Salvation Army Branches Out to Try to Fill ‘a Great Emptiness’

In his five years as worldwide leader of the Salvation Army, Gen. Paul A. Rader has seen the horrors of wars in the Balkans and abject poverty in Africa and South America.

But as he nears the end of his term as the first American to lead the 134-year-old Christian evangelical organization, Rader said the most profound impoverishment is to be found in the wealthy countries of the West--”a great emptiness and longing for meaning and purpose.”

In an interview this week during a Salvation Army national conference in Pasadena, Rader, 65, said Salvationists--as members of the denomination are called--from developing countries are being urged to come to the United States and go to Western Europe to re-evangelize the West as “reverse missionaries,” working in the army’s homeless shelters and other outreach activities.

“We do have more people moving around the world than ever before, and not just from north to south and west to east but from east to west and south to north,” he said.

Indeed, the highest-ranking Salvation Army officials overseeing the 13 Western states, including California, are Commissioners David and Doreen Edwards. He is from Guyana and she is from Barbados.

Many Americans think of the Salvation Army primarily as a social action organization, with its familiar Christmas season bell ringers raising funds for soup kitchens and other good works. But underlying those activities is the army’s evangelizing mission, which has brought it from its roots in Britain to the United States and now has spread it worldwide.

Like other churches, the Salvation Army is now experiencing its greatest growth in Africa. Other gains are being made in Vietnam, Rader said, while South Korea remains a stronghold of Christian commitment and growth. The army reports 1.2 million members worldwide, including 117,000 in the United States and 786,634 in Africa.

Rader, who has visited 72 countries, rejects suggestions that it is easier to spread the Gospel in underdeveloped countries where, generally speaking, people are poorer and less educated. He said the West’s preoccupation with material goods and its consumer culture have left many people spiritually adrift.

“In terms of spirituality, we are by comparison impoverished people in the West, and that impoverishment is deepening as we enrich ourselves to almost unseemly levels in view of the . . . countries of the world that live in abject poverty,” Rader said. “We are enamored with things--with our own materialistic quest--and in that quest we have lost touch with spiritual values. We’re beginning to feel that. There is a great emptiness and longing for meaning and purpose.”

Commissioner Kay F. Rader, who has joined her husband as a “partner in mission” on overseas trips, said young Americans’ cultural perceptions are dramatically changed after serving in what many religious leaders refer to as the “Two-Thirds World,” as a team did last summer in Africa.

“As they flew in over Zambia, they looked down and they thought, ‘We have so much and they have so little.’ But they spent a summer there. As they were flying out they said they looked back and thought, ‘They have so much and we have so little.’ ”

The Raders’ travels have taken them to China, Vietnam, Bosnia and Cuba, all areas where political, ethnic or religious differences can test the mettle of missionaries with the best of intentions.

But Paul Rader said there are some bright spots. Vietnam has indicated a willingness to welcome the Salvation Army and has gone so far as to say the church’s workers could wear their distinctive uniforms in the country. China continues to ban outside religious groups from organizing there, but Rader said he was welcomed by and spoke to members of the officially sanctioned Christian church. China welcomes the army’s social service projects but not its preaching.

Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba, Rader said, has helped lift restraints there on Protestants as well as Catholics. Rader participated in a news conference broadcast by the government-controlled television in March and said Salvationists from throughout Cuba filled the Episcopal cathedral in Havana for three large meetings to renew their commitments to “holy living.” For the first time in 40 years, a Salvation Army band was admitted to the island to participate in the events.

Asked about the U.S.-led economic embargo of Cuba, Rader attempted to steer a middle course, saying that the Salvation Army tries to avoid commenting on political issues.

He understands how Cuban refugees in the United States feel “very deeply and passionately” about supporting the embargo.

“They put their lives at risk, and [many refugees] perished in the waters between Cuba and southern Florida,” he said.

On the other hand, he cited “dramatic instances of ways in which the embargo has worked against the interests of ordinary Cubans.”

“You come away wishing that somehow this stalemate could be surmounted and that there could be a way forward by which Cuba could be more open to America,” he said.

In Albania, which borders war-torn Kosovo, Rader said, the Salvation Army is feeding 30,000 people daily and had earlier offered humanitarian aid to a largely Muslim population in a Bosnian town.

“Anybody with any kind of sympathy for the human condition has to be heartbroken over what’s happening [in Kosovo], not only in the horrors that have been visited upon the people who didn’t survive longenough to get out of [the province], but the people who have just been thrust out of their homes callously,”Rader said.

He rejected the term “ethnic cleansing” for the Serbs’ drive to eject ethnic Albanians, most of whom are Muslims, from Kosovo. “I think it’s ratcheted up to genocide,” he said.

Still, Rader wishes that NATO had not resorted to bombing Serbia in an attempt to halt the murder and plundering of the Kosovo Albanians. Rader questioned the bombing’s effectiveness and added that eventually the West will be called upon to rebuild the infrastructure it is destroying.

Rader said religious animosities in the Balkans pitting Catholics against Orthodox Christians and Christians against Muslims are real enough. But he said it would be inaccurate to view the fighting simply as a religious conflict.

“There, an identification of certain groups of people in terms of their ethnic traditions and religion is part of the culture,” Rader said. “But it has gone a long way away from wherever it was rooted in that religious tradition in the past. That only becomes a flag under which to march, and it doesn’t relate to Christian principles. It doesn’t relate to Muslim principles when we understand them rightly. There’s so much more that’s involved there historically.”