Belief — The Church of the Nazarene

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.

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →

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 →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →

The shared center — held across the tradition

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 →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death

The nature of 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

After death

Resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell — stated plainly in the Articles