A word to the cadets (and everyone else!) #1

Major Harold Hill(R) was asked to address the graduating cadets in New Zealand last December. 

This is the first part of his sagely advice.

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bout ten years ago I was involved in a seminar in Zimbabwe for extension training officers from the various African territories. One of the speakers was the then Financial Secretary for Zimbabwe, Amos Makina, now IS for Africa. He said he always recommended three rules to officers: (1) preach the Word; (2) visit the people; (3) always get a receipt. I propose to hang at least some of my remarks on these three points.

(1) Preach the Word

Our one reason for standing up in front of people, and all we have to offer them, is the Word of God. If the Bible doesn’t excite us, we need to ask God for that to happen.

There is a line from Milton which says that “the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

Last year I heard one of my contemporaries, a long-time and hugely respected local officer, expressing sadness that for much of his soldiership he had had to check his brain in at the door of the Citadel. He wasn’t being arrogant - he’s not like that. Just sad. One of the reasons why your course at Booth College may have seemed at times overly academic for people who only wanted to get on with saving and serving the world is that the faithfulness of such Salvationists deserves better.

The College has done what it could to ensure that you have the resources and habits of study by which you might firstly feed your own spirit and secondly feed your people.

This isn’t a homiletics lecture, but personally I recommend six guiding principles:

(1) KISS. Keep it simple. (That doesn’t mean dumbed down; we don’t want pap!).

(2) As a basic exegetical principle, ask, what did this text mean then, and how does it apply to us today.

(3) Remember you might be wrong. It’s OK to say “I don’t know.”

(4) Don’t say, “You”. Say, “We”.

(5) Aim to uplift people; don’t weigh them down with guilt. They have enough.

(6) Know when to stop. The rule of General Coutts was that if you can’t say it in 10 minutes, you probably can’t say it at all!           

(2) Visit the People

One of the heresies we’ve picked up from the Church Growth movement is the notion that the successful officer is no longer a shepherd but has become a rancher, a chief executive, who can leave the care of individuals to his or her paid staff or volunteer pastoral assistants.  There is a perfectly respectable Salvation Army tradition of delegated pastoral care, going back to the Ward System and visitation sergeants of the early days, but it was never envisaged that officers might sit at their computer and do the paperwork all week while others got on with the people. Actually, that applies to all fields of work and all the way up the chain of command.

Major X, long gone to heaven, was by all accounts a pretty disastrous preacher, but his Corps people loved him. Why? Because he’d had his feet under their kitchen table and they knew he cared about them. (That isn’t to contradict the need for good preaching - sixty-five years ago Major X didn’t have the opportunities or resources that cadets have today.)

People soon discover whether we genuinely care about them or simply regard them as a means to our end, as cannon-fodder. The Corps (or Centre) exists for the people; not the people for the Corps or Centre. And certainly not for the greater glory of the officer. The fact is that people do not have jobs and lives in the world in order to support themselves  for Corps activities; they have the corps to help support them for life at the sharp edge in the world. One of the dangers of clericalisation, of an officer-centred Army, is that this order of priorities is overlooked. We need to get that right.

I know it’s not easy to organise - I struggled with this one too - but listening to people during the week helps earn the credibility needed to speak to them on Sunday. Or whenever…  

(3) Always get a Receipt

That financial secretary, the then Lt. Colonel Makina, said that on his way to that meeting he had stopped for petrol. When he’d asked the service station attendant for a receipt, he’d been asked, “How much do you want the receipt made out for?”

In New Zealand thank God corruption is less endemic (maybe?) and perhaps the Army has an accounting system sufficiently robust to keep us honest anyway. But the fact remains that there are still three areas of weakness chiefly capable of bringing a ministry down in flames, commonly summarised as “money, sex and power”.  

All three can be infinitely more subtle than we might expect. Leaving aside sex and power for the moment, I suspect that for people in ministry these days the temptation of money often comes in the guise of what I might call a “culture of entitlement”, since that is a weakness in our society. Officers these days are amazingly well provided for; our housing, allowances and benefits make us better off than a large number of our people. But we can perversely feel that all this and more is simply what we are owed. It’s not. The very assumption sours ministry. We need to get real about this. Long-time New Zealand missionary to Africa, Brigadier Lavinia Benson, once told me, “Never expect gratitude.” I was shocked - I thought she meant that people were ungrateful. But it was the expectation that was the problem. As you’ve learned in the 12 Steps, an expectation is a resentment under construction.  George Macdonald said, “If it be things that get you, it doesn’t matter whether they are things you have or things you don’t have!”

So much for Colonel Makina’s three point talk. (1) Preach the Word; (2) visit the people; (3) always get a receipt. I don’t claim I’ve always lived up to the things I’ve just suggested. I have not. They’re the distillation of years of trial and error. Some things I’ve learned through not doing them and then paying for my mistake. You don’t need to learn from your mistakes if you can learn from those of us who have already made them.

Writer: Harold Hill is a happily retired Salvation Army officer in New Zealand, happily married to Pat, blessed with two grown-up, married daughters and a fairly recent grand-daughter, happily occupied with research into the relationship between the Salvation Army and the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, irregular writing, speaking and teaching engagements, and the garden.

1 Comment to A word to the cadets (and everyone else!) #1

1. Nice one. You reminded me of an article of George Macdonald when you quoted him.

   http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/14/

   The very last paragraph makes an interesting point.

   Anyway… as a cadet the title grabbed my attention. Thanks for the solid advice.
Sean on February 8th, 2010

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