Christian and Missionary Alliance

Heritage

Albert Benjamin Simpson, a Presbyterian pastor in New York City, left a fashionable pulpit in 1881 to reach immigrants and the unchurched, founding in 1887 two societies — the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance — that merged in 1897 as the Christian and Missionary Alliance. For most of a century it insisted it was a movement, not a denomination, formally becoming a church body only in 1974. Simpson founded one of America's first Bible training schools at Nyack, New York, and the Alliance built one of the largest Protestant missionary forces in the world. RCMS 2020 counted 1,776 U.S. congregations, among them many immigrant and multiethnic churches — a return to Simpson's founding instinct.

Theological family

Evangelical, in the Higher Life and Keswick deeper-life stream: sanctification as the fullness of Christ received by faith, prayer for the sick, and the imminent return of Christ — summarized in Simpson's Fourfold Gospel. ARDA files the Alliance with the Holiness family; the body describes itself simply as evangelical, and it is not Pentecostal.

Who decides what

A blended polity the body calls presbyterian in tendency: self-supporting local churches within districts led by superintendents, under a General Council and denominational president.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds mainstream evangelical worship — contemporary music, expository preaching — with the Alliance accents audible over time: missionary stories treated as family news, prayer for healing offered without fanfare, and the deeper life preached as ordinary Christianity.

What it has always cared about

World missions as the church's reason for being; the deeper Christian life; prayer for the sick without making healing a test of faith; and Bible training for ordinary believers.

Its gift to the wider church

Two gifts, one printed and one sent: A. W. Tozer — an Alliance pastor — whose The Pursuit of God still schools every tradition in hunger for God; and a missionary force that carried the gospel to peoples on every continent, decades of it funded by churches that refused to call themselves a denomination.

Commonly confused with

With Pentecostal bodies, because of the healing emphasis and because early Pentecostalism drew many Alliance people — the Alliance itself does not hold Pentecostal distinctives; with the Missionary Church, a separate Indiana-rooted body; and the acronym CMA with the Churches of God, General Conference or other lookalikes.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from classic Alliance deeper-life culture to broadly generic evangelicalism, and from Anglo heritage churches to Vietnamese, Hmong, Spanish-speaking, and other congregations that now form a large share of the family.

Where Christian and Missionary Alliance churches are on the map

72 Christian and Missionary Alliance congregations appear on The Church Map, across 22 states.

• Pennsylvania — 20
• Wisconsin — 11
• California — 9
• Washington — 4
• Minnesota — 3
• Nebraska — 3
• Ohio — 3
• Colorado — 2
• New York — 2
• Oregon — 2

Moments this body was part of

• 1887 — A. B. Simpson and the Christian and Missionary Alliance

  A. B. Simpson left a comfortable New York pulpit to preach to immigrants and dock workers, and in 1887 founded the movement that became the Christian and Missionary Alliance — a fellowship organized almost entirely around getting the gospel to unreached peoples, which planted churches on every continent.

• 1942 — The National Association of Evangelicals

  Evangelicals from dozens of denominations — holiness, Pentecostal, Baptist, Reformed — formed the National Association of Evangelicals at St. Louis in 1942, choosing cooperative engagement over separatism. Pentecostals, long dismissed by other conservatives, were included from the start; World Relief and shared radio, missions and chaplaincy work followed.

  The NAE marked the moment America's revivalist traditions decided they were one family with many rooms.