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The Church Army is effectively the Anglican answer to the (Methodist) Salvation Army.
History
The Church Army was founded in England in 1882—four years after the Salvation Army—by The Reverend Wilson Carlile (afterwards prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral), who banded together in an orderly army of soldiers, officers and a few working men and women, whom he and others trained to act as Church of England evangelists among the outcasts and criminals of the Westminster slums.
Previous experience had convinced Carlile that the moral condition of the lowest classes of the people called for new and aggressive action on the part of the Church, and that this work was most effectively done by laymen and women of the same class as those whom it was desired to touch. As the work grew, a training institution for evangelists was started in Oxford, but soon moved (1886) to London, where, in Bryanston Street near the Marble Arch, the headquarters of the army was established.
Principles and Practices
Evangelistic zeal with Church order is the principle of the Church Army, and it is essentially a working men's and women's mission to working people. Working men were trained as evangelists, and working women as mission sisters, and were supplied to the clergy. By the current procedure, established in 1896, the male evangelists are required to pass an examination by the Archdeacon of Middlesex, and are then admitted by the bishop of London as lay evangelists in the Church; the mission sisters likewise must pass an examination by the diocesan inspector of schools.
All Church Army workers (of whom there were over 1800 of one kind and another) were entirely under the control of the incumbent of the parish to which they were sent. They never went to a parish unless invited, nor stayed when asked to leave by the parish priest. Officers and sisters were paid a limited sum for their services either by the vicar or by voluntary local contributions. Church Army mission and colportage vans circulated throughout the country parishes.
External links
- http://www.churcharmy.org.uk
- History of Church Army
1882 establishments | Charities based in the United Kingdom | Protestantism | Religion in the United Kingdom | Religious organizations | Social welfare charities
"Church Army"