The Church of the Nazarene

Denomination·Founded 1908 CE·est. 2,724,006 members in 30,747 congregations across 165 world areas, from the denomination's own reporting. Growth is almost entirely outside the United States and Canada — the Africa and Asia-Pacific regions have expanded while the American membership has been flat or declining for two decades.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Church of the Nazarene

Church of the Nazarene

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Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The Church of the Nazarene Discussion

History & overview

The full story →

Wesley's second blessing, kept when the Methodists let it go.

The largest denomination in the Wesleyan-holiness tradition, assembled in 1908 out of a dozen independent holiness groups that had left or been pushed out of Methodism for insisting on entire sanctification as a distinct experience after conversion. It ordained women from the start, dropped the word Pentecostal from its name in 1919 to avoid being confused with the tongues movement, and is now a body of some 2.7 million in 165 world areas, most of them outside the United States.

Why it is filed this way

The Nazarenes are Wesleyan-holiness rather than Pentecostal, and the distinction is one they have defended since 1919, when they removed Pentecostal from their name. Both movements teach a second work of grace after conversion; the Pentecostals attach speaking in tongues to it as the evidence, and the Nazarenes do not.

DeitiesThe Trinity, in sixteen Articles of Faith of orthodox Wesleyan-Arminian shape: prevenient grace, free will, the possibility of falling away, and no predestination.
Founded1908 CE · Pilot Point, Texas
FounderPhineas F. Bresee and the union of holiness bodies at Pilot Point
AfterlifeResurrection, judgment, heaven and hell — stated plainly in the Articles
TextsThe Bible · The Manual of the Church of the Nazarene · The Sixteen Articles of Faith

The map

The Church of the Nazarene’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1908 CE The Church of the Nazarene

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →
Entire sanctification — God deals with the disposition, not only the record. The tenth Article of Faith teaches a second work of grace, after conversion, in which the heart is cleansed from original sin and filled with love. It is what the whole denomination exists to keep in circulation, and it is Wesley's doctrine, not a nineteenth-century invention. Go deeper — context →
Anyone can be saved, and anyone can walk away. Arminian to the bone: prevenient grace reaches everyone, the will is genuinely free, no one is predestined, and a believer can fall. The Nazarenes came out of the Methodist stream and have never had the slightest interest in the Calvinist alternative. Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →
P Phineas Bresee — who left a comfortable pulpit to start a mission for the poor. A Methodist presiding elder in Los Angeles who resigned in 1894 when the conference would not appoint him to a rescue mission, and started his own the next year in a rented hall, deliberately plain. He wanted the church of the poor, and he wrote it into the founding purpose. Domain Holiness preaching, the church of the poor, the founding of the Los Angeles workStanding Founder rather than saint; the Nazarenes cite Wesley above him Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →
The altar call, and the rail people actually kneel at. Nazarene churches are built with a rail across the front and it is used weekly, for conversion and for sanctification both. Seekers kneel and someone kneels with them; the meeting waits. It is the tradition's central act and its most exportable one. When Weekly — the altar call at Sunday services, and at revival and camp meetings through the yearWho Anyone present Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in
Christianity — 12 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 12 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 12 shared ideas, a different faith Hinduism — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Church of the Nazarene — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Church of the Nazarene shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence.

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