Church of the Nazarene :

The Church of the Nazarene is a Protestant denomination within the tradition of evangelical Methodism. It was founded through mergers in 1907 and 1908 that united three smaller regional Wesleyan-holiness churches that were located principally on America's east coast, west coast, and South.

History :

The spiritual vision of early Nazarenes was derived from the doctrinal core of John Wesley's preaching and the holiness movement. The affirmations of the church include justification by grace through faith, sanctification by grace through faith, entire sanctification as an inheritance available to every Christian, and the witness of the Spirit to God's work in human lives. The holiness movement arose in the 1830s to promote these doctrines, especially entire sanctification, but had splintered by 1900.

The Church of the Nazarene today was the product of a three-way merger that occurred at the First and Second General Assemblies, held respectively at Chicago, Illinois, and Pilot Point, Texas in 1907 and 1908. The First General Assembly brought together the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, a denomination formed in 1896 through the merger of two older bodies, that lay principally along America's northeast coast and stretched from Nova Scotia to Iowa; and the Church of the Nazarene, founded in 1895 in Los Angeles, California by Phineas Bresee and J. P. Widney. Bresee, a former Methodist minister, sought to return to John Wesley's original goals of preaching to the poor and needy. The name of the united body adopted at the First General Assembly was Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. The following year, at the Second General Assembly, the Holiness Church of Christ, located in the southern United States, merged with the Pentecostal Nazarenes. The Holiness Church of Christ, like the eastern group, was also the result of an earlier merger between two slightly older denominations. Between the First and Second General Assemblies, there also occurred major accessions of members from the Holiness Association of Texas and the merger in September 1908 of the Pennsylvania Conference of the Holiness Christian Church.

The term "Pentecostal" in the church's original name soon proved to be problematic. In the Wesleyan-holiness movement, the word was used widely as a synonym simply for "holiness." But the rise of 20th century Pentecostalism, especially after 1906, gave new meanings and associations to the term--meanings that the Pentecostal Nazarenes rejected. In 1919, the name was shortened to avoid any confusion in the public mind about the church's place on the theological spectrum.

Other independent bodies joined at later dates, including the Pentecostal Church of Scotland and Pentecostal Mission, both in 1915. At this point, the Church of the Nazarene now embraced seven previous denominations and significant parts of two other groups. In time the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan Church would emerge as the two major denominations to gather in the smaller bodies of the 19th century Wesleyan-holiness movement.

In subsequent decades, there were new accretions and merges. In the 1920s there were major accessions from the Laymen's Holiness Association located in the Dakotas. In the 1950s there were mergers with the International Holiness Mission and the Calvary Holiness Church, both located primarily in the United Kingdom; the Hephzibah Faith Missionary Association in Iowa; the Gospel Workers Church of Canada; and an indigenous Church of the Nazarene in Nigeria.

Today the church is present in over 151 areas of the world. Its global membership is nearly 1.6 million, distributed in 14,000 churches. It also supports 56 educational institutions of various types around the world. The church also participates in revivals and missionary work. It is currently a member of the World Methodist Council and the National Association of Evangelicals.