Presence Evangelism: The Salvation Army

Abstract

The values and beliefs that The Salvation Army (hereafter the Army) subscribes to date from its establishment in East London in 1865. To describe its establishment, one should begin with the way the founder, William Booth, started and organized the activity of the Army.’ Booth was born in 1829 into a working class family in Nottingham, England. Throughout his childhood the family was desperately poor, and Nottingham was full of “breathless tales of murder and garrottings,” and “surging drunken crowds watch-ing the hanging of criminals” (Begbie 192o: 2). In 1846 he began to attend a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and was deeply influenced by Reverend James Caughey, who was one of the representative figures of eighteenth-century revivalism, peculiarly known as the Second Great Awakening. This was characterized by “camp meetings,” a unique frontier institution aimed at evangelizing working-class people. Encouraged by Caughey to start street meetings and to work for the conversion of others, Booth committed himself to evangelizing and helping the working-class poor in England.²