Rank, Doctrine and a Church Without Sacraments

The Salvation Army organizes itself as a single worldwide church under one General at International Headquarters in London, a structure the Army calls centralised rather than congregational or synodal. Members are enrolled as soldiers under the Army's own flag and a personal declaration called the Articles of War, and its clergy, called officers, are ordained into a graded rank structure borrowed openly from military usage, wearing uniforms and holding titles from Lieutenant up through Commissioner and General. William Booth adopted this military language and structure in 1878, renaming what had been the Christian Mission since 1865, and the Army has kept it ever since as the outward form of what it calls organized spiritual warfare against sin and social need.

The Army's theology sits inside the Wesleyan-Holiness family: its eleventh doctrine affirms entire sanctification, a definite second work of grace following conversion, tracing directly to the Methodist New Connexion in which Booth was ordained before he resigned to preach independently in 1861. Its sharpest departure from most other Christian bodies, including its own Methodist and Holiness relatives, is that Salvationists have held no corporate water baptism or Lord's Supper since 1883, on the conviction that grace comes directly by faith and needs no outward rite to carry it; enrollment as a soldier functions in practice as the Army's public profession of faith instead. Women have been ordained as officers on equal terms with men since the Army's founding, a position Catherine Booth had argued for in print years before the movement existed, making the Army an early rather than a late adopter of women's ordination among Protestant bodies.