New Year Priorities

Eleanor Burne-Jones shares her shopping list for 2010

These are my ten points that I think TSA needs to urgently attend to in 2010:

1. There are more people in our congregations with frustrated vocations or no sense of vocation than those with one actively nourished and affirmed by TSA.  This needs to totally reverse.

2. Officers need to be held to account as powerfully for discipling, developing, deploying soldiers in meaningful missional service as they are for financial and moral trustworthiness.

3. The army needs to be clear thinking about how to adapt to reach people in postmodernity.

4. The army needs to move toward a clear and shared understanding of how to address the problem of clericalisation and post-Christendom adjustment.

5. The army needs to embed in the thinking of every officer and every new soldier that we are a church planting movement, a movement where planting new churches is normal, not exceptional, and where every soldier should expect to spend a good part of their lives involved in this as a matter of routine.

6. All soldiers need to train in conflict transformation and conflict literacy. if we can’t resolve conflict in life-giving ways we can’t handle change or get anything done.

7. The army needs to attend carefully to its wake (former officers and former soldiers)  and understand how to build trust internally as well as externally.

8. The army needs to grasp that theological reflection should be part of the normal life of any congregation, this particularly because we are in a rapidly changing missional context.  Church planting movements have to handle rapid change, and rapid progress and need to do so by instinctively thinking in an ethically driven way and in a way that values and priorities reflecting on the Bible and on our daily practice as part of a learning community.

9. The army needs to make sure that every officer understands the factors that impede renewal in congregations, particularly the problem of control cultures and leaders thinking in terms of ‘my ministry’ rather than the ministry of others.

10. (but absolutely not least!): We need to get on our knees and pray for powerful renewal and revival … NOW!

Discussion welcome!

 Writer: Eleanor Burne-Jones grew up in The Salvation Army, but gradually left the Army and the church by her mid twenties. She spent more than fifteen years in the Jewish faith, before returning to Christ and The Salvation Army in 2003/4.  She was noviced as a Franciscan at the same time she was enrolled a soldier, and had nearly three years of Franciscan spiritual formation in the Third Order Soc. St Francis before asking to live out her vocation within The Salvation Army. In 2007 she set up Kres Jesu Krist, (Cornwall Church Health) with an ecumenical lay team. They offer training and spiritual accompaniment, and facilitate the Cornwall Fresh Expressions Network for people in pioneering ministries and church planting across the county. She is studying theology, and is a soldier at Penzance Corps, UK and has her own blog.

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