An early Salvation Army leader appears to have predicted teleconferencing, webinars, live streaming, and social media links — George Scott Railton wrote this in The Salvation Army’s ” War Cry” of September of 1881:

“Let us hope that the telephone will soon be so far perfected as to come to our help, enabling us to link together into one meeting hundreds of thousands of persons congregated in various meetings.”

Innovation is in The Salvation Army DNA.  George Scott Railton also envisioned sermon-free church — Christian meetings without “grand addresses.”

“Even our enemies are forced to confess that our faces shine! It could not but be a wonder . . . one continual flow of prayer and praise, and love to God and man . . . And why? Because we had been with Jesus! Not by grand addresses . . . not by any human means, but by the one Almighty Spirit!.” –George Scott Railton (quoted in “The History of The Salvation Army, Volume Two” by Robert Sandall).

Experience grand-address-free church every Sunday morning at 10:45 at The Salvation Army Berry Street, 225 Berry St., Nashville, Tennessee 37207.