The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical Christian denomination that emerged in North America from the Wesleyan-Holiness movement within Methodism during the late 19th century. Its members are commonly referred to as Nazarenes or Nazarene Methodists.
The denomination has its headquarters in Lenexa, Kansas. It is the largest denomination in the world aligned with the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, with just under 3 million members worldwide. The Church of the Nazarene is a member denomination of the World Methodist Council and is known for its emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification.
Mission and vision The mission of the Church of the Nazarene is taken from the Great Commission in Matthew 28. "To make Christlike disciples in the nations" was adopted in 2006 as the Church's mission statement. In 2009, it refined that mission statement to be expressed by "making disciples through evangelism, education, showing compassion, working for justice, and bearing witness to the kingdom of God."
The denominational vision is "to be a disciple-making church, an international community of faith, in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition".
Core values Since 2001, the three "core values" of the Church have been identified as "Christian, Holiness, Missional". In 2013, the Church adopted seven characteristics to express the core values which are meaningful worship, theological coherence, passionate evangelicalism, intentional discipleship, church development, transformational leadership, and purposeful compassion.
The guiding principles for the Church are found in a book called The Manual for the Church of the Nazarene (also referred to as just The Manual) and it is updated every four years during a convention called General Assembly. General Assembly is "the supreme doctrine-formulating and lawmaking body of the Church of the Nazarene". The Manual is the official "statement of faith and practice of the church... and therefore authoritative as a guide for action".2013–2017 Manual of the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, 2013), .
The Manual includes a brief historical statement of the denomination; the sixteen core beliefs, or Articles of Faith; its Constitution details the Church polity; and guidance on living a contemporary Christian lifestyle.
History
The formation of the Church of the Nazarene is a part of the history of Methodism in the United States. The Church of the Nazarene is the product of a series of mergers that occurred between various holiness churches, associations and denominations throughout the 20th century, with roots starting in the 1880s. Churches with similar points of view concentrated in New England, California and Texas agreed to meet and align more formally as one denomination. The first of these meetings was in Chicago in 1907, followed by another in Pilot Point, Texas in 1908. These meetings, now known as General Assemblies, resulted in the formation of the Church of the Nazarene as it appears today, with a centralized denominational headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri.
Formation and early years (1890–1907)
The origins of the Church of the Nazarene today have seeds in the Third Great Awakening period in America. In October 1895, Bresee and Widney founded a church in downtown Los Angeles to refocus the Methodist Episcopal Church on serving the poor living in cities, under the name Church of the Nazarene. Groups with similar beliefs along the east coast known as the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, which itself was a merger of two older denominations dating back to 1890 called The Central Evangelical Holiness Association, were led by Fred A. Hillery, C. Howard Davis and William Howard Hoople. On November 12, 1896, these two groups met in Brooklyn and agreed to merge, which included retaining the name and Manual of Hoople's group.Watchword, . Both the east coast churches and Bresee's west coast church met in Chicago from October 10–17, 1907, and decided to merge into a new church named The Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. This has since been considered the First General Assembly of the Church. At the time of its merger with the Church of the Nazarene in 1907, the APCA existed principally from Nova Scotia to Iowa and the northeastern United States.
In April 1908, Bresee accepted Edgar P. Ellyson, president of the Holiness University of Texas of Peniel, Texas; his wife, Mary Emily Ellyson; and its members of the Holiness Association of Texas into the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.Watchword, . In September 1908, the Pennsylvania Conference of the Holiness Christian Church under the leadership of Horace G. Trumbauer merged with the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.Manual 2005–2009, .
The newly merged east and west coast branches now focused on merging with the Holiness Church of Christ in the southern United States. The Holiness Church of Christ itself was the merger of the New Testament Church of Christ (founded in July 1894 in Milan, Tennessee, by R.L. Harris, but soon led by his widow Mary Lee Cagle),Manual, . and a group (also called the Holiness Church of Christ), that formed in November 1904 at Rising Star, Texas from the prior merger of The Holiness Church (founded in 1888 in Texas) and the Independent Holiness Church formed at Van Alstyne, Texas, in 1901, and led by Charles B. Jernigan and J.B. Chapman.Manual, .
The merger of the Holiness Church of Christ in the south and the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene took place in Pilot Point, Texas on Tuesday, October 13, 1908, at 10:40 am, "amid great shouts of joy and holy enthusiasm." This is considered to be the Second General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene. The latter date marks the "official" founding date. Bresee, Reynolds and Ellyson were elected general superintendents. The newly merged Church of the Nazarene began with 10,034 members, 228 congregations, 11 districts, and 19 missionaries.
Other independent bodies joined at later dates, including the Pentecostal Church of Scotland (founded in 1909 by Rev. George Sharpe) and the Pentecostal Mission (founded in 1898 by J.O. McClurkan), both in 1915. In 1922, more than one thousand members and most of the workers led by Joseph G. Morrison, from the Laymen's Holiness Association (founded in 1917) located in the Dakotas, joined the Church of the Nazarene. Additional smaller churches would be merged into the Nazarene Church during the 1940–60s.
Denominational name
The name of the denomination comes from the biblical description of Jesus Christ, who had been raised in the village of Nazareth, in Galilee, and using the demonym of Nazarene. Jesus, and later his followers, is called a Nazarene in several bible verses, as well as many bible translations, such as the NASB Bible and KJV.; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; It was first used in October 1895 by Phineas F. Bresee's church based in downtown Los Angeles, California. It was first recommended by Joseph Pomeroy Widney, a former president of the University of Southern California and an influential figure in the early days of the Church of the Nazarene on the West Coast. The denomination started as a church that ministered to the homeless and poor, and wanted to keep that attitude of ministering to "lower classes" of society.
Bresee's west coast portion met with similar holiness churches based in south and along the east coast of the United States. The southern churches were under the name Association of Pentecostal Churches of America. To reflect both denominational tributaries the newly formed merged church operated under the title the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.
The term "Pentecostal" in the church's original name soon proved to be increasingly problematic. Inside the Wesleyan-holiness movement, the word was used widely as a synonym simply for "holiness". However, the rise of 20th century Pentecostalism, especially after 1906, new meanings and associations, "particularly in regards to charismatic gifts like speaking in tongues," attached themselves to the term – meanings that the Pentecostal Nazarenes rejected.
In 1919, at the fifth General Assembly in Nashville, the Church voted to remove the word "Pentecostal" from the church name, returning to Breese's Los Angeles' Church name, simply as Church of the Nazarene.
The First Century (1907–2008)
By 1908, there were churches in Canada and organized work in India, Swaziland, Cape Verde, and Japan, soon followed by work in central Africa, Mexico, and China. The 1915 mergers added congregations in the British Isles and work in Cuba, Central America, and South America. There were congregations in Syria and Palestine by 1922. General Superintendent Reynolds advocated "a mission to the world", and support for world evangelization became a distinguishing characteristic of Nazarene life. Taking advantage of new technologies, the church began producing the Showers of Blessing radio program in the 1940s, followed by the Spanish broadcast La Hora Nazarena and later by broadcasts in other languages. At the time of the 50th anniversary of the denomination in October 1958, a total of 19.8% of all Nazarenes lived outside the continental United States, and by 2008, that number was close to 45%. By 2020, the number of Nazarene members living outside of the USA is around 75%.
Hiram F. Reynolds, championed the church to grow outside of the United States. Influenced by the indigenous church mission theories of Anglican Henry Venn and American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions secretary Rufus Anderson, from the beginning of the global expansion of the Church of the Nazarene, there was a commitment to the development of indigenous churches and districts within the framework of a unitary global denomination under the authority of the Manual. As early as March 3, 1914, Nazarene mission policy developed for the work in Japan by Reynolds encouraged the creation of "self-supporting and self-governing churches.
By the 1930s, Nazarene missions leaders "did not aim toward the development of autonomous national churches, but a federation of districts. They did not plan for indefinite missionary control. Without a great deal of thought about where this would lead, without consciously copying any other denomination's model of church government, and without much theological reflection, the Church of the Nazarene became an international body." The first non-missionary district superintendents were George Sharpe in Britain and Vicente G. Santin, appointed district superintendent in Mexico in 1919.Watchword, .
In January 1936, the General Board divided the Japan District into two, and the Western or Kwansai district became the first regular district in the denomination, "with all the rights and privileges of any of the North American and British Isles districts subject to the Manual and the General Assembly", however the effects of World War II on the church in Japan saw the two districts reunified and revert to a missionary-led district.Watchword, .
The process of internationalization, a deliberate policy of being one church of congregations and districts worldwide, rather than splitting into national churches like earlier Protestant denominations started in 1964 at the General Assembly in Portland, Oregon. With the founding parents of the church gone, the next generation of leaders struggled with interpreting the vision they were given. These main struggles dealt with speaking in tongues and legalism, which the majority of churches that broke away from the Nazarene church doing so in the 1960s.