Boundless Salvation - DVD review

 Back to the Battlefield!

Merv Collins looks at Boundless Salvation, a four part exploration on DVD of Salvationist History, Theology, Culture and Mission (courtesy of ON FIRE magazine)

Boundless Salvation Episode 1 Trailer from Salvos Out There on Vimeo.

In the old Gilbert and Sullivan musical The Pirates of Penzance, there’s a wonderful three layered chorus of police marching around shouting ‘Tarantara!’ and beating their chests, while the girls encourage them to ‘Go on to glory.’ ‘We go, we go!’ cry the police endlessly till eventually, the Major General shouts in exasperation, ‘Yes, but you don’t go!’

It’s almost a metaphor for the Salvation Army of the second half of the 20^th-century. We spent hours singing martial songs about fighting the salvation war, banged the drum and wore the uniform but precious few of us seemed to do much about it.

It wasn’t always thus.  Certainly William and Catherine Booth, the founders, and their early converts actively engaged in the war against sin and poverty, and for social justice. But as Salvationists became more affluent and middle-class, so we became more passive and complacent. A great fighting force for the Lord gradually preferred to leave the hand-to-hand combat to a committed few and busied itself making bigger halls and more polished musical sections.  The ‘lost and the outcast,’ those for whom Booth set up his Army, were largely unsighted by the vast majority of the movement’s members.

But the tide is turning, there is a desire to get back to our roots; to examine who we were and why, who we are now and what we ought to be.

To this end, John Cleary, the ABC broadcaster, author, historian and Salvationist, examines the history, the theology, the culture and the mission of the Army from Booth’s beginnings to the present day in a splendid boxed set of four DVDs entitled Boundless Salvation,.

It’s a series every Salvationist - officer, soldier, adherent - would do well to spend time with.  Cleary is no Johnny-come-lately to examining the Army’s mission. Many years ago, he edited the unofficial Army magazine Impact which frequently raised questions about the Army’s direction; he was a founder member of Solid Rock, a group which tried to bring its music into the 20^th-century and, more recently, has become a leading layman in policy making for the future.

That, and his position in the media, makes him uniquely qualified to put together this visual challenge to the current soldiery. His documentary style is reminiscent of the wonderful Ken Burns of American Civil War and Jazz fame - albeit with more limited resources!  He uses modern film clips, still photography, old film footage, great art and music - band, choral and popular songs of the past and present - to illustrate his points.

He canvasses the views of religious academics such as Dr. Gary Bouma (Monash University, Melbourne), and Professor David Bebbington (University of Stirling, Scotland) as well as some of the Army’s leading strategists. He talks to senior personnel including Chief of Staff, Robin Dunster, Comm. Philip Needham, (U.S. Eastern Territory), and U.S. musician Bill Himes but doesn’t neglect the younger movers and shakers like Russell Rook and Phil Wall in England and Geoff and Sandra Ryan in Canada who are pointing back to Booth’s vision and putting it into practice in modern-day situations.

We even hear the old General himself growling ‘Enjoy yourself as a Salvationist, but don’t forget the sons and daughters of misery. Pity them, feed them, reclaim them, employ them.  Our business is to help them all and that in the most practical, economical and Christlike manner.’

Boundless Salvation leads us to examine what the Army is not almost as much as what it is.  It shows we spring from John Wesley’s Methodist traditions, but we’re not Congregationalist (each church independent of others) or Pentecostals waiting for the rapture. We’re a global Army serving Christ here and now amongst the most marginalized and neglected in society.  If we fail in this, Phil Wall reminds us, we are no longer a ‘Salvation Army.’

Boundless Salvation takes us step-by-step.  Each DVD, about 45 minutes long, has a well presented study guide with ‘hotspot’ features where groups - anyone from recruits to Census Board locals - can stop the program for further discussion and examination.

It starts with Booth, a very successful and charismatic preacher in the north of England, ‘finding his destiny,’ a calling to serve the wretchedly poor and dispossessed London’s East End. His movement grew rapidly and crossed the world to the U.S. and Australia.  At the first open-air meeting in Australia, one of the leaders declared, ‘If there is any man here who hasn’t had a meal today, let him come home with me.’ Booth would have approved - Salvation and social work hand-in-hand.

Not unexpectedly for an Australian Southern Territory production, program one has emphasis on the Army’s work in Australia but many initiatives there, like James Barker’s Prison Gate Brigades, set up to accommodate and find work for ex-prisoners, and the Limelight Department’s pioneering use, not just within the Army, of film and multimedia extravaganzas, had worldwide application.

The Limelight Department was established to promote Booth’s worldwide Darkest England campaign, and his great literary work, Darkest England and the Way Out, used examples based on Barker’s work in Victoria.

The theology of the Army, outlined in the second program, is traced back past Wesley to Calvin, Martin Luther and the Reformation. It may sound dry but Cleary’s lively script and visuals are engrossing.  He links it, using scenes from the film Amazing Grace, to Wilberforce and the antislavery movement in England and to Abraham Lincoln and Charles Finney in America.

Finney’s message about conversion, and our responsibility to take action to change the world, fired Catherine particularly. New converts to the Army were expected to immediately take up the fight. In those days there was no padded pew after conversion; it was straight into action. As Commissioner Wes Harris says, ‘Service begins where salvation is received.’

 

Boundless Salvation Trailer Episode 2 from Salvos Out There on Vimeo.

The third program starts by celebrating what the Army quickly became in the early days - a brand of Christianity with its sleeves rolled up.  Its social work was universally admired. It developed its own international magazines for the soldiers and the unconverted, its own music publications for bands and songster brigades, and leadership programs through Y.P. and corps cadet classes. It became, as Bramwell Booth put it, ‘a nation within the nation,’ with its own art, culture and music.

This was achievement with inherit dangers: self-satisfaction and complacency.  Was this when, as Bill Himes puts it, we started ‘doing the Army, without connecting with community?’ Phil Wall is blunter. ‘We marched off the battlefield onto the parade ground,’ he says.  Activity for its own sake quickly lost all meaning, soldiership became mere membership and the songs of war became ‘praise and worship.’ Congregations sat and listened to the pastor, becoming increasingly less involved in the mission. We became a settled church not a dynamic army which leads the final program to call for a return to our roots, to become again an Army fighting social evils and poverty. 

John Cleary’s Boundless Salvation doesn’t hector or preach but through his diligent research and presentation, its message and challenge are clear. The world still needs a Salvation Army, but it needs the one set up by William Booth who himself warns us that ‘if she (the Salvation Army) is slothful and slackens her zeal, she will perish.’

The series ends with an anthem from Les Miserables, ‘Will you join in our crusade, who will be strong and stand by me?’  It makes a compelling rallying call to close a wonderful DVD series which should be compulsory viewing for every member of our great international church - no, make that Army! 

 

Boundless Salvation

(A four part exploration of Salvationist History, Theology, Culture and Mission)

Running time: Ep. 1, 33 mins; Ep. 2, 42 mins; Ep. 3, 50 mins; Ep. 4, 50 mins.

A Radiant Film Production

Written and presented by John Cleary for The Salvation Army, Southern Territory.

Producers: Corey Baudinette and John Cleary, Production Consultant: Bruce Redman

For additional information and resources see: http://www.boundlesssalvation.com/

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