My feeling is that at its base the Salvation Army was started with the intent of proclaiming, and not for taking away from the Church. The members of the Salvation Army would attend their own Church as occasion presented for the Sacraments.
This may be so, but at present the Salvation Army is a full-fledged denomination with its own clergy (who are commissioned officers) and laity (who are enlisted soldiers) and its own church services. I don’t understand why they felt the need to create new rites of enlistment and the commissioning of officers based on military ritual, instead of using the ancient liturgical sacraments always observed by the Church of England and the Methodists. I don’t understand why they don’t just coordinate the ecclesiastical aspect of their organization with the Methodists or Anglicans from which they originated, so as to allow their clergy, their commissioned officers, more time to focus on coordinating charitable operations? Something along the lines of St. John’s Ambulance or the Knights of Malta, which are both charitable organizations in the Roman Catholic church, the latter with its own clergy in addition to charitable operations. I just find it bewildering.
I don't think any Christian would be opposed to baptism and the Lord's Table. They were instituted by the Lord and ought to be practiced in all the churches. Anyone found in opposition against the sacraments are in opposition with God.
I mentioned the case of the Salvation Army, where I am actually confused as to why they do not have the sacraments or coordinate with a church that does. There are two other cases however which occurred to me, where there are theological reasons which I do understand, although I disagree with them:
In the first case, we have the Quakers. Some Quakers do have baptism and holy communion; some have entirely programmed worship like any low church Protestant denomination. There are others who have unprogrammed or waiting worship, which I am not inherently opposed to as I myself think there is value in silence and silent or relatively quiet contemplation and prayer (for these reasons, I really am attracted to the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox monastic practices of hesychasm and continual mental recitation of the Psalter, and the Jesus Prayer, which Anglicans increasingly use as well in the Anglican Rosary, the Roman Catholic tradition of the low mass, and devotions such as lectio divina, the Holy Hour, the novena, and the Rosary, and the related Russian Orthodox prayer rule of St. Seraphim of Sarov). So the Quakers who have waiting worship but observe Baptism and Holy Communion I like, and have an interest in.
However, there are some Quakers who, I believe, have done away with baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and this I cannot agree with. Like the Salvation Army, these are still Nicene Christians who are defined as Christians by the Statement of Faith of this website, which I think is a very good means of identifying groups as Christians, and so I do respect them as Christian, but I really wish they would observe the sacraments, which are not without reason called ordinances.
There are also some liberal Quakers who have adopted a doctrine very similar to that of the Unitarian Universalists, albeit with worship being almost exclusively or exclusively of the unprogrammed, waiting worship form. However, these Quakers do not meet the CF.com definition of Christian, and I would argue they are basically a more mystical alternative to the Unitarian Universalists.
I have greatly enjoyed the Oxford Handbooks on Anglican Studies and Methodist Studies, and there is a new volume available on the Quakers which I think I will get.
The other group of Christians whose sacramental practices are somewhat incomplete are the Priestless Russian Old Believers. When the Nikonian Schism occurred in the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666 after Patriarch Nikon and the Czar forcibly introduced liturgical reforms, which is an interesting discussion in its own right, this caused quite a stir, and there were violent persecutions of traditionalists. There is a very sad painting showing an elderly babushka tied to a cart, being taken away by the militia to be executed for making the sign of the cross with two fingers instead of three.
Now, most Old Believers retained the full sacraments, either through their own hierarchies set up in Russia by sympathetic bishops, or else, by emigrating to Georgia or the Ottoman Empire and being received by the Georgian Catholicos or the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Romania (and I think Bulgaria as well), and later, the Russian Orthodox Church reversed its decision and welcomed Old Believers back into the church, complete with their more ancient liturgy, and of the Old Believers I have mentioned, all observe the seven sacraments recognized as canonical in the Eastern Orthodox church.
However, a minority of Old Believers came to an opinion which I think was erroneous, these being the “priestless Old Believers.” Presumably ignorant or suspicious of every other Orthodox church, including those which were extremely liturgically conservative such as the Georgian Orthodox Church, and doubting the legitimacy of the Old Believer bishops in Russia, they came to believe that all truly Orthodox bishops had been martyred, and therefore, when the last of their priests died around 1745, they believed there were no more Orthodox priests. So they continue to baptize their children, because laity in every denomination including the Orthodox can baptize in an emergency, and some of them still have the sacrament of marriage, but Priestless Old Believers do not have Holy Communion or other sacraments that require a priest or bishop, and they build their churches so that the iconostasis is a solid wall, without the royal doors or the deacons’ doors.
Despite not having priests, they observe a full cycle of services, including the usual Orthodox mainstays like the Paraklesis, All Night Vigils, Vespers, Matins, the hours, and the Typika, which is somewhat equivalent to Ante-communion in the Anglican tradition, in that it has most of the content of the Divine Liturgy, including the proper scripture lessons and hymns for the day, but lacks Holy Communion and can be served as a “reader service” without any of the prayers the priest would do. The Typika is actually used routinely in canonical Orthodox churches, for example, on some feasts where there is a Vesperal Divine Liturgy, and also as a standby if the priest is unavailable (which sometimes happens; several Eastern Orthodox churches have priest shortages and some small parishes have to share a priest, including parishes here in the US and Canada). The Priestless Old Believers are therefore in a melancholy situation because they have come to the dismal belief that there are no priests available anywhere. A number of them live in the area around Woodburn, Oregon; additionally, in Erie, PA, there was a Priestless Old Believer church, the Church of the Nativity, but they were persuaded that there were still valid priests, and became part of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia; they print English translations of the Old Rite service books and sell Lestovkas and other Russian Old Orthodox / Old Believer items, and I have bought several things from them. They also sell an inexpensive and charming little book called A Collection of Eastern Fables by a Russian Priest. I have spoken with them and they are lovely people.
