Where Do I Sign Up? July 2003 - by Captain Geoff Ryan Back



I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Groucho Marx

We trained hard but every time we formed up teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn that we meet any new situation by reorganizing. And a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC

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There were close to 30 of us, all under the age of 10, not counting the three adult leaders. We were dressed in rather quaint, quasi-militaristic uniforms, resplendent with symbolism grafted from the animal kingdom. The adults leading the ceremony looked somewhat more incongruous than us, dressed as they were in shorts and knee socks with grave expressions on their middle-aged faces. Squatting on our haunches, we balanced ourselves on two fingers of each hand that rested on the floor. In the centre of our circle was a lifelike replica of a severed wolf’s head, replete with blood painted in the corners of its mouth.

We all chanted together, our fervent enthusiasm echoing around the small basement hall where we met, promising to do our best for our leader, who we knew only by his nom de guerre (also taken from the animal world). Our shouted fealty ended with the following recitation: This is the law of the wolf cub pack / It’s as old and true as the sky / The wolf cub who keeps it shall prosper / The wolf cub who breaks it will die!

How weird is that?

Then there was my sister, who along with her friends, had to dance around a replica toadstool while singing an affirmation that commenced with the words: We’re the fairies bright and gay

The things we did to belong.

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The question of membership in these postmodern times is a thorny issue?membership in anything, whether it be a service club, a reading circle or a church especially a church. The traditional rites, conditions and requirements of membership can?looking from the perspective of the 21st century?seem odd and arcane, if not mildly damaging at times. Certainly of late they have been scrutinized, questioned and, more often than not, rejected (and there you have it?my three-step description of postmoderism).

Service clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis are experiencing difficulty recruiting new blood into their aging membership. The service club of which I am a member is one of the oldest and prestigious of its kind in the country, but the average age is 65 and the recent efforts we have made to attract new, younger members have not met with any great success. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have been in decline numerically for years (10 years ago in the Greater Toronto Area there were 20,000 cub scouts; as of last year, there are less than 4,000). Both groups have recently undertaken a massive restructuring in order to now offer various membership options. Rumour has it that even the Freemasons are starting to sweat. People just don’t seem to want to join anymore. Is it just one more example of our commitment-shy culture and rampant individualism or are there other forces at work?

The issue of membership is a huge challenge for The Salvation Army. What constitutes membership and how should this be celebrated and confirmed? How should it be controlled and monitored or should it be at all? At what point do the requirements of building and maintaining an Army conflict with the requirements and needs of the Kingdom of God and/or the Church of Jesus Christ? How do we maintain esprit de corps and common mission focus and strategy, while respecting increasingly important and individual cultural expressions?

Much of the challenge is rooted in the organizational structure of The Salvation Army. With our hierarchal and centralized management structure we find ourselves an anachronism in a decentralized, linear, relational, post-9/11 world. We resist admitting this fact and resist changing this reality because we have so much invested in the status quo. But the manner in which we are presently structured becomes increasingly untenable year by year and further disconnected from the mission as it is fought daily in the field.

As strange as this may sound, as a mission structure al-Qaeda provides the perfect model for The Salvation Army. As odd as it may be, a group of people with a medieval, yet profoundly religious, worldview have come up with the perfect postmodern organizational structure that embodies the latest in management theory and employs the best in technological gadgetry. Al Qaeda has been described as a hybrid peer-to-peer network in which a central source triggers the actions that are carried out by individual nodes. Their headquarters, as such, was embodied in Osama Bin Ladin, who primarily fulfilled the functions of resourcing and inspiring the network nodes. Bin Ladin set the mission and embodied the fundamental vision?he was the ideological icon for the organization. He also provided the financial resources for the international network of nodes to carry out their missions. The discipline of a deep commitment to the vision/mission is what held the network together. They operated largely undetected, yet with huge impact, in an environment that was hostile toward them. They were a network of local missions with an intense global focus. The applications to The Salvation Army in an aggressively secular, post-Christian culture are self-evident, I think.

Unfortunately, we continue to operate within a corporate culture model from the mid-20th century that is often inflexible and operates largely on assumptions and constructs that are a bad fit in our present day. I refer, for example, to such operating norms as rigidly vertical lines of top-down authority, an organizational pyramid structure, a leadership culture that is largely disempowering. This increasingly wide disconnect between the demands of an organizational structure that is perceived to exist mainly to sustain and feed its bureaucratic hunger and the exigencies of mission at the sharp end, has produced a complex confusion that has transmitted itself down through the ranks of adherents, soldiers and officers.

Membership in a local corps is not as cut-and-dried as it used to be, partly due to societal and generational shifts as they influence long-term commitment, denominational loyalty and individualistic drive, and partly as fallout from the lack of clarity transmitted by upper leadership.

While serving in Russia, I encountered people who were deeply committed to the local expression of The Salvation Army as expressed through our corps, but who had little understanding of the wider Salvation Army and absolutely no interest in connecting with it. One such couple came to us in Rostov-on-Don. They had become Christians through a para-church ministry in the city. He was a university professor with a doctorate in quantum physics and she was a high-school teacher. They had shopped around the rather sparse selection of Protestant churches in the city, decided that they liked ours best, and joined up. They were the only non-dysfunctional family in our church, were educated and well saved, so they naturally became leaders playing a very active role in the life of our church. In that environment, with few mature Christians, they were indispensable. The husband, however, couldn’t handle the whole uniform/military thing and was deeply committed to the sacraments, so the furthest they would go with regard to membership was adherency. When eventually they immigrated to Canada, this couple found another church to attend and eventually became members there.

I thought that this was unique to Russia, until returning to Canada, where I’ve found over the last three years that this is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon here as well. I presently have people fulfilling leadership roles at Corps 614, Toronto, who have come to us from other church backgrounds and who are mature, committed, gifted Christians, desperately needed by us, but who are not interested in soldiership or in forming any lasting ties to the denomination as such. Intensely committed on the micro-level of our corps, they have no desire to commit on the macro-level to the organization. As the church is, at the end of the day, a voluntary organization?what can be done?

In this regard, adherency is a Godsend because it is such a flexible and loose designation that it can be shaped to fit the needs of most contexts. In Russia, we redefined it in order to include hundreds of people in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s who wanted to join us but did not really know or understand what we were about. At Corps 614, adherency has been reshaped to offer inclusion to a range of people?from mature, experienced Christians who are committed solely to our highly-localized faith community, to street people who have made a profession of faith and, though still with huge lifestyle issues to work out, are regular attenders and valued participants in the life of our church community. Full membership, presently defined solely as soldiership, is not an option for either of these groups.

I know of a number of corps in the U.K. which have drafted membership covenants that include the doctrines of The Salvation Army (often in alternate language) and various other affirmations of intent usually related to the localized body, but often with some reference to the wider denominational community of The Salvation Army. At Corps 614, we continue to wrestle with this and have instituted a separate covenant, signed annually, that asks the signee to make a commitment to our local corps. As well, we have ministry covenants for those active in any ministry (ideally all would be adherents and soldiers).

There are a number of extra-biblical clauses in the Salvation Army membership document that are not weathering the strain of the changing times very well. Some are issues that have never been adequately resolved. For example, there is the requirement that all soldiers abstain from drinking. While overall this is a good and prudent thing and often very necessary for our mission, it is extra-biblical. Can we really, at the end of the day, continue to make abstinence from alcohol a requirement for membership in the Church, the Body of Christ?

I remember as a teenager soldiering at a now-closed downtown corps in Toronto. One of our soldiers was a troubled soul who had been placed on the rolls by some officer in bygone years. She would often act out inappropriately, occasionally violently, and was a disturbing presence most of the time (I was afraid of her). Needless to say, she loved her uniform and proudly wore it everywhere I don’t think I ever saw her in any other clothing. Often other corps members would look at her and shake their heads, muttering: Who in the world put her in uniform? What were they thinking?

The fact is, she often was a bad representative of The Salvation Army and probably hurt our corporate reputation a fair bit. But even back then, at a time in my life when I gave such matters little thought, the confusing dilemma represented by this woman niggled at me. Agreed, she should not have been in uniform as the public face of the Army. However, as soldiership is our primary form of discipleship and full church membership (and uniform wearing can be a part of this), could we, as a part of the Church, deny someone membership in the Body based on mental capacity? So it was wrong to allow her to represent the Army in so public a manner, but it also would have been wrong to exclude her from membership in the Church. It’s not the only time that membership in The Salvation Army and membership in the Body of Christ have become confused, I reckon.

And what about officership? If anything, the confusion is even greater here, at least from my perspective as an officer who finds himself increasingly bewildered by the nature of the covenant I signed over a decade ago and with the behaviour of the denomination I committed to. When General Gowans, in response to the cry of the grassroots and through the International Commission on Officership, created new policies governing officership, he further muddied the waters. By giving freedom for local definition while retaining centralized control to a large degree, the General created a push-me-pull-you hybrid compromise. Individual territories have been allowed to progress with the redefinition of officership as they see fit and so the traditionally international homogeneity of officership has given way to a patchwork of localized definitions. It is somewhat akin to the effect that pluralism has had on religion?50 years ago in Canada if you referred to God everyone more or less knew who you were talking about. That is not the case now. An officer in Canada or Bermuda means something different to an officer in the U.K., for starters. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either.

While in the U.K. recently, I bumped into a young woman who had worked with my wife, Sandra, and me for a couple of years in Russia. She had returned to the U.K. following her service in Russia, gotten married, served with her husband as corps assistants in the U.S.A. and went back to the U.K. where they became lieutenants. As they were involved in the conference in a leadership capacity, they were listed in the event guide as associate officers at their corps. Apparently they enjoyed the benefits of any officer in their territory (such as an Army vehicle and quarters), yet they retained their autonomy to a degree that I do not. They essentially chose where and with whom they wanted to serve.

At the same conference, I was surprised to see one of our former soldiers from Rostov-on-Don who became an officer two years ago. She explained that she was now serving in a social services appointment in the U.K. Territory. She introduced me to her fiancé, an Englishman. They are getting married in July, after which he will enter some form of flexible training. She will remain an officer throughout this period and will not be required to step down from officership.

That is a far cry from the officer couple?family friends of ours?who ran into difficulties some years ago. The husband was dismissed from the ranks and so was his wife. After over 40 years of faithful?if not exemplary?service, she was also stripped of her rank and years of service. Why do some officers get nailed on the joint covenant clause when their spouse messes up, while others can be married to non-officer, non-Army in some cases, non-Christian spouses and continue in ministry? The essential question is the nature and conditions of officership.

Here in Canada, I have a friend who planted a corps not too long ago. He has had experience youth pastoring across the country. Due to natural talent, hard work and his background in religious education, he has been given the opportunity to plant a corps. He is not an officer and has not undergone Salvation Army officer training, although he is currently working on a Masters of Divinity at Tyndale. He is not an envoy (remember them?) nor a lieutenant, although he is a soldier. What does this say about my officership and the covenant I have undertaken? What does it say about the screening and training process presently in place for candidates? What do I say to the 20-somethings who attend my corps and ask me why on earth they would ever become an officer? I have no answers.

I count each of these people as friends. I have no personal issue with any of them, and I am glad that they stand in the ranks alongside me. But each of them, in their own way, has added to my confusion about the nature of my calling and about what exactly constitutes an officer these days. What does it require to become an officer with regards to training and development? What does it require to stay as an officer with regard to commitment, covenant and self-determination?

To sum up, it seems like signing on the dotted line is not as straightforward as it once was. I would like a bit more clarity from those who make these decisions if I am to continue to offer people membership in The Salvation Army. If ultimately it is to be totally devolved to the local level and I am to be given full freedom to define these stages of membership as I see fit, then so be it! Let me know for sure. If not, then I need clear direction as to what I am calling people to belong to and what they are required to undertake in order to achieve and maintain this membership. As for personal concerns how do I become a lieutenant again?

Captain Geoff Ryan and his wife, Sandra, are corps officers at Corps 614 in Regent Park, Toronto. Commissioned in 1990, they served nine years in Russia. They have three children: Anya, Sasha and Sergei.

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From - Horizons Christian Leadership Magazine - 2003