Church of the Nazarene

Heritage

The Church of the Nazarene was born of gladness rather than grievance. Phineas Bresee's Los Angeles congregation (1895) united in 1907 with the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America from the Northeast, and on October 13, 1908, at Pilot Point, Texas, that body joined the southern Holiness Church of Christ by unanimous rising vote — a scene the denomination still celebrates as its birthday. Further unions followed; the word Pentecostal was dropped from the name in 1919 as tongues-speaking movements made it misleading. RCMS 2020 counted 5,155 U.S. congregations, and the church is now emphatically global, with most members outside North America.

Theological family

Wesleyan-holiness, the family's largest classic body: salvation by grace through faith, and entire sanctification — the heart cleansed and filled with love for God and neighbor — as a work of the Spirit in this life, stated in sixteen Articles of Faith. Not Pentecostal, despite the early name.

Who decides what

A representative polity deliberately balanced between episcopal and congregational: local churches call pastors with district approval, districts have superintendents, and a Board of General Superintendents serves the global General Assembly — the design was Bresee's compromise, and it held.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds warm evangelical worship, contemporary in most places, traditional in some, with the altar at the front still meaning what it meant: an open invitation to seek pardon or the sanctified life. Testimony and revival services survive in many congregations.

What it has always cared about

Entire sanctification preached as good news rather than burden; higher education — a network of Nazarene universities and seminaries on several continents; compassionate ministries; and the union instinct itself, which gathered a dozen regional holiness bodies into one church.

Its gift to the wider church

Pilot Point: American church history is mostly a record of divisions, and the Nazarenes supplied its happiest counterexample — regional movements surrendering their separate identities by standing vote, and then building universities, clinics, and a global fellowship on the merged foundation.

Commonly confused with

With Pentecostal denominations, because of the discarded early name and shared revival ancestry — Nazarenes do not practice speaking in tongues; with the Church of the Nazarene's conservative-holiness offshoots such as the Bible Missionary Church; and with other Wesleyan bodies of similar doctrine, chiefly The Wesleyan Church.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from revivalist to liturgically curious, and the global church spans cultures from Kansas to Mozambique to Korea; how entire sanctification is preached — crisis, process, or both — varies within the family's agreed doctrine.

Where Church of the Nazarene churches are on the map

1,620 Church of the Nazarene congregations appear on The Church Map, across 50 states.

• California — 142
• Ohio — 139
• Indiana — 126
• Michigan — 84
• Texas — 83
• Washington — 68
• Missouri — 62
• Illinois — 60
• Florida — 58
• Oklahoma — 52

Moments this body was part of

• 1867–1894 — The holiness revival

  A renewed hunger for Wesley's "entire sanctification" — stirred for decades by Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings in New York — organized itself at a camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey in 1867. Over the next generation the holiness movement spread through and then beyond Methodism, birthing the Church of God (Anderson), the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan and Free Methodist streams, and the Salvation Army's American work.

• 1907–1908 — Pilot Point: the Nazarenes choose to be one

  Regional holiness bodies from the east coast, the west coast and the south — each with its own name, paper and schools — merged at Chicago in 1907 and Pilot Point, Texas in 1908 to form the Church of the Nazarene. The anniversary is still kept as a feast of union.

  Three young denominations gave up their names to gain each other — the opposite of the era's splits, and it held.