Identity-Forming Theological Education: The Practice of Confession in the Formation of Salvation Army Officers

Abstract

Preparing future Christian leaders to take their place in the Church is not only about ensuring they have the capacities (intellectual, pastoral, strategic leadership, public performance, etc.), but that they become significant carriers of the traditions, beliefs, and practices that define a particular community of faith. Learning to become a Salvation Army officer is substantially concerned with this perpetuation of organizational culture. As such, individual learning may be constructed in terms of taking up a particular social identity that conforms to the needs and expectations of the organization. Through discourse analysis I surface one particular element of organizational discourse—“confession”—and examine how power/knowledge circulates to produce a Salvation Army officer identity.

Notes

There are of course limitations to a discursive approach. While discourse analysis is generative in terms of allowing us to see how ‘language’ constitutes reality through the statements we accept as normal, valid, true, it is limited in adequately addressing the non-linguistic aspects that also constitute identity such as emotion and cognition. Foucault's approach is also criticised as annihilating the stability of the ‘knowing’ subject, as it is reduced to no more than the product of power/knowledge relations. Thus since all knowledge is socially produced it can never be regarded as certain. So while a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis may disrupt “taken for granted assumptions it can provide no grounding for alternative modes of knowledge, for they will be equally bereft of a firm epistemological territory upon which to stand” (Cheek and Porter 1997, 112).

A fundamental part of the organizational birth narrative in which the founder William Booth is understood as the agency through which the divine works to raise up The Salvation Army for God's purposes.

For further exploration of Foucauldian insights into the exercise of power in adult learning see the very helpful and thought provoking Brookfield (2001).

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in a society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral networks, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalising power” (Foucault 1977, 201).