Aggressive Christianity

Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. MARK 16:15

The phrase that gave its name to her first book of sermons is the one most people associate with Catherine Booth, and it has worn oddly with time. Aggressive, to a modern ear, suggests rudeness or hostility. To her it meant something closer to active, forward, taking the initiative: the opposite of a Christianity that sits in its buildings and waits. She opened the address Aggressive Christianity with a thought experiment. Suppose you knew nothing of church history, and simply read the Acts of the Apostles and asked what the world would look like nineteen centuries later. Surely it would long since have been won. Instead, she said, look at Christian England: the great majority of the nation ignoring God entirely. Something had gone wrong, and she was not willing to blame God for it.

Two deceptions

She believed the enemy had succeeded by deceiving God’s own people in two ways. The first, which an earlier chapter has followed, was about the standard of their own lives. The second was about their duty to the world. The church had come to think that its task was to build chapels, pay ministers, hold services, and invite people to come. If they would not come, that was their responsibility.

She had met this attitude in person. After she preached in a town in the West of England, the gentleman she was staying with told her she had been rather hard on them. They built the chapels and paid the ministers, he said, and if the people would not be saved, they could not help it. She answered with a parable. Suppose a plague broke out in London, and the Board of Health opened hospitals and offered free treatment, and the people, besotted and blind, would not come. Would anyone say the Board had done its duty and the people deserved to die? No. If the people will not come to the physicians, the physicians must go to the people.

Go

That, she said, is simply what the Great Commission means. Go ye. To whom? To every creature. And where are they to be found? “Where they are.” She pictured a servant sent into the city on his master’s business, who instead took an office and sent out circulars inviting the master’s clients to call on him at their convenience. Nobody would call that obedience.

And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. LUKE 14:23

She took Paul’s commission from the risen Christ in the same way. The people are asleep: wake them. They cannot see their danger: open their eyes. They are preoccupied: turn them round by your earnestness.

To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. ACTS 26:18

And she pointed out that the early church did not spread through apostles alone. When the believers at Jerusalem were scattered by persecution, it was ordinary converts — laymen and women, as she put it — who went everywhere preaching the word, and churches sprang up where no apostle had ever been.

Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word. ACTS 8:4

Only do it

She knew the objections. You must be careful and judicious, people told her; you must not thrust religion down people’s throats. “Then, I say, you will never get it down,” she replied. Was she to wait until an unconverted man wanted to be saved before trying to save him? He would never want it until the death rattle was in his throat.

But the aggression she meant was not a matter of volume. It was a matter of doing it at all. “Go as quietly and softly as the morning dew,” she said. Have meetings like the Quakers, if you like. Only do it. She told of a young woman who came to see her, whose proud and ungodly father had died after a sudden illness, having lost his reason before the end. For three years she had meant to speak to him about his soul and never found the courage. She said she had never smiled since, and thought she never would. Don’t be like that, Catherine urged. Do it quietly, if you like; privately, if you like; but do it, and do it as if you believed the soul in front of you was worth saving.

Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:11

She pictured the method as something almost domestic: taking a friend lovingly by the button-hole and saying that you had never spoken to him closely and prayerfully about his soul, and letting him see the tears in your eyes, or if you cannot weep, hear them in your voice.

The weeping behind it

It is easy to hear the energy in this teaching and miss what drove it. She said more than once that the state of the world had so depressed her that she felt her heart would break, and she applied to herself the psalmist’s words.

Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law. PSALM 119:136

Aggressive Christianity, in her sense, was not a strategy. It was grief with its sleeves rolled up.

Weighing it

Her reading of compel them to come in needs one clarification, because the phrase has a dark history. Earlier centuries used it to justify forcing people into the church by law and violence. She meant nothing of the kind. Her compulsion was entirely moral: earnestness, persuasion, tears, persistence and the power of the Spirit. She said so explicitly. Nothing in her teaching warrants manipulation or disrespect for the freedom of the person being addressed.

There is also a real danger of mistaking pushiness for zeal. Some who have imitated her tone without her tears have done more harm than good. Her own measure was love: to go as if you felt the value of the soul and meant to save it. Where that is present, even a clumsy word is often welcome. Where it is absent, no method will help.

And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. MATTHEW 28:20

She noticed that the commission ended with that promise, and drew the obvious conclusion: He would not have promised His presence if the work were going to be easy.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List the people you know who do not know Christ and will never come to a church service. How might you go to them, where they are?

2. Is there someone you have meant to speak to about their soul for a long time? Decide when and how you will do it, quietly if you like, but soon.

3. Look at your church’s activities. How many wait for people to come, and how many go out to them?

4. Pray over Psalm 119:136 until you feel something of the grief behind her zeal. Ask God to give you a heart that weeps for the lost.

5. Examine your own manner when you speak of Christ. Is there love in it, or only urgency?

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You came looking for me when I was not looking for You. And I have waited in comfort for others to come to me.

Forgive me for building walls and sending invitations, and calling that obedience.

Send me where they are. Give me the courage to speak, and the love that makes my words bearable. Let them hear the tears in my voice.

You have promised to be with me always. Go with me now. Amen.