Fire Baptized Holiness Church
Fire Baptized Holiness Church belongs to the Wesleyan-Holiness family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
Fire Baptized Holiness Church reports 34 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
A small Kansas-centered holiness church whose fiery name predates Pentecostalism — and which declined to follow the fire-baptized movement into it.
Heritage
The fire-baptized movement of the 1890s, associated with evangelist B. H. Irwin, preached a baptism of fire beyond sanctification and organized associations across the plains and the South from 1895. Most of that stream embraced Pentecostalism and merged in 1911 into what became the International Pentecostal Holiness Church; the Kansas-centered body known as the Fire Baptized Holiness Church (Wesleyan), headquartered at Independence, Kansas, continued instead as a conservative-holiness church — Wesleyan in doctrine, plain in standards, and not Pentecostal. RCMS 2020 counted 34 congregations.
Theological family
Conservative Wesleyan-holiness: entire sanctification as a second definite work, with strict standards of dress and life; the fire of the name is the Spirit's purifying work, not tongues.
Who decides what
A general conference and district structure serving small congregations, in the holiness-connexional pattern.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor finds plain, fervent holiness worship — hymns, testimony, altar prayer — among modestly dressed members.
What it has always cared about
The purity of heart the name proclaims; camp meetings; and steadfastness at small scale.
Its gift to the wider church
A living footnote the historians need: this body preserves the non-Pentecostal reading of the fire-baptized revival, evidence of the fork in the road where Holiness and Pentecostal parted.
Commonly confused with
With the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, heir of the larger fire-baptized stream; and with the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, a historically Black Pentecostal body of similar name.
Range of views inside it
A small, uniform body; variation is modest.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. The fire-baptized name is shared across bodies with divergent histories, and our matching must be read cautiously; this record is deliberately brief in proportion to the public record. Sentences drawn from it hedge as "Fire Baptized Holiness congregations typically…".
Sources: The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
Where Fire Baptized Holiness Church churches are on the map
2 Fire Baptized Holiness Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 2 states.
- New York — 1
- South Carolina — 1
More of the Wesleyan-Holiness story · Find these churches on the map