26
Catherine Booth
Mother of the Army
Distracted by the ruckus, she glanced up from her quiet game in the front yard to see a crowd of young boys taunting a drunken man as he was being forced down the street by a police officer. In a blink, she was at the man’s side. Grabbing his hand, she walked with him the remainder of the way to the police station, her head held high against the jeers of the bystanders. She was only nine years old at the time, but Catherine Booth was already on a path to becoming a passionate advocate for the poor and oppressed.
Praying for Salvation
Catherine was a serious, reserved child. But her quiet nature didn’t prohibit her from speaking out with uncharacteristic boldness when she felt called to do so. At the age of fourteen, for instance, Catherine became an impassioned spokesperson for the temperance movement. She read avidly on the subject, served as secretary of the junior branch of the local temperance society, and wrote prolifically for a variety of magazines. Promptly after dinner each evening she retired to her bedroom and wrote essays by candlelight, many of which were published anonymously in the leading magazines (for who would take the thoughts of a teenage girl seriously?).
When Catherine was sixteen she moved with her family to London, and it was around this time that she endured a crisis in her faith. Up to this point, Catherine had been a devout Christian. By the time she was twelve years old she had read the Bible aloud, cover to cover, eight times, and often she was unable to sleep until she had confessed her sins to God and felt forgiven and comforted by a sense of his love. But suddenly Catherine was inexplicably gripped by the fear that she had not received the Holy Spirit into her heart and was therefore not saved. “She felt that if the witness of the Holy Spirit to her own heart were not given, all her knowledge about God, about the practice of religion, would fail to satisfy,” wrote her granddaughter and biographer, Catherine Bramwell-Booth. “She could not recall any particular place or moment when she had definitely stepped out on the promises of God and received the witness of the Holy Spirit to her salvation.”1
Catherine obsessed over this fear for weeks until finally she awoke one morning to find that her deepest prayers had been answered. She slid her hymnal from beneath her pillow and, reading these lines, knew in her heart that she was saved: “My God, I am Thine, what a comfort divine, what a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine!” She later recollected, “The words came to my inmost soul with a force and illumination they had never before possessed. . . . I no longer hoped that I was saved; I was certain of it.”2
Dearest Earthly Treasure
When Catherine was twenty-three she met her soul mate and husband, William Booth, by chance, on a carriage ride after he’d preached at her church. Because she was not feeling well, William had been asked to escort her home. As the carriage lurched over the unpaved road, the two acquaintances instantly and simultaneously realized that God intended their union. Later William wrote it was God himself “who in a most wonderful and providential manner has brought us together and then flashed into our hearts the sweet and heavenly feeling of a something more than earthly unison.”3
The two wrote hundreds of letters to each other during their three-year engagement, frequently posting multiple letters in a single day. One written by Catherine stands out in particular, in which she argued for the biblically sanctioned authority allowing women to preach—an argument that would have great bearing on her future ministry and leadership in the Salvation Army.
“If God has given her the ability why should not woman persuade the vacillating, instruct and console the penitent, and pour out her soul in prayer for sinners?” Catherine wrote, to which her fiancé succinctly answered, “I would not stop a woman preaching on any account. I would not encourage one to begin. You should preach if you felt moved thereto; felt equal to the task. I would not stay you if I had the power to do so. Although I should not like it. I am for the world’s salvation; I will quarrel with no means that promises help.”4 William clearly agreed with Catherine in theory, yet was not comfortable with the reality of a woman in the pulpit. Over time, though, his philosophy would change dramatically.
She Preaches
After William and Catherine were married in a quiet ceremony in 1855, the two began to travel together while William served as an evangelistic preacher. By 1858 Catherine had begun to teach Sunday school to children and women, although she was not confident of her abilities. Not long after, the mother of three young children (five more would follow) was stunned by a startling revelation as she walked to church one evening. Gazing through the dingy row-house windows, she glimpsed women sitting together at kitchen tables, gossiping and passing the time, and she felt called to bring them to God. “Would you not be doing God more service, and acting more like your Redeemer, by turning into some of these houses, speaking to these careless sinners, and inviting them to the service, than by going to enjoy it yourself?” she asked herself.5
Catherine stood still, looked up to heaven, and asked God to help her. And then she immediately approached a group of women sitting on a doorstep and invited them to church. Her courage fueled, Catherine knocked on the door of the next house and spoke about Jesus to the woman who answered. Thus began her twice-weekly evening visits to the slums to evangelize to the poor and destitute, a practice that would later be an important component of the Salvation Army’s ministry.
Up to this point Catherine philosophically believed that women should be allowed to preach, but she was reluctant to pursue that calling herself. In fact, the very idea of standing before a crowd and preaching the Word of God filled her with anxiety, fear, and dread. That all changed on a stormy Sunday morning in 1860, as Catherine sat in the front pew with her four-year-old son, Bramwell, on her lap. As she listened to a visiting minister testify about obedience to God’s will, she suddenly felt a voice urge her to do the same. At first Catherine resisted the voice, reminding herself that she was entirely unprepared. “You will look a fool and you have nothing to say,” she heard another voice argue in her head. For Catherine, that “voice of the devil” was the deciding moment. “I have not yet been willing to be a fool for Christ. Now I will be one,” she decided, rising and striding toward the pulpit where her husband stood.
Surprised to see his typically shy wife standing next to him before the congregation, William leaned toward her with concern. “What is the matter, my dear?” he whispered.
“I want to say a word,” Catherine whispered back. William, shocked almost to silence, simply announced to the congregation, “My dear wife wishes to speak,” before taking a seat in the pew.6 Catherine went on to testify, confessing her sin of disobedience before the rapt congregation. By the time she was finished, several in the chapel were weeping audibly, and when William rose to his feet, he announced that his wife would preach again that evening.
Thus began nearly three decades of preaching and evangelizing for Catherine Booth. In fact, only a few weeks after this initial foray, Catherine stepped into William’s place when he fell ill and covered his preaching duties for four months while he recuperated. With her traveling, preaching several nights each week, visiting “the men” (the alcoholics on the street), and caring for now four children—the eldest only four years old—Catherine’s schedule was almost impossibly demanding. “It was not I that did this but the Holy Spirit,” Catherine wrote later. “With four little children . . . it looked like an inopportune time, did it not, to begin to preach. . . . I never imagined the life of publicity and trial it would lead to. . . . All I did was to take the first step.”7
It’s interesting to note that later, when Catherine and William’s eldest daughter, Kate, demonstrated a gift for preaching, Catherine initially objected. Perhaps she recalled her own rigorous regimen and the demands of balancing motherhood and domestic duties with a full-time preaching schedule. When she balked at the notion of Kate climbing to the pulpit, her son Bramwell suggested she bring her misgivings to God and talk with him honestly about her reluctance and fear. “In our conversation he fixed his eyes upon me and said, ‘Mama dear, you will have to face this question alone with God, for God has as assuredly called Katie and inspired her for this work as ever He called you, and you must mind how you hold her back,” Catherine reflected later.8 Catherine, who never hesitated to talk directly and honestly with God, spoke to him that night behind the closed doors of her bedroom, and when she emerged, she gave Kate her blessing and promised God that she would never again stand in the way of his will for her children.
The Salvation Army Is Born
By 1870 the Salvation Army—known then as the Christian Mission—was well under way with William at the helm and Catherine as his trusted advisor. Discouraged by the church’s refusal to support him as a full-time traveling evangelist, William broke from the Methodist Church in 1861 and with Catherine’s blessing forged out on his own, despite the fact that it meant no steady income for his growing family.
The couple’s vision of religion and evangelism departed dramatically from the norm. Instead of preaching in churches and meetinghouses, William spoke in tents, dance halls, taverns, and even graveyards and stables—anyplace that put him among the people who most needed salvation. “More than two-thirds of the working classes never cross the threshold of a church or chapel,” he wrote. “It is evident that if they are to be reached, extraordinary means must be employed.”9
The couple also strongly believed in the power of personal testimony and encouraged those already converted, from prostitutes to recovered alcoholics, to preach to the people directly. The Booths believed that God chose members of the uncultivated masses to be his messengers, his army of salvation. While William preached to the destitute and poor, Catherine concentrated on the wealthy, reaching congregations that could afford to give generously to support both their mission and the Booth family themselves.
By the end of 1878, the year the Christian Mission was officially renamed the Salvation Army, the organization employed 127 full-time ministers (more than one hundred of them recruited from the ranks of recent converts), and the total Sunday night congregation in churches and meetinghouses in London and beyond numbered more than 27,000. Modeled after the military, the Salvation Army had its own flag and hymns, and its ministers wore uniforms and were assigned ranks according to a hierarchy. William was known as the “General,” while Catherine assumed the title “Mother of the Salvation Army.” Several of their eight children followed in their parents’ footsteps. Two of them, Bramwell and Evangeline, later became generals themselves.
Driven from the Familiar to the Unknown
Catherine suffered from serious illnesses almost her entire life. As a teenager she was bedridden by a severe curvature of the spine. When she was an adult, exhaustion, depression, angina, and what’s now thought to be Crohn’s disease incapacitated her and, more than once, brought her to the brink of death. Her frail health, combined with an exhaustive preaching schedule, constant financial challenges, a relentless mission, and the unceasing job of raising eight children, made for an existence fraught with challenges and change. As her granddaughter Catherine Bramwell-Booth noted, “Catherine was continually driven by God out from the familiar to the unknown, and every new departure in her life demanded a new act of faith in God. To every fresh call and in the presence of every threatened loss or sorrow her response had to be ‘I will trust and not be afraid.’”10
In dying, as in living, Catherine trusted and encouraged. In her last letter to her beloved Salvationists, she soothed them, always a mother, with these words: “The waters are rising, but so am I. I am not going under, but over. Don’t be concerned about your dying: only go on living well, and the dying will be all right.”11
Catherine Booth, Mother of the Salvation Army, died on October 4, 1890, in the arms of her beloved husband, surrounded by her children. Three days later more than fifty thousand people knelt by her coffin to pay their respects, bowing their heads beneath a sign that read, “Love one another and meet me in the morning,” a quote from one of her messages. Many who attended the visitation and funeral were poor, their clothes shabby and unkempt, their faces ravaged and worn. Many had come to God through Catherine’s preaching or her personal attention. Many were still alcoholics, prostitutes, and gamblers, just now taking their very first step toward God. These were Catherine’s beloved people, her family. She would have been very much at home.12