History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
Through the 1890s dozens of independent holiness missions and small denominations formed in America, generally by Methodists who held that their church had abandoned Wesley's teaching on entire sanctification. Phineas Bresee, a Methodist presiding elder, left and founded the Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles in 1895 in a rented hall, deliberately plain so that the poor would come. Bresee's group merged with the eastern Association of Pentecostal Churches of America in Chicago in 1907, and on 13 October 1908 at Pilot Point, Texas, that body united with the Holiness Church of Christ from the south. The Nazarenes date themselves from Pilot Point.
Its founding is bound to Phineas F. Bresee and the union of holiness bodies at Pilot Point — 1908 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A God who does not merely forgive but cleans out — the whole tradition rests on the claim that the disposition to sin can be dealt with in this life.
The divine. The Trinity, in sixteen Articles of Faith of orthodox Wesleyan-Arminian shape: prevenient grace, free will, the possibility of falling away, and no predestination..
Death and after. Resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell — stated plainly in the Articles.