A New Structure: The Social Wing
The late Major Harold Hill’s collection of writings, To Love and Serve Him Supremely All My Days, is being published this year. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 15: ‘Out of Darkest England: The Effect of the “Darkest England Scheme” on The Salvation Army Itself’.
In ‘saving’ it, and making its name great, the scheme also altered the structure of The Salvation Army, establishing a whole new entity within its ranks. In part, this was occasioned by the need for public accountability, with the creation of the Darkest England Trust in January 1891, so that donors could be assured that their money was doing that for which they had given it. This, along with the multiplication of institutions for social work, created a whole new ‘wing’ of the movement. Instead of social work being a minor operation on the side, it became equal in scope to the field work. While there was naturally already a degree of separation in the administration of the evangelical and the limited social work of the organisation before 1890, the expansion of the latter consolidated and entrenched this demarcation. With the greatly increased number of officers engaged, social work became virtually a separate career path with, in some cases, separate training. The majority of officers would spend much, or in many cases, all of their careers in either field or social service—and sometimes ‘social’ bore a second-class officer stigma.
This was not perhaps what had been hoped for originally. According to Alex Nicol, Bramwell Booth’s earlier vision for the Army’s social work had been an integrated, soldier-based activity, an incarnational ministry:
‘He [Bramwell Booth] formed the idea in those days of subduing black patches of our city life by the sheer moral and sweetening influences of clean, happy, self-denying Christians who should voluntarily come out of their ordinary homes and go down and actually live amongst the poor and degraded.
He dreamed of a nether London honeycombed with sanctified fathers and mothers, living the Christ life among the hovels of the poor and the black localities of vice by day, and preaching the Gospel at night. A beautiful dream, inspired by an idealism far, far beyond the matter-of-fact Christianity of modern days and even the predisposition of the Salvationist to suffer for Christ’s sake.
It is interesting that at a period in the evolution of the social idea of the Army and before the Darkest England Scheme was as much as dreamt of, Mr. Bramwell Booth, the Chief of the Staff, was endeavouring to grapple with that problem of all problems, how to Christianise the heathen of England by the force of moral example, and by holy and self-sacrificing men and women living, not occasionally visiting, but actually living in the slums.’
Apart from the setting up of ‘slum posts’ (which were later superseded by other measures), Bramwell Booth’s original vision of an integrated mission did not eventuate; other voices carried the day. Any alternative to a more institutional approach would in any case have been very difficult to bring about at that time when institutional structures were the expected norm.
The way the [Darkest England] scheme eventually developed in fact led to almost separate Armies; field and social departments in every territory worked almost independently until administrative changes almost a century later.
