Recently, I was chatting to some overseas tourists full of praise for New Zealand’s beautiful scenery. The point was made that New Zealand is a country that never looks ugly. This year I took my first trips to Tonga and Fiji. Neither of those nations looks ugly either. Not on the surface, anyway.
And yet sadly, there’s still too much ‘ugly’ in New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga. There’s poverty and inequality, violence and abuse, addiction and loneliness, bigotry, racism and other injustices. Into this environment, God has placed The Salvation Army. This is our mission field!
The Salvation Army has—almost from its outset—adopted an ‘integrated mission’ approach of ministry to the whole person. When The Salvation Army seeks to bring life-giving salvation to people, we understand this as encompassing people’s physical, mental, social and spiritual needs.
This weekend in Wellington, we launch a new Mission Plan that calls us back to the heart of our purpose: bringing life, and that invites us to recommit ourselves to mission to the whole person.
Just as this edition of War Cry looks different to how the magazine has looked over recent years, and certainly to how it looked back in 1883, so the way The Salvation Army will operate moving forward will be different in some ways to how we operated in the past. But our purpose is unchanged: to bring the full and forever salvation of Jesus Christ to ‘the whosoever’.
Christina Tyson
Editor
John 10:10 Contemporary English Version
A thief comes only to rob, kill, and destroy. I came so that everyone would have life, and have it in its fullest.
Hoani 10:10
Heoi anō tā te tāhae e haere mai ai, he tāhae, he patu, he whakamōtī hoki: i haere mai ahau kia whiwhi ai rātou ki te ora, inā, tōna nui noa atu.