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You are here: Home / Archive / Salvation Army outreach programs in transition

Salvation Army outreach programs in transition

June 1, 1999 by Richard Cimino

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The 134-year old Salvation Army, as well-known as any Christian organization around the globe, faces major transformations in the next few months.

Its first American leader, General Paul A. Rader is retiring with a program involving some l.2 million members worldwide, including 117,000 in the United States. According to an interview in the Los Angeles Times (May 1),  he sees the greatest challenges for the Army as stepping up its witness against galloping materialism and secularism within the United States, and  harnessing the enormous growth in membership in Africa.

Right now some 786,364 persons claim SA membership on that continent, making it the area of greatest growth for this denomination. The Army views the West as spiritually impoverished and that  marginalized people in the Third World have reached greater spiritual maturity. To help combat Western unbelief, Third World countries are sending their own missionaries to lead the Army in the United States. Alongside that, the Army is currently feeding some 30,000 refugees daily along the Albanian-Kosovo border.

A more subtle but important change is occurring in the SA. Leaders are giving more attention to working for long range systemic improvement in their participants’ lives rather than tying such work strictly to evangelism. This older image of Army ministry is slowly giving way to a more frontal attack on such problems as poverty, poor education, and vocational deficiencies. Such a transformation is, as noted in the article, giving a greater degree of credibility to its life-long commitment to the marginalized in urban society.

— By Erling Jorstad

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Filed Under: Archive

Also in this issue

  • On/File: June 1999
  • Findings & Footnotes: June 1999
  • Values, spirituality find favor in Australian public life
  • Popular Catholicism enduring, adapting
  • Current Research: June 1999
  • Clash on five percenters raise new religious freedom issues
  • Religious orders marketing for vows
  • Natural food finds its way to evangelical tables
  • Parachurch groups challenge denominational life?
  • Religious building boom underway
  • Trance — how a dance fad turned spiritual

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