Order from the Founder: ‘Go and be extraordinary’

General William Booth never held back in his writings, exemplified by a republished article in a 1955 issue of the War Cry.

BY BARRY GITTINS

Want to know how to attract people to your cause and grow your numbers? Why not have your meetings “conducted by the Divisional officer, or by a giant, or dwarf, or a man of different race and colour, or an officer from some other part of the country...”?

These suggestions were made in an article entitled ‘Aggression’, from no less an authority than William Booth himself.

It was published 70 years ago in a 1955 issue of The Officer (first published 132 years ago, in 1893). Salvationists were told that if they carried out their methods “in the spirit in which they were intended”, they would “make the ordinary into the extraordinary”.

The extraordinary, Booth explained, was something different from the ordinary.

“I reckon that I usually strive to make the ordinary things I do into the extraordinary, and,” Booth noted modestly, “as a consequence, I very often succeed.”

“I know it may be said: ‘General, you are always extraordinary’,” Booth continued, “Well, it may be true, but it was not always so. I was ordinary enough at one time, but by God’s help and blessing I made myself extraordinary.

“That is what I want you to do; you can do it if you will; the means are in your hands. Go and try.”

While officers were busy praying that God would make them extraordinary, Booth counselled the use of singing groups, music festivals, testimonies from “drunkards”, “living pictures”, “social lectures, shadowgraphs” and the use of the “cinematograph” [the movies].

Booth told his officers they needed to utilise “something new [and] different from what is going on all the time”.

“Your processions and music and uniform were extraordinary once,” Booth taught, “but that time has passed in most countries, and by their everyday use they have become ordinary.”

Booth urged his readers to make “the ordinary effort extraordinary by bringing in some strange element, either in personality or action ... People must be made to think.”

While it may ring of the circus, and seem both sensationalist and exploitative to modern ears, to Booth it was a straightforward approach that put Jesus into people’s faces.

“It is not in a man to look at Heaven and keep on looking, and not want to go through the gates of pearl,” Booth wrote. “It is not in a man to look at Hell, and keep on looking, and not want to turn away from the road that leads there.

“It is not in a man to look at the Bloody Cross, and keep on looking, and not want to go into the arms of Him who died upon that Tree.”