A Fool for Christ

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:27

A Methodist childhood. Catherine Mumford was born on the seventeenth of January, 1829, at Ashbourne in Derbyshire, the only daughter of John and Sarah Mumford. Her father was a coachbuilder and a lay Methodist preacher; her mother was a woman of strict and serious devotion who kept her daughter close and taught her to love the Bible. The family moved more than once, and Catherine grew up largely in Boston, in Lincolnshire, and later in London. She was a grave, bookish, tender-hearted child. She is said to have read the Bible through eight times before she was twelve, and whatever the exact count, the fruit of it was obvious for the rest of her life: she could quote it at length, and argue from it with anyone.

The sickroom. She was never strong. In her early teens a curvature of the spine laid her up for long months, and other illnesses followed. The years that might have gone to school and society went instead to reading. She worked through theology, church history and the controversies of Methodism, and she thought for herself. It was in these years, too, that she became a convinced abstainer from alcohol, having seen what drink did to the families around her. She never had a formal education of any kind. What she had was a mind trained by Scripture, a pen, and an unusual habit of taking an argument all the way to its conclusion.

I will know Him. The crisis of her faith came at about sixteen. She had been brought up as a Christian and had never known a time when she did not fear God, and that, she later said, was precisely the temptation: to settle for a lifelong half-Christianity and never be truly changed. She refused. She told the Lord she would never rest until she was as thoroughly converted, and knew it, as any thief. For some six weeks she sought God, often far into the night, and then one morning, reading a hymn, she came into the assurance she had been seeking. She never afterwards thought a Christian should be content without it, and much of her later preaching was an attempt to bring others to the same certainty.

William. In 1852 she met William Booth, a young pawnbroker’s assistant from Nottingham turned Methodist preacher, as poor and as earnest as she was. They were engaged that year and married in London in 1855. Their long engagement survives in a great many letters, and from the first she was his counsellor as much as his companion. She was the better educated of the two and the clearer theologian, and she argued with him — about doctrine, about his ministry, and above all about women. William at first held the common view that a woman’s place was not the pulpit. She wrote to him plainly that she thought he was wrong, and gave her reasons, and in time he came round entirely. William entered the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion, and the couple moved from circuit to circuit, ending at Gateshead on Tyneside.

The pamphlet. In 1859 an American holiness preacher, Phoebe Palmer, was holding meetings in the north of England, and a local minister attacked her in print for speaking in public. Catherine, who had never preached, answered him in a pamphlet. Female Ministry; or, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel went through the texts used to silence women one by one, and argued that they had been misread, and that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost on sons and daughters alike had not changed His mind. It was sharp, learned and unanswerable to many who read it. And its author still had not said a word in public herself.

Whitsunday, 1860. The moment came the following year in William’s chapel at Gateshead. She has told the story herself, in the address printed as Witnessing for Christ. For ten years, she said, the Spirit had been urging her to speak, and for ten years she had failed for want of courage. Some months before, in a season of illness, she had promised God that if He would visit her again she would obey. At a service with around a thousand people present, sitting in the minister’s pew with her four-year-old son, she felt the Spirit come upon her, and heard the old accusation that she would look like a fool. It settled the matter. “I have never yet been willing to be a fool for Christ, now I will be one,” she answered, and walked to the front. Her startled husband could only announce, “My dear wife wants to say a word.” She confessed to the congregation that she had been living in disobedience, and there was, they told her, more weeping in the chapel that day than ever before. She never went back. Within months, with William ill, she was taking his appointments, preparing sermons in pencil while nursing the baby.

Never! In 1861 the New Connexion Conference, meeting in Liverpool, would not release William from circuit work to be the travelling evangelist he believed God had called him to be. Catherine is remembered to have called out “Never!” from the gallery when a compromise was proposed, and the Booths walked out of their security with four small children and no income. For some years they moved from town to town as independent evangelists, in Cornwall, in the Midlands, in the north, often preaching separately. More and more, she drew her own congregations.

East London. In 1865 William began preaching in a tent in Whitechapel, among the poorest people in the largest city in the world, and knew that he had found his life’s work. The East London Christian Mission grew out of it. The work was desperately poor, and much of what kept it alive came from Catherine. She preached to the comfortable in the West End of London and in the resort towns — in halls and in drawing rooms, to people who would never have entered a mission hut — and she spoke to them without softening anything. They came, and they gave, and some were converted. The Christian Mission was renamed The Salvation Army in 1878, and its military forms, its uniforms, its brass bands and its open-air marches shocked the respectable and drew the crowds. From the beginning, women preached, led and commanded in it. That was her doing more than anyone’s.

Eight children. She bore eight children between 1856 and 1867 — Bramwell, Ballington, Catherine, Emma, Herbert, Marian, Evangeline and Lucy — and she trained them herself, keeping them out of boarding schools and teaching them the Bible on her knee. She gave them to the work one after another. Her daughter Catherine went to open the Army’s work in France in 1881; Bramwell became his father’s chief of staff and later his successor. It was a large, gifted, argumentative family, and not all of them stayed in the Army. But she lived to see most of them preaching.

The Army Mother. In the 1880s the Army spread across Britain and overseas, and she became its chief interpreter to the educated public. Her sermons were printed as Aggressive Christianity, Godliness, Life and Death and Popular Christianity. She defended the Army against its critics in church and press, and she was its conscience as well as its apologist. In 1885 she threw herself into the campaign, led with W. T. Stead and others, against the traffic in young girls in London. She spoke at great public meetings and helped gather a petition of hundreds of thousands of signatures. That year Parliament raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

The last battle. Early in 1888 she found a lump and went alone to a specialist, who told her it was cancer and that she had not long to live. Her own mother had died of the same disease, and she knew what was ahead. She preached her last public sermon that summer. The rest of her life was spent in great pain, much of it at Clacton-on-Sea on the Essex coast, where her family and a stream of Army officers came to her bedside. She dictated messages to the Army and to its soldiers until she could not. She died at Clacton on the fourth of October, 1890, aged sixty-one. Many thousands filed past her coffin in London, a vast crowd attended her funeral, and she was buried in Abney Park Cemetery. Those who had called her the Army Mother were not only the officers. They were also the poor.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. For ten years she knew what God wanted and did not do it. Is there a known obedience you have been postponing? Name it to God today.

2. Her turning point came when the fear of looking foolish was named for what it was. What does the fear of looking foolish keep you from doing for Christ?

3. She argued with the man she loved and changed his mind. Is there a conviction you hold from Scripture that you have been too timid to speak about at home?

4. She made her sickroom a school. What would it mean to use your present limitation, rather than simply endure it?

5. Pick up one of her own sermons in the Ochorus library this week and read it straight through.

A PRAYER

Lord, You chose a timid, sickly girl and made her a preacher. You are not limited by my weakness, only by my unwillingness.

I have been afraid of looking foolish. I have waited for approval that never came, and called my waiting wisdom. Forgive me.

Give me her obedience at the moment it matters: to rise and speak when You say speak, and to be silent when You say be silent.

And when my own last battle comes, let me meet it as she did, with the war still going on and my eyes on You. Amen.