The mythical invitation

deansimpson7
Jun 3
7 min read

The famous depiction of John Gore and the first unofficial meeting of The Salvation Army in Australia in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. Inset: John Gore later in life.

BY CAPTAIN PAUL FARTHING*

The story goes that in September of 1880, John Gore and Edwards Saunders gathered ’neath a gumtree in Adelaide Botanic Garden to hold the first Australian Salvation Army meeting. They sang a hymn before John Gore ascended the tailboard of a greengrocer’s cart and said, “If there’s a man here who hasn’t had a square meal today, let him come home to tea with me.”

Gore’s words are glorious. This is a golden sentence. It suggests that The Salvation Army’s commitment to the social gospel was there from the very beginning.1 It can even be instructive. It says to today’s Salvation Army, “This is how we did things when we were thriving”.

But, alas, the evidence suggests that John Gore never made such a statement.

A fascinating account from 1913 by then-Lieut-Colonel John McMillan tells a very different story from the established narrative. McMillan later became Evangeline Booth’s Chief of Staff and, if not for an early death, may well have succeeded her as General. He states that Gore was running late for the first meeting and that Saunders had to conduct it himself until Gore arrived. The two of them then led a procession to Hindley Street for a meeting in the Labour League Hall. This account is veracious. McMillan references primary sources – he is writing while both Gore and Saunders were alive – and he makes no mention of Gore’s invitation. Rather, he makes it impossible. McMillan says that Gore was not even there when the meeting started, and when the meeting ended, he had them go straight to the hall for another meeting. There is no time for tea.2

McMillan’s version of events is supported by the earliest sources. The first account of the meeting appears in the Christian Colonist on 10 September 1880. It tells us that Gore and Saunders sang, “Will you meet me at the Fountain?” and it tells us that one person spoke about the Army’s work in England, another on the necessity of salvation, and another on Zacchaeus, but there is no mention of inviting anyone home for tea. They do mention that the open-air meeting was followed by a service in the hall on Hindley Street.3

Accounts of the second4 and third5 meetings also fail to mention a meal at Gore’s place. There are numerous other contemporary accounts of the Army’s early work in Adelaide; they were something of a sensation, people wrote about them often, but nobody mentions Gore’s invitation.6

About 10 years after the event, we start to see accounts of the meeting in The War Cry. In 1891, The War Cry published its first comprehensive article on the first meeting under the title ‘How we began in Australia’. The open-air meeting and the indoor meeting that followed are mentioned, but not the invitation.7 In 1895, an early convert named Josiah Harris sent his recollections of the early meetings to The War Cry, but he makes no mention of the line.8 In that same issue, a wonderfully detailed account of the first meeting appears under the title ‘An Adelaide Half Night and What Came of It’. It mentions a night of prayer at which Gore and Saunders (along with five other people who have dropped out of the narrative) prayed and resolved to hold a meeting.9 It goes on to describe the large crowd that came to that first meeting; the author correctly identifies the song they sang and remembers an interjector being arrested. This reads like the account of someone with intimate first-hand knowledge of the meeting, and there is no mention of the invitation.10 In these early years, the invitation was not part of the narrative.

But perhaps, many years after the event, Gore or Saunders remembered this line and told their fellow Salvationists? Alas, there is no evidence that this happened either, and it is worth noting that Gore and Saunders (Gore especially) were given ample opportunity to make such a report.

In his later years, Gore was a frequent guest of honour at Salvation Army events, where he would be invited to tell the story of that first meeting. The most prominent of these events was the unveiling of a plaque in the Adelaide Botanic Garden to commemorate the 1880 meeting. Gore’s recollections are comprehensively reported in several newspapers, and his line is absent in all of them.11 The War Cry gave three pages to the event but made no mention of the invitation. Commissioner Hugh Whatmore told the crowd that Gore had informed him of the song they sang at the first meeting, but he did not mention the invitation. This would seem like the perfect time for a commissioner seeking to inspire his soldiers to make the line known. It would seem most likely that Whatmore didn’t mention it because in 1927, the line was not part of the Australian Salvation Army’s origin story.12

The modern-day plaque in the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

Then, in 1948, Thomas C Benson (Australia’s first colour sergeant) told The War Cry he was at the meeting where Gore and Saunders first met and that he attended many of the meetings in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. Benson, quite probably the last eyewitness alive, mentions no invitation.13 In all of these many accounts, a line that the modern Salvation Army considers absolutely remarkable goes entirely unremarked.

Apart from the lack of evidence is the fact that this was not The Salvation Army’s evangelical method. The Army in the 1880s held open-air meetings, followed by an indoor service. Salvationists were instructed to do this in The Salvation Army’s orders and regulations. It explained that the Salvationists’ primary objective was to get people into the hall to hear the good news. It said, “Every effort should be made to draw people to the hall.” All the early accounts show Gore and Saunders doing exactly that – not providing tea.

The line is not part of the story until 1952, when Colonel Percival Dale included it in his book Salvation Chariot – over 70 years after the event. From this point, the line is prevalent. In 1960, Commissioner Frederick Coutts spoke at the 80th anniversary of Sydney Congress Hall and said, “In the first open-air gathering in the Botanic Gardens, John Gore invited any hearer who had not had a square meal that day to come home with him. Salvation is concerned with the whole man – body, mind and soul. And from the beginning this truth has inspired Salvationists alike in their evangelical and their social work – those two inseparable parts of the one Gospel.” Here we see the myth become truth, a sentence that went unremarked for 72 years comes to inform and justify core Salvation Army beliefs.

It takes a good deal of special pleading to argue that Dale (who offers no source for his claim) should be trusted above the bountiful earlier sources. The line was most likely never said.

To lose this line could lead to a minor existential crisis in your average Salvationist. Many, like Coutts, have looked at the great success of the early Army and seen this line as a blueprint. It suggests that evangelism, coupled with social action, is the secret to The Salvation Army’s soul-saving efforts. Indeed, the line is often used as a kind of blessing for the modern Salvation Army’s social evangelism methods. However, while the early army in Australia certainly targeted the lower classes, social work was not at the heart of its efforts until much later. The Australian Salvation Army’s most fruitful period of soul-saving was not driven by social work; rather, as Salvation Army social work increased, Salvation Army soul-saving decreased.

This doesn’t mean that social evangelism should be abandoned, of course, but the emergence of this mythical invitation has perhaps obscured the true blueprint to Salvation Army soul-saving success.

John Gore giving a speech at the unveiling of the original commemorative plaque in 1927.

When, in 1927, John Gore attended the unveiling of a commemorative plaque, he was asked why the early Army had surged forward in the way it did. He was, at this point, elderly and frail in body, yet mighty in spirit. He climbed the makeshift stage and there, upon the same spot on which that first meeting was held, he launched into an impassioned oration: “If you want the people to believe in you, you must be in deadly earnest and you must have a fire in your bones. I never was an educated man, but I had the fire of the Holy Ghost, and that was the one qualification necessary for soul-saving.”14

Well said, John. Amen.

* Captain Paul Farthing is the Corps Officer at Shellharbour, NSW. This article is an op-ed by Paul, derived from personal research.

References:

1 https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/about-us/our-story/

2 “Australia’s First Corps” The War Cry, 13 December 1913, 3.

3 “A SALVATION ARMY IN ADELAIDE.” Christian Colonist, 10 September 1880: 5.

4 “NEWS OF THE CHURCHES.” Christian Colonist,17 September 1880: 5.

5 Christian Colonist, 24 September 1880: 5.

6 TO CORRESPONDENTS.” The South Australian Advertiser, 1 February 1881, 4.

7 How We Began in Australia The War Cry 21 February 1891.

8 “Our Corps and their work in Adelaide” The War Cry, 31 August 1895, 6.

9 The five others were Charles Gale, William Trezise (perhaps Alfred Trezise), White, Edward Gay