Wilson Carlile

English priest and founder of the Church Army (1882), an Anglican evangelistic organization modeled on the Salvation Army but operating explicitly within the structure and authority of the Church of England. Over more than sixty years, he pioneered aggressive street evangelism, training programs for lay preachers, and urban pastoral care, demonstrating that evangelism and sacramental catholicity could flourish together within Anglican tradition.

Wilson Carlile exemplifies the recovery of lay evangelism within Anglican tradition. Against both Catholic formalism and evangelical sectarianism, he demonstrated that the Church of England could embrace aggressive, incarnational evangelism—street preaching, personal conversion narrative, urgent call to decision—while remaining firmly within sacramental tradition and episcopal authority. He proved that lay leadership in evangelism need not mean loss of liturgical depth or apostolic order. The Church Army, continuing to the present day, stands as Carlile's enduring legacy and represents a distinctive Anglican answer to the question of how the Church remains missionary and apostolic without abandoning its sacramental and hierarchical identity. Within ACNA tradition, he represents the principle that revival and order are not opposed but complementary.

Wilson Carlile was born on January 14, 1847, in London. He experienced conversion to evangelical faith through the ministry of spurgeon and other Victorian preachers, but came to see that the Church of England could not be effectively reached through the methods of the independent denominations. In 1882, at age thirty-five, he founded the Church Army—deliberately paralleling the Salvation Army's militant evangelistic vision but embedding it within Anglican ecclesiology, liturgy, and order. He recruited lay evangelists (called 'Church Army Officers'), trained them in street preaching and pastoral visitation, and deployed them to working-class parishes and neighborhoods across England. Unlike the Salvation Army, which stood outside the established church, the Church Army functioned as an internal missionary order under episcopal oversight, its officers operating under priestly authority and proclaiming a message that integrated evangelical conversion with sacramental grace. Carlile was ordained priest in 1887, lending ecclesiastical standing to his movement. For more than sixty years—well into his nineties—he led the Church Army, expanding its work to mission fields, prisons, and military installations. His writings and speeches articulated a vision of the Church as inherently missionary, every member a witness, every parish a base for aggressive evangelism. He died on October 23, 1942, at age ninety-five, having transformed Anglican understanding of the laity's role in evangelistic mission.

• Evangelist
• Founder