Wesleyan-Holiness

The nineteenth-century holiness revival: entire sanctification as a distinct work of grace.

The Holiness / Pentecostal boundary is the most contested line in the whole taxonomy. Nazarene, Wesleyan, Salvation Army and Church of God (Anderson) are Holiness and not Pentecostal; the International Pentecostal Holiness Church is both by descent.

The nineteenth-century revival that took Wesley at his word: entire sanctification as a real, testify-able work of grace — and built churches, colleges and rescue missions to prove it.

Heritage

A revival of Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection inside American Methodism: Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday Meeting in 1830s New York, then the National Camp Meeting Association from Vineland, New Jersey, 1867. Some holiness people stayed Methodist; the "come-outers" formed new churches — the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (1843, abolitionist from birth), the Free Methodist Church (1860: free pews, freed slaves, freedom in worship), the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana, 1881), and the Church of the Nazarene, united at Pilot Point, Texas in 1908. The Salvation Army belongs to this family throughout.

Theological family

Wesleyan-Arminian theology with the family distinctive: entire sanctification, a second work of grace perfecting the believer in love — expected, sought, and testified to.

Who decides what

Mostly light connectionalism: superintendents and conferences rather than powerful bishops; the Church of God (Anderson) declines formal membership machinery altogether; the Salvation Army runs on its own military pattern (see its record).

What a first-time visitor would find

Revivalist warmth: gospel songs, testimony, and the altar as the church's working furniture — a place people actually go, mid-service, to settle things with God. Many congregations now worship in contemporary style while keeping the altar call.

What it has always cared about

Holiness ethics, historically expressed in plain living; women preaching decades before most of Protestantism — the Nazarenes ordained women from their founding; compassionate ministry, from rescue missions to orphanages; missions; and a string of colleges.

Its gift to the wider church

It kept sanctification on the Protestant agenda when respectable churches had shelved it; it opened American pulpits to women earlier than almost anyone; its rescue-mission compassion became the pattern for urban ministry across traditions; and it raised the cradle in which Pentecostalism was born.

Commonly confused with

THE contested boundary of this whole taxonomy runs here: Holiness is not Pentecostal — these bodies do not teach tongues as evidence of Spirit baptism, and several formally rejected the Pentecostal revival — while the International Pentecostal Holiness Church is genuinely both by descent and is filed with the Pentecostals. And "Church of God" is a many-way name collision: Anderson, Indiana (this family) is not Cleveland, Tennessee (Pentecostal), and the string alone cannot tell you which is which.

Range of views inside it

Strictness of holiness ethics varies widely by body and congregation; worship ranges from camp-meeting tradition to contemporary; the degree of explicit Wesleyan teaching varies too.

A note from the mapmakers: Because the Holiness/Pentecostal line is the most contested in our taxonomy, our family assignment for any individual "Church of God" or holiness-adjacent congregation deserves double-checking against the congregation's own statements. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Holiness churches characteristically…"

Sources: The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans) · The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Melvin E. Dieter, Scarecrow Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Wesleyan-Holiness churches are on the map

4,599 Wesleyan-Holiness congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 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.

  • 1880 — The Salvation Army opens fire in America

    George Scott Railton and seven women officers landed in New York in 1880 and took the Salvation Army straight to the people other churches missed — the poor, the addicted, the imprisoned. Its brass bands and soup kitchens made holiness practical, and "soup, soap, and salvation" became one of the most recognized ministries in the country.

  • 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.

  • 1906–1909 — Azusa Street

    In a former livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a revival led by William J. Seymour — a Black holiness preacher, the son of formerly enslaved parents — ran for three years and launched global Pentecostalism, now counted in the hundreds of millions. Black, white, Latino and Asian worshipers prayed together under a Black pastor in Jim Crow America; the participant Frank Bartleman wrote that at Azusa "the color line was washed away in the blood."

    Modern Christianity's fastest-growing stream began as an interracial prayer meeting led by the son of enslaved people. Its later divisions were a departure from its birth, not an expression of it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 1970 — Asbury 1970: the chapel service that did not end

    A required chapel service at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky on 3 February 1970 gave way to confession and testimony and simply continued — 185 hours without a break. Students carried it outward to something like a hundred and thirty campuses and churches that spring. It is the direct precedent for what happened in the same chapel in 2023, and the reason anybody recognised what they were looking at.

    Nobody scheduled it, nobody owned it, and its spread was students going to other people's campuses at their invitation.

  • 2023 — The Asbury outpouring

    A routine chapel service at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky on February 8, 2023 simply did not end: students kept praying and singing for sixteen days, tens of thousands drove in from every state and stream — Baptist deacons, Catholic students, Pentecostal grandmothers in the same pews — and the university kept the platform deliberately low: no celebrity preachers, no branding, phones discouraged.

    The most-watched American revival in a generation belonged to no denomination, promoted no one, and was handed off — on purpose — before anyone could own it.

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