Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
William Booth: God's Soldier and the Founding of the Salvation Army

William Booth: God's Soldier and the Founding of the Salvation Army

Quill, Spirit

Paperback

Historical FiguresChristian Living

ISBN13: 9798189144394
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 26 2026
Pages: 134
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.29 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English

On a spring evening in 1865, a group of gospel preachers near a public house on Mile End Waste asked if any bystander wished to say a few words to the crowd. William Booth stepped forward. He had no plan to found a movement that night, only a conviction, carried since he was fifteen years old, that his life should be spent putting other people right. By the time he died in 1912, that conviction had grown into the Salvation Army, an organization whose uniformed soldiers, brass bands, and shelters for the poor had reached nearly every corner of the world.

**William Booth: God's Soldier and the Founding of the Salvation Army** follows this remarkable life from its unassuming beginning in a terraced house in Nottingham to its close on a stage before nine thousand people at London's Royal Albert Hall. Readers will walk with Booth through his conversion in a small room beneath a Wesleyan chapel, his years as a Methodist minister, and the painful 1861 conference where his wife Catherine's single defiant word ended his formal ministry and set him on the path toward London's East End. From there, the book traces the mission's earliest, most precarious years, meetings held in a tent slashed by knives, winters that drove congregants away, and the gradual, hard won construction of something permanent, culminating in the single struck-out word on a printer's proof that gave the organization its lasting name.

This is a story built as much on partnership and loss as on triumph. Catherine Booth emerges not as a supporting figure but as a genuine co-founder, whose courage and conviction shaped the mission at every turn until her death in 1890 left William to lead alone. The book follows him through the decades that followed, marked by the death of his daughter Emma in an American railway accident, his reception by President Theodore Roosevelt, an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and, remarkably, a series of motorcar evangelism campaigns undertaken well into his seventies. It closes with his final public address, his death in August 1912, and a funeral procession that brought all of London to a standstill.

For readers drawn to religious history, Victorian England, or the stories of individuals who built lasting institutions from almost nothing, this book offers a clear, carefully researched account of how one man's evangelical conviction grew into an international movement still active today. It explains not only what Booth accomplished, but why he made the choices he did, what those choices cost him and his family, and how a mission born in a burial ground tent came to be recognized by presidents, universities, and the city of London itself.

William Booth's story is one of persistence in the face of institutional resistance, physical danger, and profound personal grief. It is a story about what it takes to build something meant to outlast its founder. Readers ready to understand how the Salvation Army began, and the man who gave it its name, will find that story told here from beginning to end.

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