first called the East London Revival Society, soon became known as the Christian Mission. In 1878, it was renamed the Salvation Army and carefully organized with military ranks, uniforms, flags, bands, and books of orders and regulations, with Booth as its first commander.

It was Booth's initial intention simply to bring the Gospel to the millions of people who had never attended any church. Most of all, he wanted to reach those people who, he thought, might not be welcomed by “respectable” church congregations. Soon, however, he realized that his preaching could not be optimally effective while people lacked the basic essentials of food, shelter, and warm clothing. Therefore, the work was expanded from street preaching to the organization of social reforms and the establishment of food and shelter depots, children's homes, and agencies for helping discharged criminals. Soon people began to refer to members of Booth's army as the purveyors of “soup, soap, and salvation.”

Booth really did reach for “lost souls.” Before he was scheduled to speak at a rally, he would send out word to the far reaches of the slum areas, “Come, drunk or sober.” Salvation Army members would go to street corners, as they still do, and there play drums, cornets, and tambourines to attract audiences. As crowds gathered, the group would preach the Gospel and offer hope to the people in the audiences.

For many years, the Salvation Army was greeted with a great deal of hostility, which came from the more conventional forms of organized religion and also from established society and government. Some of the opposition even came from the poor whom Booth was trying to help. The army's street preachers were kicked, beaten, and showered with eggs, and the very people who bore the brunt of these attacks were sometimes placed in jail for disturbing the peace. Despite all obstacles, however, the organization finally prevailed. Its numbers grew vastly, as did the variety of work in which members engaged, endeavoring to meet human need in any form.

Soon, the Salvation Army was carried to many nations. In 1880, George Scott Railton and seven women were sent from England to organize the Salvation Army in the United States. Their efforts were received by Americans very much as the efforts of William Booth had first been received in London. However, in the course of time the value of their work was appreciated, and Railton and his successors received valuable support from people interested in helping the unfortunate and destitute. In addition, the Salvation Army established outposts in 18 other countries around the world during the 1880s.

In 1890, Booth, in collaboration with W. T. Stead, published his most influential book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. In this work he explained his efforts and gave concrete proposals for relieving poverty and loneliness, dealing with vice and moral danger, and salvaging wasted lives. Slowly Booth was given recognition: by the city of London, which made him a freeman; by Oxford University, which conferred an honorary doctorate upon him; and by the British government, which invited him to the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. That same year, Booth accepted an invitation to open a session of the United States Senate with a prayer.

Catherine Mumford Booth lived to see only some of the honors and recognition conferred upon her husband and the organization that she had so effectively helped to build. She was “promoted to glory,” in the Salvation Army's phrase, in 1890 in Clacton, England. The Booths' eight children had also played roles in building the Salvation Army. After their mother's death, however, two sons and a daughter left the organization because of disagreements and dissension. One of these was Ballington Booth, who later formed the Volunteers of America, an organization in some respects similar to the one he had left.

In spite of increasing loss of sight and ultimately blindness, Booth continued his evangelical and humanitarian works until he was past 80. He made his last public appearance in London's Royal Albert Hall on his 83rd birthday. Four months later, on August 20, 1912, he died in London.

Although he lived in the Victorian age, when such issues were avoided, William Booth did not shrink from discussions of poverty, prostitution, illegitimacy, homelessness, hunger, alcoholism, drug addiction, and crime. He dealt with them by providing homes, training schools, soup kitchens, hospitals, and other needed services. Counseling, help in adjustment for released prisoners, work rehabilitation programs, a missing persons bureau, camps, residences, family service agencies, rehabilitation programs for alcoholics and drug addicts, and day-care centers are some of the services that the Salvation Army now provides. The group also works in times of disaster, such as wars, earthquakes, floods, and fires, when it provides food, shelter, clothing, and comfort to victims.