Bresee was a successful Methodist minister — pastor of large churches, presiding elder, a man with a career — who in 1894 asked to be appointed to the Peniel Mission in Los Angeles and was refused, and left. The First Church of the Nazarene opened in 1895 in a rented hall on Los Angeles Street. He chose the name deliberately: Nazarene was a term of contempt in the New Testament, and he wanted a name that pointed at the lowly Jesus and would attract the poor rather than the respectable. The founding statement made preaching to the poor the church's purpose, and early Nazarene buildings were plain by policy. That original class orientation has largely gone in North America, where the denomination is suburban and middle class, and remains recognisable in its African, Asian and Latin American work.