dear matt

As a member of the Salvation Army who grew up in another denomination and has quite a few ties in other denominations, I get asked a lot about the Salvation Army’s stance on the sacraments. We don’t practice them. Officially the Army doesn’t have a stance on the sacraments, but unofficially many take a very strict and hard to understand stance against them.

I understand their excuse. The Salvation Army did not start as a church. We were a missionary movement reaching out to the neglected and unwanted and our hope, after reaching them, was to plant them in other local churches. As the question of sacraments came up, debates began to take place over how we would practice them. Would we baptize infants, for instance, and would we fully submerse adults or simply sprinkle? Would we, like the Catholics, teach that the wine (or grape juice if you’re a Baptist) and bread actually became the body of Christ, or like Protestants, would we teach that it was merely a representation. It, apparently, was a pretty big debate and the founder of the Army, William Booth, felt like it was distracting people from the mission. So, in his infinite wisdom, Booth decided to table the discussion and revisit it at a later time. For now their mission was to send people to other churches anyway, so maybe it was a question that we would never have to get around to answering.

Problem is, a hundred and odd some years later, and we clearly are a church. In fact, about twenty years ago we officially declared that fact and so, for many people within the Salvation Army, it is quite clearly time to revisit that topic.

A lot has been said, even in the comment sections of this blog, about the Army not having a problem with the sacraments, but many of us know otherwise. I hesitate to share the experiences of others (Officers) who have been disciplined by the Army for sharing in communion, or for asking for permission to baptize somebody in their Corps who have asked to take part in the experience, so I’ll share my own much less extreme example.

When I first began working with the Army, I was still very much identified as a Baptist. I held both a license and ordination certificate through the Baptist church and had spent nine years serving as a minister in Baptist churches across the state of Oklahoma. My first experience working with the Army was through one of their summer camps. After getting to know some of the staff at that camp, a young Christian from New Zealand who was not a Salvationist (member of the Salvation Army) found out that I was ordained and asked me if I could baptize him in the creek that ran through our camp ground. Though he had been a Christian for a few years, he had never actually experienced the act of baptism. I told him that I didn’t have any problem with it, but just wanted to run it by the camp director (who was a Salvation Army officer that held a divisional role) to make sure that I was not stepping on his toes. Upon sharing the news with the camp director, however, I was asked to please do it off of camp grounds.

It’s hard to know exactly how to respond to that. I can remember reaching a point where I wanted to preach on evangelism but wasn’t sure about using Matthew 28:19 because in it Jesus commands us to baptize people. I eventually went to my divisional commander about it who encouraged me that we couldn’t leave out verses of the Bible.

I think, in the end, I do understand our excuse for not participating in the sacraments. But I can’t understand our justification for it. And so I send the question out to you all. Our excuse is wrapped up in our history. The history that I’ve already shared above. But does anybody know or understand our justification for it? Our justification would have to be wrapped up in our theology and I just don’t see it there anywhere.

Are we being disobedient by not practicing the sacraments and are we, further more, being bullies by punishing those who do?