page_title: William Booth
section_title: Conversion and early ministry
hierarchical_section_title: William Booth / Conversion and early ministry
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of William Booth
context_page_description: William Booth was an English Methodist preacher who, along with his wife, Catherine, founded The Salvation Army and became its first General. The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid. In 2002, Booth was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.
context_section_description: William Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham, the second son of five children born to Samuel Booth and his second wife, Mary Moss. Booth's father was relatively wealthy by the standards of the time, but during William's childhood, the family descended into poverty. In 1842, Samuel Booth, who could no longer afford his son's school fees, apprenticed the 13-year-old William Booth to a pawnbroker. Samuel Booth died on 23 September 1842.
  Two years into his apprenticeship Booth was converted. He then read extensively and trained himself in writing and in speech, becoming a Methodist local preacher. Booth was encouraged to be an evangelist primarily through his best friend, Will Sansom. Sansom and Booth both began in the 1840s to preach to the poor and the sinners of Nottingham, and Booth would probably have remained as Sansom's partner in his new Mission ministry, as Sansom titled it, if Sansom had not died of tuberculosis, in 1849.
  When his apprenticeship ended in 1848, Booth was unemployed and spent a year looking in vain for work. In 1849, Booth reluctantly left his family and moved to London, where he again found work with a pawnbroker. Booth tried to continue lay preaching in London, but the small amount of preaching work that came his way frustrated him, and so he resigned as a lay preacher and took to open-air evangelising in the streets and on Kennington Common.
  In 1851, Booth joined the Reformers (Methodist Reform Church), and on 10 April 1852, his 23rd birthday, he left pawnbroking and became a full-time preacher at their headquarters at Binfield Chapel in Clapham. William styled his preaching after the revivalist American James Caughey, who had made frequent visits to England and preached at the church in Nottingham where Booth was a member, Broad Street Chapel. Just over a month after he started full-time preaching, on 15 May 1852, William Booth became formally engaged to Catherine Mumford.
  Interested in the Congregationalist approach, Booth consulted David Thomas at Stockwell about the ministry. Through Thomas, he met John Campbell and then James William Massie. The recommendation was training under Rev. John Frost; but Booth disliked Frost's school, and left shortly. In November 1853, he was invited to become the Reformers' minister at Spalding, in Lincolnshire. He married Catherine Mumford on 16 July 1855 at Stockwell Green Congregational Church in London.
  Though Booth became a prominent Methodist evangelist, he was unhappy that the annual conference of the denomination kept assigning him to a pastorate, the duties of which he had to neglect to respond to the frequent requests that he do evangelistic campaigns. At the Liverpool conference in 1861, after having spent three years at Gateshead, his request to be freed for evangelism full-time was refused yet again, and Booth resigned from the ministry of the Methodist New Connexion.
  Soon he was barred from campaigning in Methodist congregations, so he became an independent evangelist. His doctrine remained much the same, though; he preached that eternal punishment was the fate of those who do not believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the necessity of repentance from sin, and the promise of holiness. He taught that this belief would manifest itself in a life of love for God and mankind. The Ethical characteristic of William Booth's business ventures was evident in the manufacture of boxes of Salvation Army matches which bore the slogan "Lights in darkest England, Security from fire, Fair wages for fair work". His match factory on Old Ford paid 4 pence a gross, while the larger firms only paid 2 1/2 pence.
caption: William Booth in about 1862
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