Once upon a time not so long ago, I worked for the Salvation Army. First of all, I am always astounded at the people who don’t realize the Salvation Army is a church/denomination. Hello! SALVATION Army!

At one point, my boss told me that the reason you’ll never see a Salvation Army church with a steeple on it is because they didn’t want to be associated with the kinds of churches where if you had a real problem/need you’d be told, “We’ll pray for you.” They wanted people to know that the Salvation Army is a place where your physical as well as your spiritual needs could be met.

I thank God for my time at THAT Salvation Army (not all of them are so good). The employees from the Captain down LOVED the people we served through the shelter and the various outreaches, and lives were changed because of it. I think it is the first time that I really experienced God’s love as a tangible thing. I once asked my boss if anyone kept record of people who were helped by the Salvation Army who later joined. He said, “Where do you think we get our membership from?”

At the time, once of my friends was all caught up in the Brownsville heresy Revival. I really infuriated her by saying I didn’t think God wanted us chasing thrills and chills, which is all Brownsville and most revivals are - thrills and chills. That real revival meant carrying out the work He gave us to do, and I wondered if the Salvation Army and churches like them hadn’t been quietly carrying out the most successful evangelical outreach of the last 100+ years. She didn’t speak to me for awhile after that.

Rich Mullins said:

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

"You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too..... But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

Shane Clairborne said:

True, the cross is not always seeker sensitive. It is not comfortable. But it is the cornerstone of our faith, and I fear that when we remove the cross, we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable. After all, it wasn't so comfy to get nailed there.

We can admire and worship Jesus without doign what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

..... Jesus came not just to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live