Our Army Heritage

I've been hearing a lot about our Salvation Army Heritage lately. It almost seems that everywhere I turn, someone is arguing the case that we should not lose or forget our heritage. But before we talk inteligently about our heritage, we need to be clear what we mean by it.

The good ol' American Heritage Dictionary (ha! did you catch that? Heritage!) puts it this way:

Something passed from one generation to another:

• legacy
• inheritance
• tradition
• birthright
• family possession
• estate

I'm OK with some of those for our Army, but others I'm not. For instance, we should be concerned about our Legacy- that image which has been left to us by our forebearers. Family Possession, on the other hand, reeks of inbreeding- something just for us and no one else.

I think the important thing to remember here, is that our heritage is not brass bands or our songbook. It's not uniforms and flags. It's not even our symbols and logos. Our heritage has not been left to us in "things." We can do without these things. Our heritage is

1) Listening to the Holy Spirit,
2) Enthusiasm for God and
3) The willingness to do whatever it takes to reach the lost.

If we do these three, we are doing the very things at the heart of our Army (and, I believe, God's purpose for our Army). If we listen to ourselves or the world more than we listen to God, we might as well give up our fight. The war just can't be won in that manner. If we just put our enthusiasm into new programs or old memories, we end up deader that the proverbial doornail.

If we are only willing to go so far to get the attention and salvation of the lost people around us, we have sold our soul for a mess of porridge. This includes hanging onto things that are making us irrelevant to the world around us.