Christian and spent much of his spare time trying to persuade other people to become Christians too (Brook, 1999, p. 11).
When his apprenticeship was completed, he moved to London to work in the pawnbroking trade there and joined with the local Methodist Church. He later decided to become a minister and began his evangelistic career at the age of 23 and subsequently traveled through England as an itinerant preacher of the Methodist New Connection Church (Coutts, 1978, p. 23). But he soon resigned his position with the Methodist church because he felt that God wanted more from him and so he separated from the church in 1861 and continued his ministry independently.
In 1865 Booth and his wife, Catherine, decided as a means both to propagate the Christian faith and to furnish spiritual and material aid to needy persons, founded the Christian Mission in London, which in 1878 became known as the Salvation Army. The impetus for this came in 1865 when Booth found himself in the East End of London preaching to crowds of people in the streets. Outside a pub called the Blind Beggar he was heard by some missionaries who were so impressed that they asked him to lead a series of meetings that they were holding in a large tent (McKinley, 1986, p. 32).
The tent was situated on an old Quaker burial ground on Mile End waste in Whitechapel. It was there on July 2, 1865 that Booth brought to the poor and wretched of this most wretched London neighborhood the gospel of Jesus Christ. His mission began to grow from this point, but the work still went slowly even as outposts were established. The group was merely another one of the 500 charitable groups working with London's poor until 1878 when Booth changed its name to the Salvation Army (from the Christian Mission). The idea of an army fighting sin caught the imagination of the people of the time and the army began to grow rapidly. Booth's fiery sermons and sharp imagery drove his message home an...