The Salvation Army was founded more than a hundred years ago during the worst period of industrialization in the United Kingdom. British Christians marveled at the stories of missionary advance in places like Africa. They read books like Livingstone’s Out of Darkest Africa with its spirited descriptions of that Continent from the perspective of European missionaries vividly describing cultures they saw as dark and in desperate need.

The young William and Catherine Booth read these evangelical tracts chronicling the terrible needs of people in other parts of the world and they were grieved by the fact that all around them in industrial cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool people lived in abject conditions – poor, homeless, rootless, and uncared for. Seized with compassion, anger and a strong sense of God’s pain over the failure of Christian England to see what was happening to its own poor, the Booths wrote their own tract, Into Darkest London. They wanted to awaken the nation to the dire needs of the poor in the cities and call Christians to a vision of God’s care for the other, the outsider, the poor. From this was born The Salvation Army. Based upon some dominant metaphors of the period (the military in the midst of an empire) the idea was to form a civilian army, a company of men and women in God’s uniform committed to disciplined, self-giving lives that served the poor and sought to bring God’s light and hope into the terrible conditions of industrial cities. It was a significant movement of God focused on the establishment of churches (citadels – to keep the military metaphor) in the poorest areas of the city. It is significant to note that this was at the same time when a new “American Renaissance” – formed by the likes of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman – was gestating an explicitly anti-city ethos to be picked up by the likes of Olmstead and Frank Lloyd Wright that resulted in a massively suburban culture as the basis for the “American Dream.” The Booth’s and their new movement were part of evangelical movements in the late 19th century that saw the Gospel of Jesus and reign of God as implicating Christians irreducibly in issues of justice, peace and reconciliation toward the poor and all who suffered oppressive forms of life.

The economic circumstances of early industrialization were a massive challenge to Christian life and identity in the form of cities filled with untold numbers of poorhouses and horrible working conditions.

Few grasped the challenge, until the Booth’s shaped a vision and formed a movement. This disciplined band of men and women was akin to movements in England in much earlier times. In the 5th and 6th centuries, out of far Northumbria the Celts formed disciplined bands of young men and women from the upper classes who believed the Gospel called them to more than their own self-shaped needs and sent them out across the country as heralds of God’s love and Gospel life.

Over the years some things about The Salvation Army changed. It became somewhat more like a service agency than a movement of Christian life and identity. The “citadel” (a community of men and women in, with, among and for the people of a neighbourhood) became less and less the centre of generative life as it gave way to the primacy of an organization that was more about the support and resourcing of a social service agency. Hamilton, for example, once had ten citadels, but these closed down or amalgamated with each other and moved into the suburbs, as most of those in the service lived out of the urban centers and drove in to serve people.

The Freeway is a bit of a different story. According to Alan Roxburgh, “The Freeway is an understanding of place, belonging, identity and community most churches have lost. It’s not just the idea of opening a coffee house in one of the poorest urban areas of Canada, but how a group of disparate Christians moved into the neighbourhood – not so much to ‘plant a church’ – but to live among and become neighbours with others. This is an understanding of Christian witness and community that challenges assumptions about the Gospel. Here, you will find a group of Christians who, through trial and testing, are learning how to live out Luke 10 in their context.”

The Freeway is considered postmodern or emerging or missional, etc. and have even joined networks like Resonate and Allelon and TrueCity, but we don’t want to create false, “us/them” dichotomies between institutional and organic churches. Instead, we simply try to listen to God speaking into our lives and calling us to move back into a neighbourhood. Like Jeremiah’s letter to the captives, we buy houses, plant gardens, have children and seek the welfare of our neighbours. This is a movement of God that transcends labels of institutional or emerging, organic or organized, missional or whatever. It’s about being shaped in this context by a Gospel imagination.