Evangelism, S&M and the lost.

The Torture Garden is a fetish club in London – anyone who wants to know more can follow the link.

My 23 year old son and his fiancée go there on special occasions (such as the annual Halloween Ball.)

This morning (at 4am) I picked them up from outside and took them to Victoria coach station.

Obviously my giving them a lift in no way endorses their interest in S&M – indeed I find the club and everything it stands for quite repulsive. I give them a lift to the coach station – one, because he’s my son and two, because in doing so I can guarantee that at least one part of the evening is safe.

The Halloween Ball is held in the crypt of a church – the church is still consecrated and 3 hours after the club closes the church opens for communion.

As I sit outside the club I watch lost humanity being washed along in the sewers of self destructive and transitory nihilistic existence. The people spilling out from the club are not all young – indeed many are in their forties. Some seem genuinely happy while others find a quiet corner to throw up and look disappointed.

Brixton High Street at 4am on a Sunday morning is as busy as it might be on a Saturday afternoon. As I watch and wait I realise that Booth’s submerged tenth has become a submerged nine tenths!

It dawns on me that this immoral majority, helpless and lost as they are have no contact with the church commissioned to be their light – indeed like spiritual vampires they sleep while we wake and retreat into the darkness as we move into the light. Railton’s words (from ‘Heathen England and what to do about it’) come to mind that —

“It is useless to shut our eyes to the plain fact that the awful condition of the masses could not possibly continue for so much as twelve months if the people or God were faithful; but in the Master’s own dreadful summing up, “If the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is henceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." Is not this precisely, what we see today?”

As I drive home I ask God to talk to me about the lost, about the past, about the present, about revival… When I get back home I look up the quote, later in the same chapter the old pioneer describes the infant Salvation Army —

“there is not anywhere today another organisation professing to undertake throughout the whole world a scheme of evangelisation specially directed to meet the need of the most abandoned and godless part of the community; and surely, therefore, we may fairly claim to be the Lord's special force raised up for this emergency.”

Then in the holiness meeting at our insignificant Corps in a part of London many have never heard of, Luke a drug addict and alcoholic moves to the Mercy Seat and quietly whispers midst his tears ‘God forgive me and change me’.

I go home with the knowledge that we had ‘one soul’ today, it’s nowhere near enough but it’s a start.

Yours set apart by Christ, for the lost, in the Army

A