Bible Missionary Church
Bible Missionary Church belongs to the Wesleyan-Holiness family of churches.
Governance: connexional.
A conservative-holiness body formed in 1955 by ministers leaving the Church of the Nazarene over standards of dress and entertainment, notably television.
Congregation count not yet source-verified against RCMS 2020; NULL rather than estimated.
A conservative-holiness body born in 1955 from ministers who judged that the holiness movement was making peace with the world — beginning with the television set.
Heritage
The Bible Missionary Church was organized in 1955, gathering around Glenn Griffith, a former Church of the Nazarene district superintendent, and other ministers who left that denomination over standards of dress, entertainment, and especially the acceptance of television. It became a principal body of the conservative holiness movement, maintaining revivalist worship, plain standards, and institutions including Bible Missionary Institute in Rock Island, Illinois.
Theological family
Wesleyan-holiness in the strict revivalist line: entire sanctification as a definite second work of grace, evidenced in separation from worldly amusement and adornment.
Who decides what
Connexional: districts and a general conference oversee congregations and credential ministers, on the Methodist-holiness pattern.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor finds old-fashioned holiness worship on purpose: congregational hymns and gospel songs, testimonies, kneeling at an altar for prayer, revival preaching, and modestly dressed worshipers — a deliberate preservation of the camp-meeting atmosphere.
What it has always cared about
Holiness standards held without embarrassment; revivals and camp meetings; missions; and the conviction that the church must be visibly unlike the world.
Its gift to the wider church
A preserved sound: the Bible Missionary Church and its conservative-holiness kin keep alive the fervent altar-service worship of the early holiness revival, a living archive of how a large share of American Protestantism once prayed.
Commonly confused with
With the Church of the Nazarene, its parent body, which it regards as having relaxed the standards; and with other conservative-holiness bodies of similar practice, several of which share the same 1950s origin story.
Range of views inside it
Modest variation in standards and worship among congregations; the body exists precisely to hold a defined line, and it does.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. No congregation count is stored — none has been verified against RCMS 2020 — and this record is kept brief in proportion to the public record. Sentences drawn from it hedge as "Bible Missionary congregations typically…".
Sources: The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
More of the Wesleyan-Holiness story · Find these churches on the map