My resignation as a SA Officer

I share here with family, friends and colleagues news of my resignation from officership. Amid complex factors, the essential causes are gradual changes in belief over several years, such that I now find myself outside even the most generous interpretations of Salvation Army doctrine. With no prospect of a return in sight, integrity requires that I give up the privileges of a ministry I can no longer fulfil. Detailing the perspectives I now hold would need a large book, but I ought to be brief in an unsolicited message. I share as much as I do here for two reasons. First, I am conscious of how resignation from officership is commonly interpreted. Second, and more importantly, I believe my cherished relationships across the Salvation Army world deserve the courtesy of a clear, open account.

For those who can have known little or nothing of my journey in recent years, this news will likely be startling and in conflict with your impressions of me. What has been gradual for me comes suddenly to you. The problem is that such matters are too sensitive and private for everyday conversation. If we have had contact recently and, in concealing the full scale of my predicament, I came across as less than genuine, I can only apologise and ask for your understanding.

Resignation from officership has always been difficult. It has meant stagnation or liberation, depending on the circumstances. It may induce searing regret at having turned one’s back on a sacred calling. For others, leaving has been an act of courage and truthfulness to one’s self unmatched earlier in life. The Booth children Kate and Herbert come to mind, as do some close friends. I have them to thank for helping me prepare for such personal upheaval. This is a lacerating moment in my life, involving loss of belonging, reputation, security and opportunity. But when it comes to the question of why I must leave and the influences upon me, I know this to be the most independent decision I have ever made. No one advised or encouraged me to resign – very much the opposite. There is no seductive offer of alternative work. Bereavement is also not a cause. Neither is there any shadow: some secret immorality or unconfessed turning away from God. The pursuits of truth and personal integrity have been the only guiding lights.

Any resignation must face up to the officer’s covenant. I have mine before me as I write. On signing it in May 2001, I had good reason to assume the beliefs I was binding myself to for life were fixed and final. My finest role-models were living, or had lived, fruitful lifetimes as Protestant Evangelicals. But, of course, I am not them. The hidden difficulty lay in the assumption that future learning and experience will affirm a Salvationist worldview. This is intrinsic to making the covenant. Aged twenty-eight, I could not foresee the challenging impact of future discoveries. Lifelong Salvationists have been able to reconcile their life experience with a commitment of belief made in early years, often reinforcing it, but I have been incapable of that. Eleven years later, the insight and hindsight of midlife reveal how provisional my beliefs and identity were. I understand now that, as a way of being, I bring enlarging knowledge and life experience to bear confrontationally on all my core convictions. This illuminates lesser eruptions of doubt earlier in life. Energising as the covenant was while evangelical belief could be sustained, I have the wrong kind of personality to have foreclosed enquiry by binding myself to religious truth-claims.

While offering no less depth and authenticity than that enjoyed by lifelong believers, this habit of the heart and mind has not lent itself to a stable, linear spirituality. It proved painfully disruptive to Salvationist ministry. I am neither proud nor ashamed of how I proceed in the formation of belief, but I am at peace with my nature and must seek a future consistent with who I am. Despite my loss and heartbreak, I can foresee redemptive fruits borne of these years of struggle. I am certainly not without hope.The covenant obliges an officer to ‘maintain the doctrines and principles of The Salvation Army’. Entrusted with the care of those under my ministry, I sought always to fulfil this promise. The price has been a widening disjunction between public and private identity. While the kindness of a low-profile appointment ameliorated the tension, the attempt to live for so long with this has proved debilitating. It is as if the fabric of my identity is being torn apart. For this reason, the formal ‘breaking’ of the covenant yields hope of a healed integrity: the reuniting of my private and public self. In this context, the reflexive assumption that resignation spells disobedience, weakness and failure is not meaningful, let alone pastorally helpful.

None of this implies regret at having become an officer in the first place. Any commitment risks future loss; officership was a risk worth taking. Among countless enriching experiences, I only have to think of the privilege of being entrusted to walk alongside people at their most burdened, broken and vulnerable.

Many thoughts will turn to my family: my wife, children, dad, sister and brother in particular. I became an officer free from parental expectation and I leave with my decision rightly tested, but ultimately respected. With Mum no longer here, I find Dad's love amplified in compensation: always welcoming, always supportive. It is the same magnificent devotion I saw in Mum's final months last year.

Lynne continues as an officer with my steadfast support. She is an amazing person to be with at such a time. I have tried to engage my family with sensitivity, and have doubtless done this imperfectly. I reason that, while having to act disruptively, I do them a greater disservice if I fail to be myself. But, however turbulent the times, they are all people of unwavering, extraordinary love. I see it, know it, and feel safe and strong because of it.

Vast kindness has come to me from Salvation Army leaders, to a degree I do not expect to find in any secular environment. I find also, to my joy, that true friendship is not conditional on shared vocation or belief. The movement has always been a loving world to me; a bottomless well of goodness. Though formally detached, I hope never to be severed from the people who embody those qualities.

Thank you for reading this, but more, for such goodness as you have shown me during this treasured season of my life called officership.

With esteem, Matt Clifton