01/09/2024
Salvation Army friends may know that General Lyndon and Commissioner Bronwyn Buckingham were in Australia last week, bouncing around the country like billiard balls, visiting six state capitals in six days. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard a General preach like that,’ a retired friend told me, meaning so freely and powerfully. Me neither.
It got me thinking about Generals I have heard, and I thought I’d tell you about three today.
I can go back 60 years—yikes—to the mid-60s, when I stood across Smith Street, Parramatta watching Frederick Coutts speak at the dedication of land for a new hall—a hall now pulled down and replaced by a golden skyscraper. Coutts was British, a tall man, and he stood with one hand planted on a hip, which reminded me of a famous photo of the evil Lenin doing the same thing.
I was 19 when I bought his book of sermons, Christian Essentials. He taught me a lot, for instance the nature of saving faith: ‘The faith that saves is not faith in a proposition but faith in a person. For example, in an African classroom in a Salvation Army secondary school which I recently visited, the blackboard showed that the boys were being taught that the sum of the three angles of any triangle was on 180 degrees. I turned from the blackboard to the Salvation Army officer teaching. She was European, and not from their nation. However, the boys believed in that middle-aged woman. They believed in her. They trusted her. It is faith in a person that saves.’
Around 10 years later, he spoke to cadets and officers in the old Sydney college chapel. One cadet asked, ‘General, you have a lot of illustrations. Where do you file things like that?’
Coutts smiled, tapped the side of his head and said, ‘Up here.’
The Swedish-born chess genius Erik Wickberg followed Coutts. Scholars and preachers of the calibre of John Stott respected him so highly, that when Wickberg retired, they published a book of papers in his honour.
Wickberg was tall, too. Noble is a word for his bearing. He preached to a packed Sydney Town Hall on the parable of the Prodigal Son. At one point he said: ‘I was speaking to a young man in Brisbane last weekend. He faced a big decision whether he would follow Christ. The world offers so many other options these days.’
For some reason, the Holy Spirit spoke that to my inner self. Pretty soon I was kneeling at the front, making one of the most important transactions with God of my life.
Just before Wickberg died in 1996, I wrote to thank him. He graciously wrote back.
Next came Arnold Brown. I first met him in his office in Toronto Canada where he was Territorial Commander. He was not so tall, but he was handsome, and he had a rich melodious voice I can still hear. He’d hosted a weekly radio show for years.
He—and the admirable Mrs Brown came to Sydney in I think the early 80s. In five officers’ councils. He preached with that marvelous voice through Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. As a technical expositor of the Bible, he was the finest Salvation Army preacher I have heard. He told memorable stories but he told them to illustrate what the Bible was saying.
He often made us laugh. I still remember a story about a time he tapped the car horn to hurry his wife up.
And he played on the aura or mystique of being General. On the spur of the moment, he got Commissioners Leslie Pindred and Harry Williams to stand and sing a duet. Two more dignified saints you could not find, but we all smiled and chuckled, and Arnold made fun out of it. The early Army leaders knew how to hold a crowd, and Brown had some of that.
He was quite elderly when I was editing The Officer magazine. I printed two articles he sent but declined one. A few weeks later, I got asked to go down and see the Chief of the Staff. A kindly Earle Maxwell said, ‘We don’t say no to retired Generals.’
