"Banyan Bresee" Written by Bob Broadbrooks
The first time I stood under the magnificent sprawling canopy of the banyan tree in Fort Myers, Florida, I was mesmerized. Inventors Henry Ford and Thomas Edison built winter homes and laboratories nearby. Harvey Firestone secured the small 4-foot-high tree in India and gave it to Edison as a gift in 1925—both hoping its sap would produce a useful natural rubber, which it failed to do.Today the tree is massive, 400 feet tall, and an acre in diameter. If you Google “Fort Myers banyan tree panorama view,” you can watch a 360 degree video of what it looks like. Did you notice the aerial roots? The exposed prop roots act as braces to enable the tree to just keep expanding outward. Amazing. There is nothing ordinary about it.
Phineas Bresee, the founder of the Church of the Nazarene, was no ordinary leader. He was a massive banyan. His influence and effectiveness were dependent on his roots, which were nurtured in Wesleyanism and anchored in holiness. For Bresee, holiness was not just an intermittent sermon topic, a doctrine to be occasionally taught, a nice idea of which he had been intellectually convinced, or merely a tag placing him on a certain branch of a theological tree.
Bresee teaches us to focus on Jesus and his perfect love as we contemplate the needs of the world around us.
Holiness for Bresee was a life-altering, agonizing, personal surrender that resulted in a complete reorganization of his life. This absolute consecration infused him with love and oriented his ministry to the poor, hurting, andrejected persons in his sphere of influence. Holiness was the root of his life and ministry. These holiness roots supported every limb of his work. His Christian education, polity, preaching, praying, care for the poor, worship, discipleship, all of his ministry was informed, nourished, and supported by the ever-expanding aerial roots of holiness.
Pastor, what is the major orientation of your life? In these hectic, challenging days of ministry, it is so easy to become nervous and anxious. Questions flow: Am I being effective? Am I making a difference? Are my leaders pleased with me and my work? And more importantly: Is Christ pleased with my service? I am praying that this Grace & Peace issue, which focuses on Phineas Bresee, will help you to take a step back, breathe deeply, and imagine a new—yet old—way to bless the kingdom of Christ. Bresee teaches us to focus on Jesus and his perfect love as we contemplate the needs of the world around us. I believe this will lead you to a quiet, inner strength that will naturally support all the branches of your expanding ministry.
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"Book Review: What Is a Nazarene? Understanding Our Place in the Religious Community" Written by Brad Estep by Wes Tracy and Stan Ingersol (Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2013), 222 pages.
It is a proverb that has been around for 150 years or so: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” In other words, the value of something is not always immediately obvious. Or, before judging something or someone, it is best to take a deeper look. What Is a Nazarene? deserves a close examination by pastors in the 21st century who are navigating the pluralistic religious environment in which we function. This is a must-read. It was a must-read in 1998 when it was first published, but the need for it has grown exponentially since then.Frequently, Nazarene pastors and laity are confronted with the question that, in one form or another, centers on our theological identity. This book helps to answer that question in terms of similarities and differences from other traditions or philosophies, both inside and outside the current of the Christian Church.
The introduction alone is worth the price of the book. Wes Tracy articulately, even poetically, captures the frailties and strengths of the Church of the Nazarene that are rooted in our theological ancestors, our history of ministry to the marginalized, and our intensely relevant message of the radical optimism of grace. The eight characteristics that unified the scattered and varied Holiness Movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s (chap. 1) are enlightening when it comes to our past and yet could serve as a “blueprint” to direct our path into the future.
These kinds of insights run throughout the book and should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the authors. For decades, Tracy and Ingersol have lived, studied, and reflected upon our tradition and theology as a part of the Christian Church, and even more broadly, as a part of the religious community that surrounds us. The connections that they identify with our shared-Methodist heritage, if utilized properly, would open doors for conversation with co-workers, neighbors, and friends. With the enormous number of Catholics in the United States and Canada, the chapter that compares and contrasts Nazarenes with Catholicism is an invaluable resource. The question and answer format is particularly helpful, and they have accurately anticipated, in my view, the frequently asked questions.
Reading What Is a Nazarene? in this newly revised and updated edition has reminded me of the incredible theological and social treasure that the Church of the Nazarene plays a part in stewarding. It is worth a closer examination that is not based on superficial appearances but on the core beliefs, ways, and practices that truly define Nazarenes.
As an addendum, pay no attention to the actual cover of the book. It looks like an empty piece of paper or a “blank slate” as if “Nazarene” is yet to be defined or is open to any interpretation. Quite literally, do not judge this book by its cover because what is inside is much better!
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"The Past, Identity, and Mission: The Need to Reintroduce Phineas F. Bresee" Written by Bryon K. McLaughlin
A social blunder led to a keen insight for noted church historian David C. Steinmetz. When asked to introduce guests at a party, his memory failed when he got to one attendee. Panic, confusion, and embarrassment ensued, leaving him unable to fulfill his duties. To his chagrin, the guest had to make her own introductions. In that moment, Steinmetz realized how memory enables our ability to function effectively in the present. He concluded that a church that loses its memory and lacks self-identity can only “wander about aimlessly in the present and future.”1 Knowing our past is essential in undertaking our mission in the present, he affirmed.As Nazarenes wrestle with ministry amid immense social, economic, and cultural change, how solid is our denominational identity? How clearly do we understand our mission and message against the backdrop of increasing secularization, religious pluralism, ethnic and cultural diversity, and technological innovation? What adaptations do we need to make to reach Millennials, postmoderns, and a diverse global community? Within our denomination, how aware are we of what must change and what must remain the same as we face the challenges posed by our future? How closely should we align ourselves with the trajectory of our past? How can knowledge of the Nazarene story help answer these questions?
Our past must inform our present and future, and many significant persons and perspectives could (and should) guide our efforts: Few are as notable as Nazarene co-founder Phineas F. Bresee. Historian Carl O. Bangs, Bresee’s latest and greatest biographer, considered him not just a pivotal Nazarene figure, but a major evangelical Protestant leader in American religious history. In Bresee, we find the powerful convergence of ministry to the poor, urban evangelism, preaching that is faithful to the gospel witness, and an inclusive vision of the church fueled by a commitment to the deeper Christian life. Bresee’s story is especially compelling when you consider that at age 58, when he was at the top of his game and a significant leader in Methodism (and this was no small ascent), he walked away from a secure ecclesial future to undertake a whole new theological enterprise.
In Bresee, we find the powerful convergence of ministry to the poor, urban evangelism, preaching that is faithful to the gospel witness, and an inclusive vision of the church fueled by a commitment to the deeper Christian life.
In 1883, when Bresee left ministry on the Iowa prairie to come to urban Los Angeles, he entered a complex social context completely foreign to anything he had experienced previously. Immigration, ethnic and cultural diversity, inner-city poverty, and industrialization and labor issues were already large realities, yet Bresee was not in awe. He had the gift of being broad-spirited and enthusiastically confronted social challenges. He opted for a brand of Christianity that was decidedly Wesleyan, missional, and inclusive. He wanted to start “centers of holy fire” in the urban areas of America, which he hoped would bring revival.
While Bresee is justly thought of as the patron saint of Nazarene compassionate and urban ministry, he had reached the conviction, after a critical year in 1894 while serving at the Peniel Mission, that what the poor needed was not a mission, but a church.² He believed the poor and all classes of people needed fellowships that would be true community churches characterized by sacraments, love, and holy living. An address he gave on the pastoral office during his Methodist years expressed something of the qualities he believed a minister needed to lead such a work: “A pastor must be a large-souled man . . . large enough to take to his heart all classes of men . . . he stands especially near to the poor and despised. . . . He will have enemies to deal with as well as friends, and his heart must be large enough to love them all.”³
Bresee was a catalytic leader who valued people and resisted controlling impulses. He had the ability to bring diverse groups together around a common mission. His famous dictum, which he did not originate, says much about his character and leadership: “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and, in all things, love.” May that dictum characterize our present fellowship as we work together to fulfill our gospel-shaped mission.
1. David C. Steinmetz. Memory and Mission: Theological Reflections on the Christian Past (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), 33-34.
2. Denominational archivist Stan Ingersol related this (and the following point on “community churches”) in a group conversation on Bresee, December 13, 2012.
3. Carl O. Bangs. Phineas Bresee: Pastor to the People, abr. Stan Ingersol (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2013), 79.
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"How Bresee Speaks into My Ministry" Written by Jim Wicks
Over 100 years ago, Phineas Bresee stepped away from the security of his life in Methodism to reach those living in the margins of spiritual and social abandonment. He became the leader of a company of souls who wanted to live in the unity of the Spirit rather than in a culture of affluence and privilege. As the apostle Paul said to Timothy, “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God.” These words of Paul are the very words that exemplified Bresee’s life when he said he was “clearly called.”
Bresee continued to live as a pioneer in his faith journey—always pushing the edges, and always finding new ways to bring people into solidarity with authentic Christianity and its message of reclamation. He was not one to become a settler on the prairie of spiritual complacency, but continually sought God and the deeper Chris-tian life. I find myself drawn to Bresee’s example for something more, something adventurous, and something that is ripped out of the New Testament Scriptures. I am drawn to the God who calls me to give my life to something that is more than a set of prescriptive rules and doctrines. No matter what our tribe has become, I am still drawn to the early years of the church where Bresee, persuaded by the Spirit, answered the call to pastor. He made an appeal to the people to pour out their lives for one another and to respond to the authority of the Word. He asked the rich and the poor to give up all so they might have all things in common, and truly be brothers and sisters in Christ. He reached into the depth of a society and culture that was lost in addiction and confusion and did not conform to it but sanctified it by living amongst those living troubled lives and offering the radical optimism of grace in a benevolent God.
I am in hopes that our little band of pioneers, whom we call The Community of Adsideo, can join others like Luther, Calvin, Arminius, Wesley, Campbell, and Bresee as we seek the fullness of the call to follow God. It will cost us, because like these leaders, we know that the court of public appeal may not understand. Bresee’s tenacity speaks to a conviction that is not often seen nor experienced in our world today.
I also want to be a person who follows hard after the call of God to carryingon the work of the conversion of sinners. I agree with Dr. Bresee in the call he received and the words he spoke in an October 30, 1895, organizational meeting for the First Church of the Nazarene of Los Angeles:
We seek the simplicity and the power of the primitive New Testament Church. The field of labor to which we feel called is in the neglected quarters of the cities and wherever else may be found waste places and souls seeking pardon and cleansing from sin. This work we aim to do through the agency of city missions, evangelistic services, house-to-house visitation, caring for the poor, comforting of the dying. To this end, we strive personally to walk with God and to invite others so to do.
May we embrace the depth of these words so that the last, the lost, and the least may know the love of God.
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"Call & Response, Thoughts on Church Planting: Addition or Multiplication?" Written by Bill Wiesman
An African proverb declares, “In the desert there is one crime worse than murder: to know where the water is and not tell others.” Life-giving water has been placed in our hands. Jesus put it no less directly when he said, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required.” Evangelism or making Christlike disciples is all about sharing the life-giving water of Jesus with others. Some believe that the most effective method and the most Biblical method of making Christlike disciples is daughter church planting: a mother church giving birth to a daughter church. Maturity in humans is measured by the capacity to reproduce. A healthy, mature church should reproduce every three to five years.I see a fresh movement of the Holy Spirit developing in the USA/Canada Region expressed in 212 new churches planted in the last two years, comprising approximately 10,000 Christlike disciples. History tells us that 60 to 80% of attenders in new churches were previously un-churched. That means 6,000 to 8,000 people were reached for Christ and the Kingdom through these new churches.
Another encouraging sign is the increase in the number of USA/Canada districts starting at least one new church. In 2011, 35 of our 80 USA/Canada districts started at least one new church; in 2013, that number grew to 47 of our 80 districts starting at least one new church. We are adding new churches in the USA/Canada Region.
Do these developments point to a multiplication movement, as we were in the early days of the Church of the Nazarene? Missionary David Garrison states, “A church planting movement is a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.¹ Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird define a church multiplication movement as, “An exponential birth of new churches that engage lost people and that replicate themselves through even more new churches— measured by a reproduction rate of 50% through the third generation of churches, with new churches having 50% new converts.”²
I would suggest a much simpler definition. A multiplication movement occurs when churches make Christlike disciples by having grandchildren: a church planting movement will occur when churches make Christlike disciples by planting daughter churches that plant granddaughter churches. District Superintendent Stan Reeder encourages churches on the Oregon Pacific Districtto be significantly involved in planting a daughter church at least once every five years. Pastor Virgil Askren of Bend Church of the Nazarene sent a church planting team led by Pastor Brent Hofen to start nearby Bend Mission Church of the Nazarene in 2008. Four years after Bend Mission Church started, Bend Mission Church partnered with the Bend mother church to start Redmond Vision Church, led by Pastor Ryan Emerick. On any given Sunday, the three churches together will average 900 in worship attendance, with 500 of those in the two new churches. Using our 60 to 80% estimate, that means 300 to 400 new Christlike disciples! Redmond Vision Church is the daughter and granddaughter church of Bend Church of the Nazarene.
Here are four suggestions to enhance this movement:
Pray for granddaughter churches to be planted.
Build into the vision, plan, and timeline for planting within a daughter church the core value of reproductive multiplication.
Receive an offering in the mother church each year for three years and give it to the daughter church to be set aside for the granddaughter church. (One time to do this in the United States is Grandparents’ Day, the first Sunday after Labor Day.)
Invite the daughter church pastor to share the vision for a granddaughter church and the progress of plans each year. A good time would be Pentecost Sunday, the celebration of the birth of the Church.
A team of about 600 people is praying that the Lord will bless the USA/Canada Region with granddaughter churches. The three specific requests are: the same passion and fervor of the early Church of the Nazarene; 10,000 newly-trained missionary church planters in USA/Canada; 10,000 new churches of the Nazarene in the next 20 years. Will you join us in prayer?
1. David Garrison, Church Planting Movements (Bangalore, India: WIGTake Resources, 2004), 22.
2. Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird, Viral Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 5.
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On Bresee and Our Nazarene Identity: An Interview with Ron Benefiel
Not everyone can say they have pastored the same church as Phineas Bresee, but Ron Benefiel is one of the few. Benefiel served as pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles, a multi-congregational and multi-ethnic church, from 1982 to 1996. During that time, he also founded and served as the executive directorof the P.F. Bresee Foundation, a nonprofit community center in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire district. In 2000, he was elected as the eighth president of Nazarene Theological Seminary. Benefiel is currently serving as the Dean of the School of Theology and Christian Ministry at Point Loma Nazarene University. Grace & Peace Magazine asked Ron to respond to a few questions about being Nazarene, his ministry in Los Angeles, and his thoughts on Bresee.
G&P:WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU TO BE PART OF THE NAZARENE FAMILY?
Benefiel: In many ways, being a Nazarene is as much a part of my identity as being a Benefiel. The Church of the Nazarene nurtured and “raised” me as a follower of Jesus Christ. I owe a great deal to the tradition. And what a great tradition it is! God raised up the people called Nazarenes and specifically called us to be a holy people to minister to and among the poor. Growing up, I always wondered about the name: “Church of the Nazarene.” Timothy Smith, in Called Unto Holiness, says that the name came to J. P. Widney after a night of prayer. In adopting the name, early Nazarenes believed that Jesus of Nazareth, who identified with the lowly, “toiling masses of the world," is the One for whom our Church should be named.
G&P: YOU SERVED AS PASTOR OF LOS ANGELES FIRST CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE FOR MANY YEARS. WHAT ARE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF THAT TIME?
Benefiel: It was a real privilege to serve as pastor of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene, Bresee’s church, the church many people consider to be the founding church—certainly in the West. Throughout most of its history, the congregation celebrated Founder’s Day on the third Sunday of October. On that day, we remembered Bresee, the founding of the church, and the reason for our existence. Bresee’s vision of a worldwide church—that the sun would never set on the Church of the Nazarene—was quite literally true of us there in Los Angeles. On any given Sunday, people from 30 different nationalities would come together and worship. Even today, those congregations have a sense of pride and gratitude in being Nazarene and of being part of what God raised up in the beginning under Bresee.
One of the saints from my tenure was Mary Stewart. Mary had been the pianist for 65 years, and her mother had been the pianist when Bresee founded the church. When I came, Mary was the only person in the congregation who had any direct memory of Bresee. She told us one story over and over again: “When I was a little girl, Phineas Bresee would come out on the platform, and you could tell he had been in the presence of God.” This was a story from generations past to generations future. Here was someone reminding us that Bresee was a man of integrity, a man of Christian character, and even as a little girl, she knew that he was a man of God.
G&P: WHAT DO YOU SEE AS BRESEE’S VALUE TO THE NAZARENE MOVEMENT?
Benefiel: Phineas Bresee was a breakout leader and was an outstanding preacher and organizer. Even though he did not have much formal education, he understood the value of education and was committed to it; he founded what has become Point Loma Nazarene University. He was able to hold together a passion for evangelism and care for the poor that is at the heart of why the Church of the Nazarene was raised up as a renewal movement in the Wesleyan tradition. He had the ability to unify the church. Even at its founding, there were pushes and pulls that threatened to tear the church apart. Bresee was able to transcend all of that. He was a great leader who was fully committed to God—someone who embodied everything our tradition came to represent.
G&P: AS A SOCIOLOGIST, WHAT ARE YOUR OBSERVATIONS OF NAZARENE IDENTITY?
Benefiel: Sociologist Ken Crow and I have been observing and categorizing denominational identity in the Church of the Nazarene over the past 18 years. One thing we have learned is that Nazarene identity is not static but constantly changing. We developed a model or typology of six different identities that contribute to or compete for the core identity of the Church of the Nazarene. The six types can be collapsed into three major groupings. The first group, the “traditional” Nazarenes, looks to the immediate past and is rightfully concerned about losing the history of our theology and our reason for being. The second group, the “contemporary” group, is broader in character and is more concerned with looking outward, connecting with other denominations where God is moving in the world and learning from them. Finally, there are the “re-traditioning” Nazarenes. This group focuses on digging deeply into our Wesleyan heritage and bringing that forward into the present and future.
Each of these identities embraces a dimension of our Wesleyan theological heritage in one way or another. “Traditional” Nazarenes have a very strong commitment to evangelism and preaching the gospel. The Church of the Nazarene was born as an evangelistic movement. This is essential to our calling. “Contemporary” Nazarenes help us see where God is at work in the world today. The work of the Spirit is always moving us to new and creative ways of thinking. “Re-traditioning” Nazarenes help us remember our calling and commitment to the poor and to social justice.
Each group contributes something to our larger understanding of what it means to be Nazarene. Our hope is that the different groups appreciate what each of them brings to the table. Each type brings a particular perspective— an angle of vision—but what is important is that our sense of identity always unfolds out of our core or central narrative of being a holiness people who are deeply committed in our love for God and neighbor.
G&P: HOW IMPORTANT ARE NAZARENE SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES IN FORMING AND REINFORCING NAZARENE IDENTITY?
Benefiel: Our schools are critical to this process. There is a lot, of course, that our general leadership can do, but those in our educational institutions are shaping and influencing the lives of students in a community over an extended period of time. When I consider my colleagues at Point Loma Nazarene University, I see this incredible holiness resource of thinkers and leaders in literature, social work, nursing, business, or theology. Our schools have the potential of being ministry resource centers, centers out of which mission can be communicated, expressed, and resourced. Our schools are extremely important to the future of the Church of the Nazarene.
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"Understanding the Wider Roots of American Methodism" Written by Robert Doyle Smith
Jason Vickers edits a collection of articles that reviews basic history and reflects on the religious culture of Methodism and how it has related to American culture. Nazarene pastors will be interested in the text because the study seeks to include in its narrative the wider Methodist tradition beyond the major sources of United Methodist tradition.Several writers are from the “dissenting” tradition within American Methodism: Dennis Dickerson is from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Douglas M. Koskela is a Free Methodist, Andrew Wood and Stan Ingersol are from the Church of the Nazarene, and other contributors have connections to Wesleyan- Holiness institutions. However, the extent of holiness history and perspectives varies by chapter.
Vickers’ chapter on theology and the historical surveys by Russell Richey and Douglas Strong provide Nazarene pastors a basic understanding of the theology and issues that formed the identity of the Church of the Nazarene. Vickers explains that Methodist theology had “evangelical sensibilities.” Theology had been shaped by the task and goal of preaching to lead people to salvation. This sensibilityis reflected in the 1905 Nazarene Manual’s “Agreed Statement of Belief”: “Recognizing that the right and privilege of persons to church membership rests upon the fact of their being regenerate, we would require only such avowals of belief as are essential to Christian experience.” Vickers describes what this looked like in the ministry of early Methodist ministers and how and why this attitude changed in the century prior to the formation of the Church of the Nazarene.
A second sensibility relating to the Holiness Movement would be “radical sensibilities” or social compassion. While the text does not present history or commentary on the Nazarene experience, it explains why the 1898 Nazarene Manual claims, “God called them to go into the poorer parts of the cities, and into neglected places . . . securing the salvation of souls, and the relief of the needy and suffering.” Wendy Deichmann’s American Methodism in the Twentieth Century presents a developed treatment of selective issues of United Methodist history following 1925, but she provides little attention and no substantive commentary that would help one understand the issues confronted by any of the major denominations in the Holiness traditionduring the same time period.
A rich feature of the text for Nazarene ministers will be several chapters in part 2 on the religious culture of Methodism. “Revivalism and Preaching” notes how Methodists ceased to attend class and quarterly meetings because of changes in church and culture. Does the history of Methodism help Nazarenes evaluate the significance of similar behavioral changes in their own tradition? “Discipline and Polity” provides an excellent foundation for understanding Nazarene polity. I agree with Douglas Koskela’s explanation that discipline means more than a book of rules: It is the “means by which Methodists hold each other accountable in their response to God’s grace and their pursuit of holiness.” In Koskela’s chapter and Richey’s historical survey, one finds excellent treatment of the meaning of connection. In a nondenominational era, Nazarene leaders must be able to communicate the value of “connectionalism,” that is, “a commitment among members to sharespiritual, missional, organizational, and financial responsibility with each other.” E. Brooks Holifield’s “Clergy” might help Nazarene pastors think about the future shape of ministry. His topics include clerical authority and types of ministry, professional ministry and educational requirements, and the primary task of the minister. His discussion, along with Stan Ingersol’s chapter on education, describes educational models that could be the basis for shaping future models of theological education. “Laity” by Jennifer Woodruff Tait might help Nazarenes consider the role of clergy and laity in the future by seeing the roles Methodist laity played in the past. For example, what would Methodist history suggest about the possible role and authority of a minister, and how might laity function in a bi-vocational ministry setting?
Here are some changes that would have improved the text for Nazarene pastors. While “American Methodists and Popular Culture” might help Nazarene pastors think in general about the usage of media and technology of popular culture, Christopher Anderson would have made the chapter more relevant if he had reflected on how the Church of the Nazarene handled the issue during the same time period.Strong’s historical survey might have included a fuller delineation between holiness moderates and radicals. The distinction also could have been visible in “Healing” if Candy Gunther Brown had contrasted the position of radical holiness groups like the Metropolitan Church Association, who called for Christians to rely on divine healing and refuse medical care, with the viewpoints of moderates like the Church of the Nazarene, whose 1907 Manual statement on Divine Healing focused on the right of medical care: “While we recognize that God heals with and without means, we hold that no one has the right to take such an extreme position as may result in death of any person without medical attention.” Deichmann’s historical survey may also fail to reflect the diversity in the Holiness Movement when she states that Holiness partisans paired Holiness teaching of the second blessing alongside “literal Biblicist premillennial theology.” The phrase “literal Biblicist” requires clarification. Moreover, “literal Biblicist premillennial theology” does not seem an accurate depiction of normative holiness theology when holiness moderates and radicals had a variety of views on scripture and millennialism.
A strength of the text is its extensive treatment of gender and race. Nazarenes will learn about thegeneral cultural context of the era, but the stories of such ordained women ministers in the Nazarene tradition as Anna Hanscombe, Mary Lee Cagle, Lucy P. Knott or Elsie Wallace do not appear. Laceye Warner’s “American Methodist Women” does not include ordained women from the Church of the Nazarene even in her discussion of the time period when women had not as yet won this right in either of the Methodist Episcopal churches. Ingersol does comment on the contributions of Olive Winchester, Emily Ellyson, and Mildred Bangs Wynkoop. Nazarene pastors should also know that the first two Nazarene Assemblies (Chicago 1907 and Pilot Point 1908) ordained both men and women. Today, the question for Nazarene pastors would be why the situation has reversed itself with women now having more opportunities in United Methodist congregations. Regarding race, Nazarene pastors should be aware of our own failures and successes, but it is less known in general scholarship and would have been a surprise to see it included here in the discussion on race and civil rights.
This excellent text helps Nazarenes understand who we have been in the past and what we are becoming. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to think about how we might shape the practice of ministry in the future. Including fuller description and commentary on Nazarenes would have increased its value for Nazarene pastors, and similar inclusions about other Holiness denominations would have increased the value for them as well.
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"What Should We Glean from Phineas F. Bresee?" Written by T. Scott Daniels
When the belongings of C. S. Lewis went up for auction, both Wheaton and Westmont colleges purchased wardrobes from the estate. From that time forward, there has been a good-natured debate between the two schools as to which one owns the particular wardrobe that inspired Lewis’ vision of a passage to Narnia.It is my current privilege as pastor of Pasadena First Church of the Nazarene to preach each Sunday from a pulpit that belonged originally to Phineas F. Bresee. There is some good-natured debate as to whether or not it was the only pulpit that belonged to Bresee or even how special thisparticular pulpit was to him, but in our minds, the faithful in Pasadena are the true guardians of the pulpit of Bresee.
Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are. – Jaroslav Pelikan
It is not surprising that after a century of development, extension into vast global contexts, and rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscapes, the Church of the Nazarene would be wrestling with questions of identity. Struggling to continually redefine, recontextualize, and renarrate the core values and convictions of faith is a vital part of being a living tradition. One of the key ways that traditions thrive in the future is by reaching back and retelling the stories andcelebrating the people who set the trajectory for the movement.
ripped-scrollA living tradition, as church historian Jaroslav Pelikan so beautifully states above, cannot simply return to its past; it has to embody it anew. It is impossible to think about recapturing the spirit of the Church of the Nazarene without examining the founding influence of Bresee. Any rearticulation of the legacy of the denomination has to take seriously his life, his passion, and his deepest convictions.
But without a thoughtful record of his life and ministry—like battles over wardrobes and pulpits—the church can often co-opt an influential leader’s memory for their own purposes.In these days of frequently contested identity in the church, one might wonder, who are the true “children of Bresee” today?
There are many things that I hope a new generation of church leaders will glean from Bresee’s life, but let me name just three.
First, it is my hope that in every generation the heirs of the Church of the Nazarene will be shaped by Bresee’s passion for the poor. Every Nazarene should know that the denomination’s name came not just from the connection to Jesus of Nazareth, but from the understanding that the word “Nazarene” had derogatory overtones (as demonstrated by Nathaniel in John 1:46: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” [GW*]). Bresee’s church would be centered on Jesus the Nazarene but would also be oriented toward those marginalized persons from whom nothing good was expected to come.
In a day not unlike the day Bresee faced over a century ago, when people are still abandoning the poor in urban centers globally, the church should be reminded of statements like this from Bresee: “We can get along without rich people, but not without preaching the gospel to the poor.”
Many of the faithful in the evangelical tradition since the time of Bresee have been deeply shaped by eschatologies that lack hope. In other words, the generationthat currently leads the church was largely shaped by theological systems whose future expectations were that God’s plan is to redeem a few out of the world before its eventual destruction. It should not surprise us that people shaped with those kinds of expectations often embody a gospel that isolates the church from the world and, like the prophet in the fourth chapter of Jonah, sits outside the city waiting for the world’s great cities and cultures to be destroyed, while God is busy at work redeeming the lost of Nineveh.
Bresee led Nazarenes into the darkest corners where sin abounded, because he was convinced of the transforming power of God's grace and Spirit to bring light into darkness, to bring holiness where there was sin, and to bring life out of death.
Finally, I also am hopeful that those who wrestle with making today’s church a living reflection of Bresee’s character will discover his commitment to unity on essentials while negotiating and leading an incredibly diverse group of people. It is important to remember that the Church of the Nazarene was formed more by the merging of people with similar passions and values than it was the leaving of disgruntled people from other traditions and denominations. Bresee was so devoted to the vision of holiness that many other nonessentials clearly became secondary.
In a time of rapid cultural and global changes, the questions of orthodoxy constantly rise to the surface. Technology and social media have done a lot of good things, but in the church they can often be instruments of division rather than unity. Leaders with Bresee’s wisdom and conviction are desperately needed today to hold a group far more diverse than Bresee ever encountered united together around the essentials of the call to be holy as God is holy.
Bresee was far from perfect and like all great people he was profoundly shaped by his particular moment in time. But God also used him to begin a movement that has gone far beyond what Bresee likely could have imagined. I hope that those of us called to lead the church today [are] connected with his heart so that the best days of Bresee’s original vision are still out ahead of the Church of the Nazarene.
*Note: Scripture marked GW is taken from God’s Word®. Copyright 1995 God’s Word to the Nations. Used by permission of Baker Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
Taken from Phineas Bresee by Carl Bangs, abridged by Stan Ingersol © 2013 by Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, MO. Used by permission of Publisher. All rights reserved. Visit www.beaconhillbooks.com to purchase this title.
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"Phineas Franklin Bresee (1838–1915): Recovering the Spirit of Original Methodism" Written by Harold Raser
In 1866, American Methodists celebrated the centennial of their church. Methodist historians and popular orators shared stirring accounts of a century of spiritual vitality and expansive growth that had made Methodism by far the largest and most widespread Protestant movement in the United States.In many parts of the United States, Methodism was still in expansion mode. One such place was Iowa, literally part of the American frontier at the time. Iowa’s population had swelled from less than 200,000 people in 1850 to almost 700,000 by 1860. Methodism had moved in with the first settlers, had quickly established itself as the largest Protestant denomination in the state, and continued to grow rapidly. Many Iowa Methodist preachers lived the life of the famous Methodist “circuit riders” of the preceding century: They rode on horseback or in horse-drawn wagons from settlement to settlement and farm to farm, conducting worship and offering what pastoral care they could during their brief, periodic visits. These traveling circuit preachers were still a familiar part of the Iowa Methodist landscape in 1866.
Not all Methodist preachers in Iowa, however, were riding circuits at the time of the centennial. Many were settling into town and city pastorates where they had care of only one congregation. Some congregations were becoming large and affluent enough to support a full-time minister and to build and maintain permanent church buildings. In addition, Iowa Methodists were turning their attention to future needs of the church, especially clerical and lay education. In 1866, theyreorganized a small Methodist school at Indianola into Simpson Centenary College (so named for Bishop Matthew Simpson [1811-84] and the centennial of Methodism) and began a concerted effort to make it a viable liberal arts institution.
Prominent in Methodism in Iowa in 1866 was a young minister: Phineas Franklin Bresee (1838–1915).1 Bresee had moved to Iowa with his family in 1857 when he was 18 years old and within months had become a Methodist preacher, assisting an older colleague on a “four week circuit” (i.e., it took four weeks to visit all the “preaching points” on the circuit, which included schoolhouses, farmhouses, and at least one log cabin). Bresee had been converted to Christianity in a Methodist “class meeting” in his hometown in Franklin County, New York, just a few years earlier.
Bresee began his ministry as the circuit “evangelist” with special responsibility for conducting periodic “protracted meetings” or “revival campaigns” across the circuit. Bresee quickly developed skill as a revival preacher and became convinced at the very outset of his ministerial career that frequent revivals were necessary for the health of every congregation.
Bresee’s trajectory through 19th-century Methodism and on into independent holiness work illuminates some of the central tensions, transitions, and challenges affecting American Methodism at the end of its first century.
In 1858, after one year as anassistant preacher, Bresee was given his first solo circuit. After serving with notable success in this and two subsequent circuits and traveling constantly, Bresee was appointed in 1862 (he was only 23 years old at the time) to one of the two Methodist congregations in Des Moines, a congregation that had a permanent building and a parsonage to house their pastor. Bresee’s work for two years in Des Moines earned him an appointment as presiding elder—a district superintendent—over a group of churches and preachers. This was definitely a promotion for the young Bresee, but the new work demanded almost continuous travel by horse and buggy over prairie expanses visiting the churches and preachers under his care. The hard travel and heavy responsibility wore on Bresee, and after two years he requested to be reassigned as a pastor. He was relieved of his duties as presiding elder in 1866 and appointed as pastor at Chariton, Iowa.
Following his success in Chariton, Bresee advanced regularly to pastor a series of larger and more prestigious congregations over the next 17 years. Thus, Bresee packed much of the story of American Methodism’s first century into his own biography. Bresee was steeped in “frontier Methodism” and revivalism. He had literally been born in a log cabin in western New York State and was raised in New York in a Methodist church that had been planted in his community barely 15 years prior to his birth. His earliest experience of Methodism involved itinerant preachers, outdoor meetings, fervent preaching, and informal, revivalistic worship. Moving from New York to Iowa in 1857, Bresee found the same familiar frontier form of Methodism, but it was moving into a building and consolidating mode. Church buildings needed to be built, Methodist schools needed to be established, and Methodist publications were required to promote the church and to rally and encourage the Methodist faithful. Bresee pouredhimself into all of this work for 26 years (1857-83).
Bresee’s personal biography took a distinctive and fateful turn, however, in that centennial year of American Methodism. Bresee was experiencing considerable personal distress at the time. The exact nature of this distress is not completely clear, but Bresee had struggled through several very challenging ministerial assignments in the years before going to Chariton, and the Chariton congregation, although relatively large and affluent, was quite contentious. Bresee said that about a quarter of the congregation was always angry with him for something, “but not the same quarter, as they took turns.”² Also, Bresee had used his travel time during his work as presiding elder to read widely and had apparently encountered authors and ideas that unsettled him and challenged his Christian faith.
We can probably assume that Bresee went to Chariton more or less “burned out” in body and spirit. He was steadily climbing the ladder of ecclesiastical “success.” He was working extraordinarily hard to “make things go.” But at the same time, he was wrestling with personal issues, including intellectual doubts, and a sometimes combative congregation. Many years later, Bresee recalled of this time in his life: “I had a big load of carnality on hand always,” which “had taken the form of anger, and pride, and worldly ambition.” He also remembered that, “at last, however, it took the form of doubt . . . it seemed that I doubted everything.”³
All of these things came together in the early months of Bresee’s pastorate at Chariton to provoke a personal crisis in his life. This came to a head in a protracted (revival) meeting during Bresee’s first winter there (winter of 1866-67). Bresee was himself serving as the evangelist (a typical Breseepractice). It was a bleak, snowy night. The crowd was small, but Bresee preached fervently, and urged seekers to the mourner’s bench. No one responded, even though Bresee moved among the congregation, personally inviting people to pray (another typical Bresee practice). Then suddenly, Bresee later declared, “In some way it seemed to me that this was my time, and I threw myself down across the altar and began to pray for myself.” As a result, Bresee claimed that he experienced a fresh empowering of divine grace that resolved his various personal and professional struggles. Bresee in later years referred to this experience as his “baptism with the Holy Ghost,” in which “the Lord gave him more grace, liberty, and blessing in every way.”⁴ The importance of this experience is twofold: first, it occurred at a critical point in the history of American Methodism, and second, it was the initial step for Phineas Bresee down a road that would eventually lead him out of mainstream Methodism and into his role as founder of a new denomination.
As the centennial year of American Methodism, 1866 was a time when American Methodists recalled their past, reflected on what their movement had been and what it had become, and contemplated its future shape. Not coincidentally, in the summer of 1867, just after the centennial year, the first distinctively holiness camp meeting was held in the Methodist village of Vineland, New Jersey, organized, conducted, and attended mainly by Methodist ministers and laypeople. The special purpose of this camp meeting was to revive “the work of holiness in the Church” by helping Christian believers to “realize a Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Ghost.”⁵ At the close of this meeting, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (later Christian Holiness Association) was organized.
The Vineland holiness camp meeting and the National Camp Meeting Association marked the crystallization of a movement that had been building within American Methodism since at least the 1830s. This Holiness Movement (whose most widely recognized leader was Methodist layperson Phoebe Palmer) had as its objective the preservation and propagation of the historic Wesleyan-Methodist doctrine of Christian Perfection. Supporters of this movement feared that this distinctive Wesleyan-Methodist doctrine and the life of earnest, simple holiness that it entailed were in danger of being neglected as Methodism in the United States grew rapidly in membership, expanded geographically, and became more affluent and worldly. Holiness people saw the defining thread of Methodist history as the doctrine and life of Christian perfection and dedicated themselves to keeping this at the center of Methodism’s identity in the future.⁶
Between 1867 and 1883, Bresee continued to serve as a Methodist minister in Iowa. He apparently continued to enjoy theblessing of the “baptism with the Holy Ghost,” and continued to occupy prominent ministerial roles, but he gave no indication whatsoever of supporting the “organized holiness” work that was rapidly spreading across the United States during these years.
In 1883, however, Bresee moved with his family from Iowa to Southern California and over the next few years was appointed pastor of a series of large, prominent Methodist congregations. It was in the first of these, Fort Street Church in Los Angeles (also called “Old First Church”), that Bresee seems to have first encountered people fervent about organized holiness and began to be drawn by them into the Holiness Movement. By the time Bresee moved on to his next pastoral assignment, he had fully thrown in his lot with organized holiness and was on his way to becoming its chief spokesperson in Southern California. Less than 10 years later (1894), Bresee withdrew from the Methodism that he had served so notably for 37 years to engage in fulltime independent holiness work. In 1895, he organized the first congregation of the Church of the Nazarene.
Baptized with the Holy Ghost, according to Bresee, meant that the Holy Spirit of God is “resident in man,” cleansing the human heart from sin and providing power for service to one’s neighbors.
Bresee’s trajectory through 19th-century Methodism and on into independent holiness work illuminates some of the central tensions, transitions, and challenges affecting American Methodism at the end of its first century. It also helps to illuminate the nature of the American Holiness Movement.
As noted, Bresee was born on the frontier, experienced Methodism in its frontier form, and began his ministry in Iowa under largely frontier conditions. Itinerant ministers, fervent evangelization, frequent camp meetings and protracted meetings, revivalistic forms of worship, heartfelt religion, and simple piety were the chief elements of frontier Methodism. Bresee learned all this early and would value these elements as essentialto authentic Christianity for the rest of his life. However, in Iowa, Bresee also experienced a Methodism transitioning from youthful movement to a more settled denomination. Iowa Methodism was consolidating its gains—publishing religious literature, building permanent church buildings, establishing colleges, and otherwise creating the necessary structures of denominational life. Bresee appears to have also embraced these aspects of a more settled “institutionalized” church and excelled at leading congregations that largely reflected this side of 19th century Methodism. He also learned and practiced various “institution building” skills that served him well when he later founded and led the Church of the Nazarene.⁷
On the other hand, Breseebecame increasingly disillusioned during his 37 years of Methodist ministry with the growing affluence of many Methodists and with a certain spiritual “coldness” and “formality” that he sensed in some congregations. He was also troubled by some of the theological reappraisal taking place in Methodism (and many other American denominations) in the second half of the 19th century. He feared that various forms of “creeping rationalism” were undermining Methodist commitment to traditional Christian orthodoxy.
Bresee’s “baptism with the Holy Ghost” may be seen as a turning point for him in dealing personally with the changing shape of Methodism. This “baptism” (language he apparently did not use until he learned it in the 1880sfrom the organized Holiness Movement) reinforced Bresee’s sense that authentic religion is heartfelt and experiential. Whatever else a church might be, it must be a place where people experience the presence of God, which finds its expression in Christlike service to others in everyday life. To be “baptized with the Holy Ghost,” according to Bresee, meant that the Holy Spirit of God is “resident in man,” cleansing the human heart from sin and providing power for service to one’s neighbors (“God’s dynamite in the soul”).8
Bresee’s conviction that revivalistic, experiential religion is the essence of authentic Christianity also had implications for his generally negative attitude toward the theological reappraisal taking place in late 19thcentury American Methodism. For Bresee, the felt presence of a supernatural God in a person’s life (and in the life of a congregation) attested to the authority and truth of the Bible as traditionally interpreted. Any approach to the Bible or Christian faith that appeared to undermine their supernatural and divine character was, for Bresee, contradicted by the experience of the “abiding Spirit” alive “in human souls.”
As for the growing affluence of many Methodists in the late 19th century, Bresee first embraced and then rejected this. Throughout his ministry in Iowa, Bresee was quite comfortable with wealth and cultivated close relationships with his more wealthy and influential parishioners. In fact, he seems to have considered himself one of them. For nearly 20 years, he dabbled in business ventures in partnership with a friend, a Methodist preacher turned business speculator. However, it was a disastrously failed business deal with this friend that drove Bresee away from Iowa to Southern California in 1883. After this disaster (and personal embarrassment), Bresee pledged that he would never again dabble in businessand would give himself wholly to preaching the gospel.9
From this point on, Bresee became increasingly critical of the new wealth in many Methodist congregations. He also began to emphasize the fact that the earliest Methodism directed itself primarily to the poor and marginalized and that, in fact, the whole tenor of Scripture challenges pretensions of human wealth and power and calls for special care and protection of the poor, widows, orphans, “aliens,” and other marginalized and powerless people. By 1894, Bresee had become so driven by a burden for ministry to the poor that he left Methodism in order to work full-time in a downtown holiness mission in Los Angeles that served the poor. When this arrangement did not work out as he hoped, Bresee organized the Church of the Nazarene to minister “in the neglected quarters of the cities and wherever also may be found waste places” through means of “city missions, evangelistic services, house-to-house visitation, caring for the poor, comforting the dying.”10
Thus, Phineas Bresee’s personal disillusionment with pursuing wealth, his experience of the plight of the poor in an explosively expanding urban area, and his religious experience and the way in which he came to interpret it theologically combined to cause him to become increasingly dissatisfied with the growing affluence of much of late 19th-century Methodism. This, together with his deeplyheld commitments to a revivalistic, experiential form of Christianity, which he believed was becoming less and less characteristic of Methodism, led him—somewhat unwillingly—out of denominational Methodism and into the role of founder of a new independent holiness church. Hisvision for the Church of the Nazarene was, “to get back to the primitive simplicity of the New Testament Church in spirit and methods, to be rid of the cumbrous machinery, the worldly methods of money getting, so much of form and ceremony, and to have in their place the Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire.”11 Phineas Bresee believed that this described original Methodism—indeed original Christianity—and it was his intention that the Church of the Nazarene be a faithful embodiment of both.1²
Copyright © 2010 by Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. This reprint is an edited (by the author) version of the original essay. Used with permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
1. There are three major biographies of Phineas F. Bresee: E. A. Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1916); Donald P. Brickley, Man of the Morning: The Life and Work of Phineas F. Bresee (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1960); Carl Bangs, Phineas F. Bresee: His Life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1995), which was recently abridged in 2013 by Stan Ingersol and retitled Phineas Bresee: Pastor to the People (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City). The oldest was written by a close personal associate of Bresee, and is based largely on conversations with and letters from Bresee stretching over a period of nearly 20 years. Man of the Morning is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation. The most recent biography is the fruit of many years of research by a historian whose parents were among the first generation of Nazarenes in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
2. Girvin, 50.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 52.
5. Advertising insert entitled “General Camp-Meeting” in The Guide to Holiness, July 1867.
6. The standard accounts of the development of the Holiness Movement are Melvin E. Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980) and Charles E. Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: the Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867–1936 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974).
7. Bresee was notably active in leadership in Iowa Methodism. He pastored its largest congregations, served as a presiding elder, was a leading member of the board of trustees of Simpson College during its reorganization as a liberal arts institution (his work for Simpson earned him an honorary Doctor of Divinity), served as a conference “visitor” (i.e., trustee) of Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, IL, and was editor of the Inland Advocate, one of several regional Methodist papers carrying the Advocate name, among other things.
8. See “To Know Him,” a sermon based on Philippians 3:10-11, in Phineas F. Bresee, The Certainties of Faith: Ten Sermons by the Founder of the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1958), 86-87. See also “The Atmosphere of the Divine Presence,” a sermon based on Isaiah 33:14 in The Certainties of Faith, 91-95.
9. Noting Bresee’s “executive” abilities, Carl Bangs remarks that Bresee could easily have “been a corporation president.” See Bangs, 99. The nature of the “failed” business venture in which Bresee was involved is not entirely clear. Bresee himself blamed it on bad luck and natural disasters (earthquake and resultant flooding of a silver mine) and this is the story passed along without question by E. A. Girvin, 72-76, Donald Brickley, 82-84, and Timothy L. Smith, 94-95. However, Bangs has dug more deeply into the sources, and as a result paints a more complex, somewhat less savory picture involving fraud—although probably not on the part of Phineas Bresee himself. See Bangs, 97-104.
10. Local Church Minutes, “Meeting of the Congregation,” Los Angeles, October 30, 1895, 3.
11. The Church of the Nazarene (pamphlet), Los Angeles, November, 1895, 3.
12. For an analysis of Bresee’s place among a variety of holiness “come-outers” at the end of the 19th-century see Harold E. Raser, “’Christianizing Christianity:’ The Holiness Movement as a Church, the Church, or No Church at All?” Wesleyan Theological Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2006 116-147.
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"Rethinking Poverty: Four Questions to Consider" Written by Beth Clayton Luthye
When you see poverty weighing people down, do you want to run out and do something immediately? For those of us who answer yes, the Bible has 2,000 verses affirming that desire. Yet before we rush to start programs, there are a few questions to consider.Is our focus on people or projects?
In trying to help, it is easy to inadvertently turn people into projects.
Yet that defeats the point of helping people. In Walking with the Poor, Bryant Myers writes, “The world tends to view the poor as a group that is helpless; thus we give ourselves permission to play god in the lives of the poor. The poor become nameless, and this invites us to treat them as objects of our compassion, as a thing to which we can do what we believe is best.”1
When addressing poverty, the ultimate goal isn’t feeding hungry people or educating children. It is helping people see themselves through a Genesis 1:27 lens—as people made in God’s image, fully human, fully valuable, and fully capable.
What are our assumptions?
Poverty is complicated. This is true halfway around the world and halfway down the block. It is easy to focus on surface stuff—lack of food, education, or employment—but poverty goes deeper than material lack.
Years ago, the World Bank researched how poor people themselves defined poverty. Their answers revealed a deep sense of shame. A Moldovan woman explained, “We depend on everyone. No one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of.”²
Others, like a respondent in Jamaica, highlighted lack of freedom: “Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be free.”
Jesus seemed to understand the deeper layers in announcing, “The Spirit of the Lord . . . has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives . . . to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18-19).
As we drop assumptions about what defines poverty, we can also release those about why people are poor to begin with. Gabriel Salguero, pastor of The Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene in New York City and national poverty advocate, says that when we assume poor people are lazy, we create a “double victimization.”³ He continues, “We should not allow slander of poor people. . . . We are to speak up for the poor. We have a sacred text that speaks to these issues. . . . I don’t recall Jesus condemning a poor person—ever.”
What are the real needs?
You want to help? “Start with conversations,” Salguero suggests. “Talk to the people in your community.”
We have to build relationships to understand people’s needs. Matthew 25:34-39 encourages us to give food to the hungry, for example, but what if the best way to give food isn’t to hand out sacks of it? What if it’s helping others gain job skills so they can buy their own? We won’t know unless we ask.
What’s our motivation?
The greatest temptation in trying to help is doing what makes us feel good rather than what’s best for others. Isaiah 58 cautions against serving our “own interest” (v. 3) while fasting; the same words ring true as we seek to “satisfy the needs of the afflicted” (v. 10).
Jumping into action is easy, but it is wise to make sure the action is right. In Compassion, Henri Nouwen and his co-authors encourage beginning with prayer, which “challenges us to be fully aware of the world in which we live and to present it with all its needs and pains to God. It is this compassionate prayer that calls for compassionate action.”⁴
As we respond to God’s heart for the poor, may we hear and be guided by God’s words.
1. Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).
2. Deepa Narayan, with Raj Patel, Kai Schafft, Anne Rademacher, and Sarah Koch-Schulte, Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (New York: Published for the World Bank, Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. Beth C. Luthye, Personal interview with Gabriel Salguero, Feb. 22, 2014.
4. Donald P. McNeill, Morrison, Douglas A., and Nouwen, Henri J. M., Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Image Books, 2005).
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The Trajectory Phineas Bresee Gave Us: A conversation featuring Stan Ingersol, Harold Raser, and Andrew J. Wood
Phineas Bresee was a significant Methodist minister in Iowa before he moved to Los Angeles. His ministry was directed for others, especially the poor and those marginalized by society. At 58, he left a prominent place in Southern California Methodism and established a church that took the name Church of the Nazarene.It was a new movement he felt was needed to engage society and minister to the needy. In the following edited discussion,* three Nazarene historians met with Grace & Peace Magazine to talk about Bresee’s life, ministry, and vision. The panel included Stan Ingersol, denominational archivist for the Church of the Nazarene; Harold Raser, professor of the history of Christianity at Nazarene Theological Seminary; and Andrew J. Wood, recent lecturer in Wesley Studies at United Theological Seminary. Video of the discussion is available HERE.
Methodist Beginnings: Bresee's Ministry on the Iowa Frontier
INGERSOL: Bresee was very much a product of New York’s Catskill Mountains. He grew up in a stable community. He attended Methodist churches from his boyhood on, and his call to preach emerged within the context of New York Methodism. When he first was conscious of that call, one would have expected him to have become a preacher in New York. He was, after all, a fifth-generation Yankee, but his father decided to pull up stakes and move to the Midwest, specifically Iowa. Phineas was about 18 then. He and his brother-in-law, Giles Cowley (who was married to Bresee's sister, Diantha) worked on a farm for a few months and waited for his parents and sister to join them. In the interim, he attended Methodist class meetings where a “presiding elder” (district superin-tendent) fast-tracked him into the ministry. Bresee assisted in conducting revivals, preaching, and meeting with Sunday school groups and Methodist class meetings. Later, he got his first real appointment out on the Iowa prairies. It was a very different culture than what he had left in New York. By the time Bresee was 25, he was a presiding elder. When he left Iowa in the early 1880s after about 23 years of ministry, he had gone from being a raw, young neophyte pastor to a seasoned and accomplished minister who had served a number of urban churches and been very much involved in church-planting in the Des Moines area.
RASER: I’ve always thought that experience in Iowa gave Bresee his high regard for revivals and revivalism. One of the main things he did as an assistant circuit preacher was to conduct revivals, to function as the district or conference evangelist. He was very effective at holding them. In his pastorates, heoften began with a revival. He believed that a healthy church was one where a revival spirit exists all the time. He took that with him to California and certainly found it useful and important in establishing the Church of the Nazarene in the 1890s.
WOOD: Bresee’s experience was largely typical of Methodist ministers of this era. A number of others who came into the Church of the Nazarene had similar career arcs. However, Iowa provided opportunities the East would not have. Bresee was on more committees (in Iowa) than was typical. Iowa and Los Angeles were growing quickly in those days. When he arrived in California, he had a range of exposure and experience he likely would not have gained if he had stayed in New York.
INGERSOL: If Bresee had stayed in New York, we wouldn’t have had Bresee and there would not have been a Church of the Nazarene. If his father hadn’t decided to move the family to Iowa, Bresee probably would have had a very conventional, New York-oriented career. His father’s decision to move to Iowa initiated the family’s westward migration that eventually resulted in Bresee arriving on the West Coast. Without Iowa, there would have been no California Bresee, and no Church of the Nazarene.
RASER: In Iowa, Bresee gained experience in a number of areas that marked his ministry. He edited a church paper and was involved with institutions of Christian higher education. He was involved in the temperance movement and served on a conference committee on temperance—this became a particular interest and passion of his. He had conflict with some parishioners of Southern background over slavery in Iowa. When he founded the Church of the Nazarene, he held a special concern for marginalized people. Christian higher education was a priority. A publication was established promoting the new church. The move from New York to Iowa and then to California gave him experiences that fitted him to be a founder of a successful movement.
WOOD: Bresee also developed in fundraising. He was quite good at retiring debt and dedicating a new church building. In Iowa and California, new congregations were being started all the time and buildings were being expanded.
INGERSOL: Carl Bangs’ biography of Bresee brought out sharply that in Iowa, Bresee began relying on rich donors to help finance new church structures. This was true, for instance, in Red Oak, Iowa, where they built a new church. Bresee began gravitating toward those who could help financially with new church buildings. In California, J. P. Widney became the financier for Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene. However, there was a collision of ideals: Widney wanted to build a fine church in Los Angeles, but the people were against it. They actually rejected his offer. They didn’t want to be beholden to a “money man.” They didn’t want to rely on someone else’s surplus but wanted to build out of their own gifts. Widney was certainly surprised, Bangs wrote, but Bresee was probably surprised as well, because his modus operandi suddenly hit a brick wall; those who had been gathered into the Church of the Nazarene had different values.
Growing into Grace: Bresee’s Journey with Holiness and the Holiness Movement
INGERSOL: It’s important to distinguish between the theology of Holiness and the Holiness Movement because what made it the Holiness Movement was the fact it was organized in different ways. You could know and preach the theology of Holiness without being part of the Holiness Movement. However, the Holiness Movement was very distinct. It had its origins in the writings and leadership of Phoebe Palmer (and Harold has written one of the truly great books on Phoebe Palmer’s life1). The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, which originated after the Civil War, spurred the Holiness Movement. Holiness camps were held across America sponsored by the National Holiness Association. Bresee was aware of it, but he didn’t become part of the organized movement until he went to California and fell in with a group of dedicated laypeople who were already active members in the Holiness Movement on the West Coast.
RASER: I’ve often been intrigued why Bresee’s involvement with organized Holiness came at such a late stage, considering that he had a profound religious experience in Iowa, an experience he later described as his baptism with the Holy Ghost (sanctification). This was many years before he openly identified with the organized Holiness Movement. So, there may have been a progression in his own thinking about his religious experience, a realization his own experience could be validated or explained by the teaching of the Holiness Movement. In some of his early preaching in Southern California, he preached sermons that critiqued the Holiness Movement. Atfirst, Bresee kept it at arm’s length. A lot of Methodists were in that boat, concerned about the divisive potential of this organized Holiness emphasis.
INGERSOL: Until well into the 20th century, the National Holiness Association (NHA) was firmly in the hands of Methodist loyalists who were careful about excluding discussion on what they called “the church question,” which was whether people should leave the mainline churches and go out and start Holiness sects. The loyalists leading the NHA sought to prevent defections, especially from Methodism. Until the Church of the Nazarene came into existence, Bresee was firmly committed to these goals. After the Church of the Nazarene was organized in Los Angeles in 1895, Bresee’s tie to the NHA understandably became more tenuous.
WOOD: Bresee became increasingly committed to prohibition politics. Holiness advocates were as committed to prohibition politics as other Methodists would have been. They were as committed to evangelistic ministry, to the practices around revival, and to urban missions. This commitment on the part of Holiness folks was most apparent in that when Bresee started having services in Los Angeles, the crowds who showed up most consistently were the Holiness folks. Much of Bresee’s storyline until that point is remarkably conventional. He was very much in the mainstream of Methodism. In Southern California, however, it was the Holiness crowd who rallied to him and his ministry. For Bresee, it was a point of powerful agreement.
INGERSOL: Bangs makes the point that when Bresee was fired from the Peniel Mission, it was the Holiness people who welcomed him as their leader.
The Gift of Persuasion: Bresee’s Leadership Style
INGERSOL: Bresee was not a controlling leader; he was an influencing or enabling leader. He was willing to greet other people as peers and equals and help them achieve their visions. On the merger of different Holiness groups into the Churchof the Nazarene, he let C. W. Ruth, an able organizer, lead. With cross-cultural missions, he let H. F. Reynolds lead. He didn’t feel he had to be in control. Some have a mythic understanding of Bresee as a big shot who was in charge of everything, but that’s not the way he was. I view him as the leader who attracted people of equal strength, and, because he was not a controlling leader, he didn’t repel them. He brought them in and gave them a place in the economy of the early Church of the Nazarene. The influencing leader probably will accomplish more in the long run because of the talent he or she attracts.
WOOD: I think of Bresee as providing a framework through which many others could work and make contributions.
INGERSOL: Bresee was largely self-educated. He went to school, but his formal schooling was slender. However, he was an avid reader. He read geography, history, biography. Out on the Iowa prairies, he read a multi-volume history of the Dutch Republic. He had very wide reading interests. He advised a young minister who could not attend college to read in all these areas, but also to read some popular magazines and some clergy magazines. He said that well-rounded ministers needed to know the social and political currents, and they needed to know the culture, and they also needed to know what was going on in the world of religion. Today, we would call him a lifelong learner, and this all came to bear on his preaching and other aspects of his leadership. It gave him a well of understanding that allowed him to meet and mix with a wide variety of people.
RASER: I also see Bresee as a skilled politician in the best sense of that term. He understood the importance of compromise, not on essential convictions, but on things that could be compromised. That’s what enabled him to be at the center of a movement that brought together different Holiness groups. Bresee was not an ideologue. He had his convictions, and we know the famous maxim that guided him, “Unity in essentials, liberty in nonessentials, charity in all things.” He was skilled at hearing other people, feeling out how rigid they were on these things, and then creating a compromise that everybody could live with. He was very collegial. Not autocratic, not authoritarian, but collegial. You could describe it as a leading from behind. Hearing people out, seeing their vision, and finding a way to make it happen in ways that involved the greatest number of people.
INGERSOL: One of Bresee’s primary contributions to the Church of the Nazarene was the form of government. Different governing styles existed in the groups that eventually merged. The eastern people were congregational, the southern people blended congregational and Presbyterian in elements, and Bresee, in 1904, began adapting Methodist Episcopal forms of church government for the Nazarenes. In this Methodist Episcopal form of government, the role of “general superintendent” was synonymous with that of “bishop.” The bishop in the Methodist system today is described as a general superintendent. The churches that broke from theMethodist Episcopal Church have adapted the Methodist Episcopal system in some form. This includes districts, district superintendents, and the rest. How did Bresee bear the office of general superintendent in an early Nazarene culture that was suspicious of Methodist bishops? Much like B. T. Roberts did in the Free Methodist Church, Bresee redefined the role. Being an influencing leader rather than a controlling leader, Bresee made this office palatable to a wide range of people who were predisposed against it. He placed this office within a more democratic form of Methodism, and those democratic roots run all the way through the Nazarene system—women were allowed to serve on church boards, as delegates to district and general assemblies, as pastors and evangelists and elders. He was able to exemplify a model of leadership that won other people over.
One question Bresee raises for us is: How do we conceive of district and general superintendency today? Do we conceive of the offices primarily as administrative or as pastoral offices? If we got back to first principles, we would understand them as pastoral offices with administrative responsibilities.
Rescue the Perishing: Bresee’s Commitment to the Poor and Needy
RASER: By the time Bresee began the First Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles, he and the others were committed to ministry to the poor. It’s very clear in all of the founding documents this would be a mark of the Church of the Nazarene. Prior to that, Bresee hadn’t demonstrated much concern for special ministry to the poor. In fact, he made good use of wealthy members of the congregation to fund ministry and cultivated those people so the congregation could benefit from their resources. It’s always been interesting to me how he moved quickly from pastoring large urban churches with upwardly mobile affluent people to founding a movement that says our special passion, mission, and calling is to the poor. I’ve wondered if some powerful crisis experience moved him decisively in that direction.
INGERSOL: I would say that the decision he made didn’t come out of the blue. He was committed to prayer, Scripture, and discernment. As he prayed and read Scripture, he discerned a call that was, in some sense, alien. It came from outside himself. In Iowa, he was a pastor to plain folk. It was the same in California. He had become accustomed to moving between two worlds: the plain folks on one hand, but also the circles of the powerful and wealthy, with state senators and people who were influential in civic life and politics, and with very wealthy people who could be benefactors of new schools like the University of Southern California.
In 1894, he asked to be appointed to the Peniel Mission, an independent ministry in the Los Angeles slums. Methodistleaders wouldn’t do that because it was a non-Methodist appointment. So Bresee asked for special status—which was granted to him—and he spent a year at the Peniel Mission. During that year, he explored a sense of calling to something different from anything he had ever done before. By the end of that year, his call had been confirmed.
WOOD: There’s a lot of conversation among Methodists in that period about the importance of the city, and certainly the sense that cities and the West, and maybe especially western cities, would be the future of the nation. There was a lot of conversation about urbanization—not just the size of the cities, but how rapidly they were gaining as a percentage of the national population. In addition to discernment, Bresee was trying to get it right. What would an ideal church be? What would an ideal minister of the gospel be doing?
INGERSOL: In a fundamental sense, Bresee went back to the basic impulse of Methodism; he was rediscovering John Wesley. In Wesley’s time, there were many religious societies in England. What made the Methodist movement different from all the rest is that the Wesleys took the idea of the religious society and promoted it among the poor. That’s why Methodism became a movement and other religious societies didn’t. When Bresee committed himself to inner-city ministry, he was returning to the original Methodist impulse.
RASER: Bresee encountered a new situation after he moved to Southern California. He saw urban people, poor people, unemployed people, underemployed people, and destitute people. He saw a need in these multitudes. The tendency of many mainline, major denominational churches was to ignore or minimize outreach to urban immigrants. But Bresee believed that this was a providential calling to him and his people. The experience at Peniel Mission was critical. It’s interesting that he partnered with the Peniel Mission in the first place. That passion was something he was already experiencing when he began to move into ministry with them, and he took that with him into the Church of the Nazarene.
WOOD: Urban missions were common in Methodism. What was not common was to allow a single individual to beappointed year after year to urban missions, especially someone as experienced as Bresee. The thought was, “You can do the urban mission thing for a while, but we have large important churches where we need persons of your stature and experience. We can send the young men to the urban mission.” He may have known at that point the bishops simply weren’t going to allow him to stay in that ministry. They would expect him to continue to itinerate, especially in assignments appropriate to his range of experience and talent.
INGERSOL: He could have gone back into the Southern California Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church after Peniel Mission. He had burned no bridges at this point, but he would not have been appointed to another inner-city ministry among the poor because Methodists in Los Angeles didn’t have a ministry like that yet. He could have returned to the familiar, comfortable, and secure.
Pastor to the People: Bresee as Preacher and Worship Leader
INGERSOL: To understand Bresee, you have to understand it wasn’t just the role of the preacher, but the role of the pastor that was fundamental to him. Any other office he held was only an extension of the pastoral role.
RASER: Bresee lived among the people. He was skilled at building relationships, and he knew his people. He exegeted his congregation well. He knew his people’s needs and was able to preach to them in effective ways, to bring the gospel to bear in specific and direct ways.
WOOD: There was tremendous power in his preaching, but he didn’t lead in such a way that there was a lack of control. That combination of great piety and passion contained a sense of order as well.
INGERSOL: Today, after the worship service, the pastor typically goes to the back of the church and greets people as they leave. That was not Bresee’s style. He actually stood in the door and greeted people as they came into the church. He was their host, welcoming them into the sanctuary. After the service wasover, he would go down and stand by the altar. If people wanted to come up and talk to him, they could. But the act of welcoming people to worship says something about how important he thought worship was as a part of pastoral work. Preaching was at the heart of what he did. He was a good preacher, and my guess is this is the reason why Los Angeles First Church grew to be a truly large congregation. It had a membership close to a thousand and an active attendance of 500 or 600. We have a vivid portrayal of his preaching by J. B. Chapman, who described what it was like at Pilot Point, Texas, when the second General Assembly convened there. This was the first look most of the southern people had of Bresee. Chapman states that when Bresee stood and read his text from Isaiah, the sermon that followed was so spellbinding that even those who had regarded him with some suspicion were brought in through the power of his preaching. This is eloquent testimony to Bresee’s ability to preach for the moment and envelop people.
RASER: I’ve been impressed with how closely the descriptions of Bresee’s preaching are to the ideal sermon that Charles G. Finney, the prominent 19th-century evangelist, sets forth in his lectures on revivals and religion. I don’t know if Bresee read Finney’s lectures on revivals, or if he had read other writers on preaching, but Bresee’s preaching met almost all of Finney’s recommendations. Finney said preaching should be conversational. By all accounts, Bresee’s preaching was very conversational. Finney recommended that preachers use a number of illustrations to make their points clear and relevant to the people. Descriptions of Bresee’s preaching say that he preached directly to the people, and those who heard him experienced what many said they experienced with Charles Finney—that it felt as though he were speaking directly “to me.” Bresee had that ability and skill just as Finney had. Finney said preaching should be evangelistic, but it should also bring people to a point of decision, a place where they have to say, “How do I respond to what I’ve just heard? What does this call for me to do?” Accounts of Bresee’s preaching are that this was always a part of it.
WOOD: Bresee had a quarter-century of preaching experience by the time he was 44. He had a long time to hone his skills, to learn what does and does not work with diverse audiences.
INGERSOL: Pastoral authority is built in many different ways, and good preaching helps build it rapidly and strongly. Bad preaching can erode pastoral authority. When it came time for the merger of Holiness churches at Pilot Point, the people of the East Coast were suspicious of superintendents, because superintendency is a form of episcopacy, and they were congregationally-oriented and very anti-episcopal. Part of their willingness to merge with Bresee’s group was his bearing as a general superintendent and his understanding ofthe office as an extension of his pastoral ministry. His ability as a good preacher allayed some fears. He was able to preach Holiness from different angles of vision, using different texts and different understandings.
WOOD: Bresee always set his preaching ministry in the context of a worshiping community. He did not delegate worship leadership to anyone else and then say, “Now it’s time for my part of the service.” He was involved all the way through the service.
INGERSOL: He had a strong, negative reaction to anything in the service that smacked of entertainment. To him, when people gathered to worship, everything was to be directed toward God. There is an account in the Nazarene Messenger where one of the fine voices of Los Angeles was invited to sing one Sunday morning. Just before her song, she leaned over and said, “I’m going to have to leave after I sing, because I’m also singing at another church this morning.” Bresee said, “Well, if you’re not going to stay for the sermon, then you might as well leave right now because you’re not going to sing.” He explained in the Nazarene Messenger that the world is full of entertainers, but in the Church of the Nazarene, you don’t come to be entertained.
WOOD: Bresee refused to pay musicians as a matter of principle. Music would be given as a gift, one of the gifts and graces given by God back to God and to the Christian community, or one wouldn’t be allowed to participate.
INGERSOL: Bresee made it a practice of having Holy Communion on a regular basis, certainly monthly. He also had “love feasts,” an old tradition from the Moravians that had passed into the Methodist tradition. In the love feast not only were bread and water shared, but testimonies as well. In the early years of Los Angeles First Church, they would have Communion one Sunday and a love feast the next.
RASER: Bresee insisted that regular sharing of testimonies was a vital part of worship and a vital part of the formation of the people in the worshiping community. Virtually any gathering of the people was a fit time for sharing of testimonies. They were part of the preaching service and a central part of a love feast. They were a part of prayer meetings or watch night services—especially the New Year’s Eve watch night services his congregation was well known for. The emphasis on the sharing of testimonies, the importance of people verbalizing their experience and other people hearing— that was one of the ways that the glory was “gotten down,” one of his favorite phrases about what ought to happen in worship, “getting the glory down.”
WOOD: The affirming of God’s grace and blessing in someone else’s life broke down barriers of difference, because whateverI may or may not have in common with you, God is at work in your life, and therefore, you are my sister, my brother.
INGERSOL: Another part of worship was baptism. Bresee was very versatile. He would baptize people at any time, anywhere. He baptized one person during a meeting of the church board. Sometimes, when they went to the beach for their annual picnic, he would baptize people in the ocean. Later in life, after the merger of the various Holiness churches, when he travelled across America, he baptized infants at district assemblies. In those early years of the denomination, they would have the infant baptism service and the ordination service in conjunction with one another.
Bresee believed in orderly services. When he talked about “getting the glory down,” it meant that it was the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit. Bresee was very clear this would not happen until after the sermon had been preached. “Getting the glory down” was never a substitute for the preaching of the Word. It must be a response to the preaching of the Word. On one occasion where somebody got up and started getting very emotional while he was preaching, Bresee said, “Brother, sit down. It’s not time for the glory to come yet.” The preaching of the Word was primary, and then the glory could come down.
RASER: The concept of “getting the glory down” has sometimes been understood as unfettered emotionalism—the louder or the wilder, the better. Bresee, by all accounts, didn’t mean that at all. He certainly believed in worship that resulted in free expression. This response might be saying “amen,” it might be a shout or waving a hanky; however, it could mean for some people simply sitting in silence, experiencing and reflecting on the presence of God in the service. It didn’t mean that everybody responded in exactly the same way. It was definitely not for show. In 1906, when the Azusa Street Revival came to national attention, Bresee believed that some of what was going on there, whether intentionally or not, was showmanship. This had become an extravaganza, a demonstration. People came to see these bizarre things happening as a part of worship, as a part supposedly of manifesting the presence of God and the Holy Spirit in that congregation, and Bresee critiqued Azusa Street at exactly that point.
INGERSOL: In the Nazarene Messenger, he called it a “fleshly manifestation.”
WOOD: The primary sign of the presence of God is not chaos. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be demonstrations of emotion and energy, and some of it might not be surprising and amazing. You would expect the presence of God to be jarring at times, but not chaotic.
INGERSOL: Bresee channeled emotion in one way, through music. As far back as the middle of his Iowa ministry, he began introducing what he considered to be more lively songs of gospel music into the life of the congregation. By the Nazarene years, he was deeply committed to gospel music, but he never excluded the old hymns. In fact, if you look at the early songbook, you’ll see there’re a mix of gospel music and hymns. He also wanted the lively music of his day to be very much a part of all the worship services.
The Search for Authentic Christianity: Bresee and the Wesleyan Vision
INGERSOL: Bresee’s indebtedness to Wesley is very important. Not only did his vision of ministry to the poor reflect an early Wesleyan impulse, but Bresee was indebted to Wesley for his theology as well. When you think about the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, or even the Wesleyan tradition more broadly, what makes us all unique are certain beliefs. In the Nazarene Manual, they’re enshrined in Articles 6 through 10, articles that reflect the heart of Wesley’s spiritual theology—articles on atonement, prevenient grace, justification, and sanctification. Bresee was raised in a Methodist church in which this was the basic theology. All Christian groups have the Bible, but they interpret it differently. Each has its own exegetical-theological tradition. The Wesleyan exegetical-theological tradition goes back to John and Charles Wesley. If you look at A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, one of Wesley’s primary writings, you see some of the components of that theological development. You also see it in the early conference minutes of 1744-45. Bresee was indebted theologically to Wesley. That doesn’t mean he believed everything exactly the way Wesley did. In fact, the Holiness Movement added some things to their message that Wesley didn’t. However, without Wesley, there would be no Bresee.
RASER: Bresee always understood the Church of the Nazarene as a movement that captured the spirit of original Methodism, and he believed that Methodism captured the spirit of New Testament Christianity. The Church of the Nazarene was intended to express the spirit of New Testament Christianity, or scriptural Christianity as Wesley would have called it.
WOOD: The movement back to the New Testament to recover the piety and correctness of early Christianity is something the Church of the Nazarene has in common with many Protestant groups. It was early Christianity understood through the lens of primitive Methodism. Bresee looked back and saw that Methodism had a lot of things right, but by the late 19th century, things were not as they should have been.
INGERSOL: Early American Methodism was an extension of the Wesleyan revival. This revival became transatlantic with Methodist migration to the new world. Nazarene historian Timothy Smith used to argue that the first Holiness Movement in America was really the advent of Methodism in America, so that what we call the Holiness Movement today was really the second Holiness Movement. The first one was the spread of early Methodism throughout the colonies and the early American nation.
Maintaining the Trajectory: Following Bresee into the 21st Century
INGERSOL: It’s important to go back to first principles and ask ourselves, “Are we still on track with the vision of the founders?” Bresee was critical to the early Church of the Nazarene and to the initial trajectory of the church. The uniqueness Bresee gave to the Church of the Nazarene (besides its frame of government) was a vision for ministry, especially his attraction to the inner city and the diverse racial makeup of Southern California. He didn’t particularly take the lead in reaching out to other ethnic groups, but the people around him did. Mrs. Maye McReynolds, of Los Angeles First Church, started the church’s Hispanic ministries, which eventually spread down along the southern border. Other people close to Bresee opened up the work with Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. He took the urban context seriously, as a vital place for Christian ministry to occur. The model he left us can help us break out of any suburban captivity of the church we might be caught in today. Perhaps he shows us a way to break out of the affluence that is so much a part of American and Western society today. Today, the Church of the Nazarene is only 30% U.S. and Canadian, and the average Nazarene is poor and is either a person of color or Hispanic. In terms of taking the city seriously, taking urban ministry seriously, and taking multicultural ministry seriously, Bresee has left us a very helpful model.
WOOD: Bresee was deeply committed to a life of ministry and to faithfulness in the Christian walk. He was a person who led with clarity, with graciousness, with openness to possibility and others’ contributions. Bresee’s leadership style drew gifts, graces, and talent from others. Bresee’s life has so many different contacts and connections, so many different people who were involved, so many different interests, that payingattention to Bresee at this hour could help us see how diverse the early church was, how many different leaders there were. Bresee was not a specialist in everything. There were many important figures whose contributions helped make us who we are. If we’re going to think about transforming what the Church of the Nazarene is, at the very least we should do it with an awareness of what we have been.
RASER: I had a colleague who would say, “Don’t forget the present gets at least one vote.” This spoke to the fact that the past doesn’t necessarily determine the future for an institution or a people. People in every time and place get to have a vote in where things are going, but it is important that the vote in the present not be made in a vacuum, or not be made with a mistaken understanding of what the past was. It is vital for the Church of the Nazarene today to know what the founders intended. Bresee is not the only founder of what became the Church of the Nazarene, but Bresee is certainly a principal founder of the Church of the Nazarene, and he was at the center of the union movement that drew together a number of other movements to form the core of today’s Church of the Nazarene. He was perhaps the most articulate in his understanding of the mission and the purpose of the church that was a result of those mergers. We need to know what the founders intended, to know whether our vote of the present is in keeping with the past. Bresee is a compass for understanding where the church has been and how the church has come to be where it is today. We need to think intentionally about where the church is going and what the church is going to be in the future. As an exam question in Nazarene History, I sometimes ask my students, “If Bresee suddenly appeared and saw the Church of the Nazarene as it is, what do you think he would think about our church? What would he approve of, what would he disapprove of?” Then I ask, “Why does it matter, if people like it? Or what does it matter what the founders, people like Bresee, thought? How should that be of any concern to us today?”
INGERSOL: Every denomination has a trajectory that is initially determined by the founders. Over time, other things alter the trajectory. Fundamentalism was one of those outside forces that altered the Nazarene trajectory. We could probably say, at least for American Nazarenes, that the culture of affluence that grew up after World War II is another outside force that has affected the trajectory of the Church of the Nazarene. When we go back and look at founders and first principles, we can ask the question: Have we gotten off track? If so, what steps do we need to take to get back to where we should be?
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"Not What I Planned On: A Pastor’s Thoughts on the Difficult Intersection of Urban and Bi-Vocational Ministry" Written by Rustin E. Brian
not-what-i-planned-onIn referring to his particular church in Los Angeles, as well as Church of the Nazarene buildings in general, Phineas Bresee once said, "We want places so plain that every board will say welcome to the poorest."1 Statements like this are what first attracted me to the Church of the Nazarene. Like many my age, I was attracted to a “relevant” faith (I am not sure I still care for that term; I think I prefer “faithful” instead), one that, in particular, was concerned about the poor, the abandoned, and the forgotten, as well as those who struggled with addictions and with sin in general. Of course, the Church of the Nazarene also cared for those who were more affluent, selfreliant, and upwardly mobile. What church does not care for these folks? But as I understood it, the Church of the Nazarene intentionally sought to serve the “least of these” and to be a church that not only served the poor but alsowas of the poor. The Church of the Nazarene was “called unto holiness,” which meant the church was called to love and serve God and others. Having not grown up in the Church of the Nazarene, I had very limited experience with it until attending Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU). There, I witnessed many churches fulfilling this calling, professors who were teaching and living out this calling trained me, and wonderful departments of student and spiritual development that sought to help students explore this calling to love God and others formed me. These experiences, and so many others, told me that this was the church I wanted to commit my life to._______
We want places so plain that every board will say welcome to the poorest. - PHINEAS BRESEE
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And so I prepared for a life of full-time ministry. After PLNU, I attended Nazarene Theological Seminary. As I progressed in my studies and matured in my walk withChrist, I knew that God had called me to a life of full-time service, particularly in urban contexts, where “compassionate ministry” was a reality. I desired a church of ethnic and economic diversity to both serve and to learn from myself. In short, I wanted to pastor the church Bresee spoke about.
Along the way, I had some very normal experiences: I accumulated student loan debt as well as some personal credit card debt, I got married and had a child, I grew to appreciate the benefits of a quiet life, and enjoyed the benefits of education. Throughout these “normal” experiences, I formulated what I thought were realistic expectations about life, salary, and benefits for a pastor. I knew that affluence was not in my future, but I assumed that I would be able to pastor an urban church and get paid an adequate full-time salary, which would either include or allow me to pay for medical benefits. My expectations were based on many real-life experiences, and the reality that I do believe exists for many in the Church of the Nazarene. It was not, however, based upon those who were serving in “urban” churches. I just assumed that pastors in suchchurches would be paid like those in “less-thanurban” churches.
Eventually, it came time to get a “real” job. It was then that I learned there were not all that many urban churches. Those that did exist, moreover, did not have the money for a full-time pastor, especially one with student loans, let alone for a pastoral staff. What is more, the district or General Church does not subsidize these ministries, as is the case in some denominations. I found myself confronted with a choice: serve in a “less-than-urban” church or get creative. Now, do not get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with “less-than-urban” churches: I have attended and worked for several, and I have loved them. It is more a question of fit, than anything else. Eventually, I took a full-time job at a wonderful “less-than-urban” church and really enjoyed it. That church, though not “urban” by any stretch of the imagination, was genuinely committed to loving God and others, and they were daily growing more and more committed to that pursuit.
And yet, the issues of “fit” and “calling” continued to make me anxious about my situation. As a result, I began to entertain ideas of church planting and other creative possibilities for pursuing urban ministry; all of which, by necessity, would require me to be bi-vocational. Simply put, this was not what I planned for.
About a year ago, after much thought and prayer, my wife and I left a very good staff position at a wonderful “less-than-urban” church, and I accepted the call to be the bi-vocational lead pastor of a small urban church. I will admit this was a bit of an experiment. This past year has been great, and I can testify to many different ways that God has blessed our church and especially my family. To be honest, though, bi-vocational ministry is very difficult—sometimes it can be downright disheartening. There is just never enough time to do all that a pastor needs to do. Creativity, long-term planning, ongoing education and study, as well as local and district denominational and ecumenical involvement are all, for the most part, luxuries that cannot be afforded by the bi-vocational pastor. The life of the bi-vocational pastor is often spent playing catch-up, trying desperately to simply be ready for the next service and possibly to provide some semblance of pastoral care for attendees. In short, life is tough for a bi-vocational pastor.
Since making this occupational change, I have become burdened for my fellow bi-vocationalpastors—and there are a lot of us to be burdened for. Did you know, for example, that 41% of Church of the Nazarene pastors on the USA/ Canada Region consider themselves bivocational; 32% by necessity?² This number increases to a staggering level if we include the global denomination. It would seem that the Church of the Nazarene is largely a church of tent makers or bi-vocational pastors. I cannot help but think that these numbers will only increase as the global Church steadily grows, and the United States faces increased secularization. The question is not whether we will have bi-vocational pastors in the Church of the Nazarene, but how can we better support, equip, encourage, and sustain these women and men to love and serve their churches and to fulfill their calling to proclaim and live holiness throughout all the lands?
My experiences lead me to two constructive suggestions for how we might begin to address this issue. These are certainly not the only ways to respond to the issues of bi-vocational and urban ministry. From my, albeit, limited experience, though, I believe they are good places to start.
First, there is need for increased denominational support for urban and bi-vocational ministries—pastors in particular. In both urban and rural settings, bi-vocational ministry is difficult. Resources, funding, and training for such pastors and churches are in short supply. The fact that so many of our pastors are bi-vocational should be proof enough that increased support is needed. While this observation is easily made, finding a solution is anything but. A few possibilities might include: regional universities and training centers offering increased training opportunities aimed specifically at bi-vocational pastors, district and/ or city pastoral support groups aimed at urban and bi-vocational pastors, and increased financial support for bi-vocational pastors and urban ministries. This final possibility isobviously easier written than done, but it is something that is sorely needed. Perhaps in urban areas in particular, we might have several smaller congregations pastored by a “circuit rider” pastor. None of these possibilities is perfect, and I am sure that there are many more. The fact is, as a denomination, we must begin offering better support, training, and compensation for our bi-vocational and urban pastors. These pastors and their congregations reflect the majority of Nazarenes in the United States and Canada—they are the “typical” Nazarene church and pastor—and yet they live a very different reality than what is often assumed to be “typical.”
Second, and more importantly, we must better prepare young people for the changing realities of ministry that they will face when they graduate from university and/or seminary. Today’s teens and young adults are socially active and attuned to the inequalities of the world. They yearn for a faith that is dynamic and world-changing. For many, this means a faith that is socially active. This makes churches of Wesleyan heritage, and the Church of the Nazarene in particular, appealing to young people considering a future in ministry. The question is what to do with these young people and their desire for a socially “relevant” faith. My hunch is that the global denomination needs to take stock of this rising tide of young leaders interested in urban and compassionate ministry, who likewise, do not feel at home in our more "traditional" churches. The leaders of tomorrow are very different from those of today. Sit down and have a conversation with teens and college students who are called or at least interested in ministry, and this much is evident. We must begin now to better connect them, and to make sure that thereality that they find when they begin their ministry careers is in alignment with the socially engaged faith that they desire. (They might even help us to do this!) I would contend that more and more young people want the church that Bresee described—the church that he founded. Are we ready for leaders with that passion and vision?
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Helpful Hints in Navigating the Difficulties of Bi-vocational Ministry:
• Wake up extra early for devotional and sermon prep time before heading off to your day job. For me this means 5:00 a.m.
• Relax your expectations. Judge me if you will, but I simply cannot accomplish all the things I would like to accomplish in ministry being bi-vocational. I try to focus on the essentials and not stress so much about the other things. Being a “Super-Pastor” will not help my family, my church, or me.
• Be extra sensitive to the needs of your family. My number one job is to be a husband and father, and yet my schedule is not conducive to this requirement. If something in my schedule must suffer, it cannot be my limited family time. Period.
• Fight for Sabbath. After spending six months with little or no Sabbath, I negotiated Fridays off from my day job. The loss of income hurts, but the family and church time that this freed up has proven invaluable.
• Have a mentor. I currently have two individuals from whom I seek regular counsel and who serve as mentors to me. These relationships take time but are hugely important to my life.
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Additionally, I think that young aspiring leaders need to heed these realities and begin to prepare for a tent-making, missionary-like future. Many of these young people desire to serve in a church that is creative, diverse, urban, and socially involved. Experience tells me that in manycases, if not most, such churches often require bi-vocational pastors. It is also quite possible that such churches are so few in number that these young leaders will need to plant and “build” these churches from the ground up. I find this idea to be very encouraging. It certainly can be squared with the model of ministry on display in the New Testament—Paul’s letters in particular. This type of ministry, though, is anything but easy and convenient. This is not the future that most young aspiring pastors think of when they think of faithfully fulfilling their call to pursue ministry in a decidedly urban context. I know it was not the future I envisioned.
For example, over the last few years I had the great privilege of pastoring several teens who are called to ministry and who are now preparing for ministry at some of our Nazarene universities. Sensing their passion and calling for ministry that is “compassionate” in nature, I took advantage of my mentoring relationships with them to strongly urge them all to double major in college, giving them additional training and thus the possibility for income that does not come from the church. I described their future as that of a missionary to the United States or Canada (though they could certainly go overseas) and encouraged them to think of their future in ministry that way too. If I am wrong, they will simply have a good, balanced education and more tools to use in ministry. If I am right, though, these young leaders might just have the tools necessary to thrive in the changing climate of the 21st-Century Church. They might also have realistic expectations about what to expect when it comes time to get a “real” job!
My “experiment” with bivocational ministry has been difficult. Both personally and professionally, I can attest to the struggle that it is. It has opened my eyes to the reality that many pastors in the Church of the Nazarene face: bi-vocational pastors are seriously overworkedand underequipped. Moreover, this reality, while not unique to urban ministry, is characteristic of much of urban ministry. Those interested in and preparing for urban ministry face a challenging future in ministry. But of course (and this cannot be overstated), all those preparing for a future in ministry are preparing for a challenging future. As pastors, we are not to avoid challenge. The consistent witness of Scripture, in fact, testifies to a God who calls God’s people to faithfulness in and through adversity. While we are not to fear challenge, it is wise to prepare for it.
Bresee’s understanding of church will always be a challenge. Pursuing his vision of a church that both serves and is made up of the poor will require discipline, hard work, and a lot of creativity. I am still convinced that this vision is worth pursuing. My journey to serve a church with this type of vision is still developing. Along the road I have learned that I have to stretch my imagination to include more creative possibilities for “doing church” and to think of ministry, increasingly, as bi-vocational. My hunch is that more and more of my colleagues, especially those currently preparing for a life of ministry, will need to do some of this same creative thinking. The question is: How can the Church of the Nazarene foster a space for such creative thinking, as well as better equip bi-vocational and urban pastors to do the work of ministry in the 21st century?
Note: Not all bi-vocational ministry is “urban”; in fact, most bivocational pastors serve in rural communities. Likewise, not all “urban” churches require bi-vocational pastors. The latter, though, is extremely common. Moreover, when we factor out the many churches that exist on the fringe of dense urban areas (these are often classified as urban), and concentrate on those churches that find themselves in the urban cores of large cities, I would argue that urban and bivocational ministry become almost synonymous terms.
1. Taken from the Nazarene Messenger, Vol. 6, January 15, 1902, 6.
2. This information is based on the 2013 Annual Pastor’s Report, which was facilitated by Nazarene Research Services, Church of the Nazarene.
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"Journey Inward, Journey Outward: Our Heritage of Compassion" Written by Tom Nees
trajectoryThe theme of “Journey inward, Journey outward” describes my own experience within the Wesleyan- Holiness tradition. Soon after graduation from Nazarene Theological Seminary in 1962, I was serving as pastor of the Nazarene Church in Sunnyvale, California, near the epicenter of the ‘60s social protests,the anti-war hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and the Free Speech Movement erupting on the Berkley campus of the University of California.
I remember well when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and then Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and Robert Kennedy, less than two months later on June 6—add to that the advancing Civil Rights movement. The first decade of my post-seminary ministry was shaped during this tumultuous era.
I was troubled—as was Thomas Merton in his meditations, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander1 —because my tradition frowned on social engagement.
During that time, I also read Call to Commitment by Elizabeth O’Conner,² the story of the ecumenical Church of the Savior founded by Gordon Cosby³ in Washington, D.C., in 1946, upon his return from duty as an Army chaplain in World War II. It was a church with Jesuit-like membership requirements of spiritual exercises combined with social engagement with the problems of the city. I thought if I ever got to Washington, D.C., I wanted to see it first hand. I could not have imagined as I watched Washington, D.C., neighborhoods engulfed in flames following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that I would soon begin a 25-year ministry in one of those so-called “riot corridors.”
By the time I began my ministry at the Washington, D.C., First Church of the Nazarene in 1971, O’Conner had published another book, Journey Inward, Journey Outward,⁴ the story of how the Church of the Savior reinvented itself around mission groups with members accountable to a spiritual director for disciplines of prayer, Scripture reading, journaling, and silence, while engaging in neighborhood service projects.
I joined a mission group soon after my arrival that included Pastor Gordon Cosby. Our initial mission was to wait tables each Thursday evening at the Potter’s House. During that time, we became more aware of the low-income housing crisis. In response, we organized Jubilee Housing with the express purpose of acquiring deteriorating apartment buildings and helping the lowincome residents rehab and eventually own their own buildings.
With a few members of the First Church of the Nazarene, I agreed to organize our own mission group and take responsibility for a 48-unit, deteriorating building full of people: few of whom were able to pay rent.
At the same time, I completed a D.Min. program at Wesley Theological Seminary (WTS) in Washington, D.C. I had a growing interest in my own tradition, particularly the 18th-century Evangelical Revival in England led by John and Charles Wesley and the formative period of the Church of the Nazarene.
What I found changed my ministry, if not my life. As the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was an Isaiah 6 awakening, my discovery of John Wesley and the founders of the Church of the Nazarene was a Josiah experience, discovering within my own tradition the theological and practical foundation and motivation I needed to pursue my calling.
In the Wesleyan section of the WTS library, I discovered records of Wesley’s engagement with the poor and his voluntary practice of poverty. All I knew from my theology classes in college and prior seminary work were his sermons on holiness, with little to no context. It was never mentioned that the book Wesley wrote and published, more than any book of sermons or theology, was a book on health care. That aspect of Wesley was never discussed.
Encouraged from what I was learning about the Wesleyan- Holiness story, I eventually wrote my D.Min. thesis in 1975: “The Holiness Social Ethic and Nazarene Urban Ministry.”⁵ My work is referenced in a new book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism⁶ (published by Oxford University Press) by Molly Worthen, who is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
During the mid-1970s, our small mission group became the nucleus of the Community of Hope, a ministry that integrated the personal and social dimensions of the gospel, if not holiness. I began to think of the Wesleyan-Holiness narrative as, in the words of O’Conner’s book, a “Journey Inward, Journey Outward.”
The committee reviewing my thesis wanted me to demonstrate that Wesleyan- Holiness theology, as articulated by Wesley and later advanced by the founders of the Church of the Nazarene, is inextricably intertwined with social transformation. It was not enough that these leaders were engaged in serving the poor and advocating for social reforms; the committee wanted me to argue that holiness theology and practice, necessarily not just coincidentally, advances social as well as personal transformation.
And so I read everything I could find on the social action and reforms advanced by Wesley, the 19th-century American Holiness Movement, and the founders of the Church of the Nazarene. I spent weeks in the Nazarene Archives documenting references to social concern and action. During that time, I read Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s Trevecca Nazarene College (now University) lectures: John Wesley: Christian Revolutionary,⁷ printed in 1970 before her major work, A Theology of Love,8 published in 1972. She wrote:
Wesley’s doctrine, moreover, would not permit him to rest content in biblical theology as such, or religious experience as such—two stopping places for some contemporary Wesleyanisms. Instead it pushed him into the social and economic and educational problems in the world outside his church.
Wesley was one of the first advocates of popular education. He saw that his converts must be cared for, and he built schools wherever enough converts warranted it.
He knew the value of wealth if properly used, but the curse of it when it was controlled by selfish hands. He practiced what he preached by giving away (we are told) 98 percent of his income.
Labor problems and child labor came to his attention. He worked for fair wages, fair prices, honest, healthy employment.
He applied Christian ethics to a corrupt society. His voice against the liquortraffic ‘England’s master curse’ was potent. He was a powerful antislavery spokesman. Wesley’s social reforms leaped the Atlantic Ocean and influenced American social morality more than is recognized.
These formative events: the social unrest of the ‘60s, severe poverty near my church in Washington, D.C., and the readings of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition led me to understand the practice of holiness as both an inward and outward journey.
The Journey Inward
In the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, the inner spiritual life is primary. There have been many misunderstandings of holiness among us (some of which Wynkoop tried to correct), and a variety of definitions of holiness developed during the 19th and 20th centuries as documented by Mark Quanstrom in his book, A Century of Holiness: The Doctrine of Entire Sanctification in the Church of the Nazarene: 1905–2004.9
The so-called “cardinal doctrine” of the Wesleyan-Holiness Movement and the Church of the Nazarene in particular has been an intentional experience and practice of inner spirituality. However holiness is understood or misunderstood, it has always been about an intentional inner spiritual life beyond a simple affirmation of Christian belief.
Upon joining the Church of the Savior mission group, for the first time in my life, I became accountable to a spiritual director for spiritual practices similar to those in Wesley’s Methodist “classes” and “bands.” For Wesley, sanctification or holiness was more than a religious experience, although it was and is that, or a doctrine, although it was and is that too. Holiness, as demonstrated by his life and his Methodist followers, was a practice of spiritual development both inwardly and outwardly. The inward journey is both primary and complementary to the outward journey. Neither is complete without the other.
The Journey Outward
For Wesley and the founders of the Church of the Nazarene, holiness was the practice of spiritual disciplines and social transformation including what we now refer to as compassionate ministry.
Holiness then, is more than a doctrine or an experience; it is a practice—a way of living. It is a life of compassion defined by the “Golden Rule” as described by Karen Armstrong in her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.¹0 The practice of holiness or sanctification is a journey to and with God. God is known in our practices of contemplation, prayer, and silence. And as in Mother Teresa’s words: “Jesus comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor.”
Just as those of the Wesleyan- Holiness persuasion have always been about intentional personal transformation, so at their best they have always been about social transformation. In his 1976 book, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage,¹¹ Donald Dayton documented the wide range of social reform movements in the 19th century advanced by holiness and other evangelical groups. Dayton also described the demise of those social reform movements in the mid-20th century. In Apostles of Reason, Worthen notes that Timothy Smith’s Revivalism and Social Reform¹² “traced the roots of 19th-century social progressivism normally associated with liberal Protestant theology, to earlier evangelical revivals.”
We need to remember the mid- 20th century Wesleyan-Holiness narrative to understand where we are now and why we need a new story. The years between 1925 and 1975 were a time Timothy Smith referred to as “the great reversal” when holiness social concern and reform were nearly forgotten. David O. Moberg, professor of sociology and anthropology at Marquette University, used that phrase for the title of his 1972 book The Great Reversal: Evangelism Versus Social Concern¹³ to describe how Wesleyans, among others, gave up their social concern in reaction to the Social Gospel.
I discovered this in my research in the archives of early Nazarene documents. In our denomination’s formative years, Nazarenes were deeply engaged in a variety of gospel missions, orphanages, and “rest cottages”— providing refuge for young women, victims of “white slavery” or prostitution, for instance. All of this has been well documented and preserved in Stan Ingersol’s research in Rescue the Perishing, Care for the Dying: Sources and Documents on Nazarene Compassionate Ministries in the Nazarene Archives.¹⁴ Of course, we knew something of Bresee’s mission work in Los Angeles leading to the founding of the Church of the Nazarene. But then it changed, almost suddenly. Fundamentalism, with its opposition to any social action that resembled the social gospel, influenced evangelicals generally, including the holiness churches.
Fortunately, the emphasis changed again around the mid-1970s; at least, it began to change since we have not yet arrived at an understanding of holiness as the integration of personal and social dimensions of the Gospel as practiced byour founders.
Moberg published a revised edition of The Great Reversal in 1977, changing the subtitle from “Evangelism Versus Social Concern” to “Evangelism and Social Concern.” ¹⁵ He recognized that in the early ‘70s holiness and evangelical leaders were, as he wrote, “reversing the great reversal” in practice as well as in theory.
I have lived through much of the “Great Reversal,” a time when some, in the name of holiness, opposed much of what we now do as compassionate ministry. I began an urban ministry in Washington before there was such athing as compassionate ministries just at the time the “Great Reversal” was beginning to reverse.
To fully recover our practice of holiness as a life of compassion, we need a new story. The idea of putting it this way came to me in a recent meeting I joined with Abdul Aziz Said after reading his book Islam and Peacemaking in the Middle East.¹⁶ As a Syrian- American, he has been teaching at American University in Washington, D.C., since 1957. He is the senior ranking professor of international relations at AU and is the founder of the Center for Global Peace.
In the second chapter of this book titled, “The Need for a New Story,” Said writes that Middle East peace will come only when the “confrontational story” or stories are replaced with a “compatibility story.” I suggest the phrase “Journey Inward, Journey Outward” as the theme of a new holiness compatibility story of spirituality in a life of compassion. In this story, we would recognize that holiness is a practice of both inner spirituality and a compassionate life. We would recognize that the inward journey of holiness might take many routes regardless of where it begins. We would be willing to let go of our “confrontation” stories with their legalisms and exclusive claims to truth. We would reject the “confrontation” story of fundamentalism. As professor Said writes: “Fundamentalism implies a refusal to listen to the ‘other.’” We would recognize that holiness is a practice of compassion, leading us outward to a world of suffering and human need.
In our compatibility story, we would respond to human suffering wherever it exists and cease our disputes about the Social Gospel and social justice. We would recognize that evangelism— sharing the good news—is alwayscompassionate and that Christian compassion is the good news or evangelism. The new holiness compatibility story is, to coin a phrase, compassion/evangelism.
This theme and story will be wellreceived beyond the boundaries of our own tribe. Evidently, the increasing number of “nones,” those claiming no religious affiliation, is not a reaction to spirituality and compassion but to the old stories of religious disputes, contentious true believers, and indifference to a world of need. We can connect with even the “nones” by telling the new holiness story as an intentional journey of spirituality and compassion. With this new story, we can retain and attract the next generation as we recover and are faithful to our own tradition.
As in the subtitle of Jonah Sachs’ recent book, Winning the Story Wars,17 “Those who tell—and live—the best stories will rule the future.”
1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image Books, 1968).
2. Elizabeth O’Conner, Call To Commitment: The Story of the Church of the Savior, Washington, D.C. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
3. Gordon Cosby passed away on March 20, 2013, at age 95, spending his final days in Christ House, a hospice for homeless people organized by the Church of the Savior.
4. Elizabeth O’Conner, Journey Inward, Journey Outward (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
5. Thomas G. Nees, The Holiness Social Ethic and Nazarene Urban Ministry, D.Min. thesis, Wesley Theological Seminary, March 1976.
6. Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7. See: http://usacanadaregion.org/sites/usacanadaregion.org/files/PDF/Books/John-Wesley- Christian-Revolutionary.pdf.
8. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love: The Dynamic of Wesleyanism (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1972)
9. Mark Quanstrom, A Century of Holiness: The Doctrine of Entire Sanctification in the Church of the Nazarene: 1905-2004 (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2004).
10. Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2011)
11. Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
12. Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: In Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1957).
13. David O. Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism Versus Social Concern (New York: Lippincott, 1972).
14. Stan Ingersol, Rescue the Perishing, Care for the Dying: Historical Sources and Documents on Compassionate Ministries Drawn from the Inventories of the Nazarene Archives (Second Edition).
15. David O. Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism and Social Concern, rev. ed. (New York: Lippincott, 1977).
16. Nathan C. Funk, and Abdul Aziz Said, Islam and Peacemaking in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2009).
17. Jonah Sachs, Winning the Story Wars (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
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"Phineas Bresee and the Women of the Church of the Nazarene" Written by Diane Leclerc
womenNazarene women clergy represent a long tradition of women preachers in the Wesleyan-Holiness Movement. Methodist women preached shortly after Methodism was born. Holiness women preached when the Holiness Movement was born and have done so ever since. Christian historians and ecclesiastical analysts often overlook the contribution of women clergy because they mistakenly see women preachers and female ordination as a later 20thcentury phenomenon, which rode the second wave of feminism. The Holiness Movement was squarely in the middle of the first wave of feminism in the 19th century. The movement was vocal and active on issues of equality such as abolition, the rights of non-whites and immigrants, the rights of the poor, and the rights of women. Nearly all of the denominations that arose from the Holiness Movement affirmed the full equality of women and their right to ordination, including the Church of the Nazarene. Yet, so many people who are now associated with such denominations do not know this history or the Wesleyan-Holiness theology on which human equality is founded. As a result, women have found it necessary to defend their right to preach in denominations that have never officially questioned such a right.Susie Stanley’s exceptional book, Holy Boldness: Women Preacher’s Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self,1 shows that hundreds of women were preaching with an empowered sense of self and calling in denominations associated with the Holiness Movement. Phoebe Palmer was a key figure; indeed, she was its matriarch. In Donald Dayton’s words: “It was . . . the denominations produced by the mid-nineteenth century ‘holiness revival’ that most consistently raised feminism to a central principle of church life. This movement largely emerged from the work of Phoebe Palmer.”²
Palmer’s The Promise of the Father (1859), a defense of women in ministry, anticipates many interpretative moves of 20th-century feminist exegetes. But the isolated pronouncements of any figure, even one as revered as Palmer, would not be sufficient to persuade an entire religious movement to take a decisive and controversial stand on women’s roles. Rather, the Holiness Movement’s endorsement of women’s equality is rooted more profoundly in the 19th-century Holiness Movement’s articulation of its doctrine of entire sanctification. Holiness theology made it possible for women to understand themselves as “entirely sanctified” and thereby adopt new roles in radical disjunction with their pasts. Nancy Hardesty articulates this disjunction:
Christians were not only justified before God but were also regenerate, reborn, made new, capable of being restored to the Edenic state. For women it made possible the sweeping away of centuries of patriarchal, misogynist culture in the instant . . . The argument that ‘this is the way we’ve always done it,’ holds no power for someone for whom ‘all things have been made new.’³
Nazarene women clergy represent a long tradition of women preachers in the Wesleyan-Holiness Movement.
The synthesis of holiness theology with revivalism can be seen clearly in the emphasis on the instantaneousness of sanctification. Holiness theology also modifies Wesley in its adoption of John Fletcher’s linkage of entire sanctification with “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” by taking the image and popularizing it. Baptism language linked holiness with Pentecostal power. Women who had experienced entire sanctification were empowered to accomplish that which exceeded theirhuman limitations. Through Pentecostal empowerment and “unhindered” freedom, women were enabled to progress in their spiritual journeys as never before. In holiness theology, women have equal access to the “Pentecostal power” available through the Holy Spirit. Thus, they are equally capable to be “Pentecostal witnesses” to what God can do in a life that is entirely devoted. The Church of the Nazarene, and Bresee specifically, stand squarely on this interpretation of Pentecost.
Catherine Booth (Salvation Army) and B. T. Roberts (Free Methodist) were among those writing treatises on women’s right to preach. Booth published her work on the subject in 1861. B. T. Roberts published Ordaining Women in 1891. These works, with the rise of holiness theology, allowed women to fulfill this special requirement of God. Preaching was the inevitable step after testimony, and ordination was the next step after preaching. All this was based on a belief in equality that arises from more thansocio-historical factors. Wesleyan-Holiness theology gave rise to practical application. Wesleyan-Holiness women preached in an environment that allowed them to thrive. Such egalitarianism was central to Holiness identity. Women preachers were a “natural fit” as evidence of this deeply held conviction.
The Church of the Nazarene stands out as a particular case in which women’s preaching and leadership succeeds. This was due partly to Phineas Bresee’s strong leadership. But before Bresee supported a “feminist” stand for the denomination, he had already been influenced by many women in his life.
Bresee had models of strong women in his family. His mother, Susan Brown Bresee, became part of his household and moved with her son from parsonage to parsonage in Iowa and California. Later, she was a charter member of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene. His daughter, Sue, was also part of his new movement. The strongest female in Bresee’s life was his wife, Maria Hebbard Bresee, who worked tirelessly alongside him for over 55 years. During some of their years in Iowa, she endured a hard life, raising little children while her husband was away. In California, she helped to bear many of Phineas’ burdens as he endured the emotional turmoil of many changes, some rejections, and the responsibility of leadership of a new denomination.
After his family moved to Southern California, Phineas Bresee became more deeply involved in the Holiness Movement and consequently met women in positions of church leadership. He grew acquainted with Amanda Berry Smith, the famous African American evangelist, and heard her preach on several occasions. He wrote, “She preached one Sabbath afternoon, as I never heard her preach before, in strains of holy eloquence and unction . . . The Lord opened heaven on the people in mighty tides of glory.”⁴
Later, in the Church of the Nazarene, the preaching of women ceased to be an unusual occurrence. The following women represent the many opportunities given to Nazarene women to preach as evangelists, pastors, and mission workers. Such interactions caused Bresee to once proclaim, “Some of our best ‘men’ are women!”
LUCY PIERCE KNOTT⁵
Lucy Pierce married William S. Knott in 1882. In 1887, they took their three children and moved from Kentucky to Los Angeles, where they met Bresee. They became strong supporters of Bresee and followed him to several churches in Southern California. They became charter members of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene when it was organized. Bresee wrote down some of his memories of Lucy Knott. He noted that she was a “minister” among young women at Los Angeles First. He called her “pastor” of the Mateo Street mission, which was later organized into a church. “As a preacher and leader in the church, she has shown peculiar ability.”⁶ He noted the strong effectiveness of her evangelical efforts and insightful and powerful work with small groups. He also noted that she had the full support of her husband for her ministry. She was licensed to preach in 1899 and was ordained in 1903. Her congregations loved her.
MAYE McREYNOLDS
Bresee also knew Rev. Maye McReynolds. Early in the young denomination, she was called by God to work among the Mexican population of Southern California. After moving from Minnesota in 1899, Maye McReyolds heard Bresee preach at a revival. That night she experienced entire sanctification and soon joined the Church of the Nazarene. She was employed by the railroad, where she encountered Spanish-speaking people on a daily basis. She felt “compelled” to work among them. She was ordained in 1906 and served as pastor of the Mexican mission, and later of the first Nazarene Mexican church. According to Rebecca Laird, she was a “confident, bold woman with great compassion . . . [with] a radiant spirit [as] a devoted missionary, preacher and leader.”⁷ She was also accorded equal status with the district superintendents at the third General Assembly, where it was “moved and seconded that Sister McReynolds, who has been for years recognized as Superintendent of our Spanish Mission in the Southwestern part of the country, be recognized as a regular District Superintendent and seated in the assembly as such. Motion carried.”8 She appeared in the official picture taken at the assembly of the general and district superintendents.
ELSIE WALLACE
When DeLance and Elsie Wallace moved to Spokane, Washington, they brought with them a passion to spreadholiness in that area. They fostered a mission, which she headed. C. W. Ruth, the Church of the Nazarene’s assistant general superintendent, was invited to preach a revival there in January 1902. He reorganized the mission into a church during his visit upon the unanimous consent of the congregation, appointed Mrs. Wallace as its pastor. Later that year, Bresee visited Spokane and ordained her to the ministry—the first woman ordained by his hand. Her church grew. Elsie and her husband established other churches in Washington and Oregon. Bresee urged Elsie to become the pastor of Seattle First Church until it grew strong. Later, she conducted a revival in Walla Walla, where a new church was organized and she was urged to become its pastor. She remained there for nine years. She was appointed as the district superintendent of the Northwest District in 1920. After a short stay in Kansas City, where her husband served for a time as manager of the Nazarene Publishing House, she returned to Washington to again pastor Seattle First Church. After another stint as an evangelist, she moved to California and pastored three churches there. Early in her ministry, Elsie Wallace wrote Bresee seeking “fatherly advice.”9 Such advice served her well. She retired in 1941 after over 40 years of highly effective pastoral and preaching ministry.
Many other women knew and served with Phineas Bresee. Mary Lee Harris Cagle, deeply involved in the mergers that created the denomination, stands out as one of the strongest female leaders it has known. She represents the many female leaders who met and influenced Bresee, but history does not record all such encounters for us.
What is crystal clear is that Bresee stood strongly with the Holiness movement’s affirmation of women preachers, their ordination to the ministry, and the use of their gifts in public ministry. For him, it was a given; so much so that when an explicit statement on the issue was called for, it was reasoned that the obvious inclusion of women in all levels of leadership made an argument for such wholly unnecessary.
Oh, to return to those glory days when female leadership was a given. If recent statistics continue, we might just be on our way.
1. See Susie Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preacher’s Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002).
2. Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 200.
3. Nancy Hardesty, Great Women of Faith: the Strength and Influence of Christian Women (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), 90.
4. Girvin, E. A., Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1916), 91.
5. I am indebted to Rebecca Laird for much of the following information. See Rebecca Laird, Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1993).
6. Girvin, 115.
7. Laird, 51, 53.
8. Minutes of the Third General Assembly, Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. Afternoon session, Nashville, October 7, 1911.
9. Mrs. DeLance Wallace, “Spokane, Washington,” Nazarene Messenger, January 12, 1902, 10.
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"Bresee’s Commitment to Multicultural Ministry: A Latino Reflection" Written by Juan Vazquez-Pla
latinoMy ethnicity, my culture, my first and second languages (Spanish/ English), and the place where I was born and raised and where I initially served as a Nazarene pastor (the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) makes me appreciative of what Phineas F. Bresee’s (1838–1915) biographers and others have called “his commitment to multicultural ministry.”Of my 53 years in ministry, almost half has been spent serving in the USA/Canada Region, and that reinforces my appreciation for the multicultural element in Bresee’s ministry.
In one of Bresee’s early reports as general superintendent of the emerging Church of the Nazarene he is quoted as saying: “A Spanish mission has also been opened in this city . . . which is a very faithful and promising field.”1 He was referring to what Roberto Hodgson, in his own historical assessment of that mission, calls “la Primera Iglesia del Nazareno Mexicana” of Los Angeles, organized in 1906.² Interestingly enough, Bresee assigned as its “superintendent” an Anglo-American woman by the name of Maye McReynolds, a member of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene.³ Sometime before 1906, she had given up her job at the Santa Fe Railroad Company in order to “proclaim the good news among the Mexicans” in the city.⁴
But I suspect that sponsoring so enthusiastically the Los Angeles “Spanish mission” may not have come that easy for Bresee. He was entering a culturallyunknown ministerial territory.
Iowa Monocultural Ministry
During Bresee’s previous 26 years as a “frontier” Methodist preacher in Iowa (1857-83), his approach to ministry should have been rather mono-cultural. We do not know otherwise.
The state of Iowa, during Bresee’s tenure there:⁵
was mostly rural, with an agricultural-based economy;
had a population of immigrants and Americans of mostly northwestern European descent (English, Irish, German, and Norwegian);
had English as the lingua franca;
and was mainly Protestant; northern Methodism was the fastest growing religious movement in the area at the time.
Los Angeles Multicultural Ministry
But the booming city that awaited Bresee at the end of the 19th and early 20th century presented a different cultural setting altogether.⁶
The dominant religion was Roman Catholicism, brought by Spaniards and Mexicans in the 1770s (the city’s full name was originally “Our Lady the Queen of the Angels”).
Foreign and American western migration hadincreased the population from about 50,000 in 1890 to more than 100,000 by 1900.
It had “the most diverse population of any state.”
There were “no apartheid laws requiring racial segregation of public meetings.”
However, “The majority of Anglo Americans in Southern California during this period were strongly biased and discriminatory against Indians, Mexicans, Asians and Roman Catholics.”
As challenging as this new multicultural setting may have been for Bresee, he evidently rose to the occasion and sponsored the "Spanish mission” of Los Angeles.
As the reader probably knows, that small Spanish work sponsored by Bresee more than 100 years ago would become in time the largest multicultural segment of the Church of the Nazarene in the United States and Canada.⁷ At the same time, the Spanish segment of our church would become one of the strongest globally. It would be this pan-ethnic Nazarene conglomerate which, in time, in God’s providence, would also give the church such denominational giants as the late H. T. Reza and the recently-elected General Superintendent Gustavo A. Crocker.
In-built Multiculturalism
Yet, as I here reflect with gratitude on Bresee’s commitment to multicultural ministry, I have to acknowledge that another challenge is emerging for us as Latinos and Latinas in the United States and Canada—an in-built multicultural challenge, if you will.
It will be readily accepted that the political, economic, and cultural realities of the United States and Canada will most likely keep the doors open to more immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in the foreseeable future. Therefore, immigrant, Spanish-speaking, mono-cultural Nazarene congregations, as Bresee originally perceived them, are here to stay.
However, I am thinking in terms of the bilingual, even the “English only,” first generation and beyond of American or Canadian Latinos and Latinas. I am thinking in terms of the racially- and culturally-mixed families that many of them are increasingly forming. I am thinking also of the increasingly racially- , ethnically- , and culturally-diverse North American society in which Latinos and Latinas now live.
In light of this, my question is: Should what Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts calls “The Integrated Church: Authentic Multicultural Ministry”8 become now as much a part of our Latinoministry focus as the mono-cultural one? In this new scenario, more and more of the Latino mono-cultural congregations would become in-built multicultural, and more and more of the ones started by Latinos and Latinas would be integrated from the beginning. In her book with the same title, Lewis- Giggetts presents the in-built multicultural challenge to other mono-cultural churches: White, Black, Asian, and so on, but also to Latino churches.
I submit that Bresee would have considered this new and more authentic multiculturalism in our day as much a “faithful and promising field” as he did the Los Angeles Spanish mission of his day.
1.E. A. Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince In Israel, http://wesley.nnu. edu/wesleyctr/books/0001-0100/HDM0091.pdf, 124.
2. Roberto Hodgson, “Reseña General de la Historia de la Iglesia del Nazareno en Estados Unidos y Canadá,” Reflexiones Ministeriales, http://pagnaz.com/files/historiaidn_rm211.pdf.
3. Girvin, op cit.
4. Hodgson, op cit.
5. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa, accessed October 18, 2013.
6. See “An Overview of Religion in Los Angeles from 1850 to 1930” and related links, compiled by Clifton L. Holland, http://www.prolades.com/ glama/la5co07/overview_1850-1930.htm, accessed October 18, 2013.
7. Grace and Peace Magazine, Issue 9, Summer 2013, 73.
8. Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts, The Integrated Church: Authentic Multicultural Ministry (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2011),
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"Nazarene Identity: A Panel Discussion" Written by Grace & Peace Magazine
With this in mind, Grace & Peace Magazine convened a panel to discuss denominational identity and ways to connect people to Nazarene faith communities. The discussion was moderated by Bo Cassell, Professor of Sociology at MidAmerica Nazarene University, and included the following participants: Ron Benefiel, Dean of the School of Theology and Christian Ministry at Point Loma Nazarene University (Benefiel previously served as pastor of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene and as president of Nazarene Theological Seminary); Rustin E. Brian, former lead pastor of Kansas City Trinity Church of the Nazarene, and recent author of Covering Up Luther; Ken Crow, a retired sociologist and researcher, who served at MidAmerica Nazarene University and Nazarene Bible College before becoming a researcher in the Research Services office of the Global Ministry Center of the Church; Diane Leclerc, who serves as Professor of Historical Theology at Northwest Nazarene University, and is the author of Discovering Christian Holiness: The Heart of Wesleyan Holiness Theology; and Eugenio Duarte, who was elected as the 37th General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene. He is a native of the Cape Verde Islands and has served as a pastor, district superintendent, field strategy coordinator, and regional director for the Africa Region. An abbreviated and edited* portion of the panel discussion appears below. Video portions of the discussion are available HERE.
CASSELL: LET’S START WITH THIS QUESTION: WHAT IS “IDENTITY” AND WHAT DOES IT DO FOR US?
Benefiel: A working definition for identity in a religious group includes shared beliefs, practices, and experiences that, over time, are formed into a shaping narrative that guides or gives direction. Christian Smith, in his important book, Moral Believing Animals, says that people live by stories. They have meta-narratives that shape their lives: a family story that becomes part of an individual story that becomes part of a corporate, or in this case, a Nazarene story.
Cassell: RUSTY, AS A PASTOR, DO YOU SEE PEOPLE LIVING OUT A LARGER STORY, OR ARE THEY PRIMARILY CONCERNED WITH THEIR STORY?
Brian: People are concerned with their story, but if the church is doing a good job telling the larger story, they will move into that realm. In adding to Ron’s working definition, I suggest that belief comes last. In our culture today, people join not because of a particular doctrinal stance or ethical position, but because they want to be part of a church community—they want a story. They might not be able to articulate it, but they want a deeper sense of belonging.
Cassell: HOW MIGHT A PASTOR FACILITATE CONNECTION TO A LARGER IDENTITY—TO A BIGGER STORY—THAN JUST THE INDIVIDUAL OR LOCAL CHURCH STORY?
Duarte: People find stories like theirs that attract them to a larger group, a larger community—and this is part of what builds a denomination. As a pastor, that’s what I did. I found points of connection between people in my church, other local Nazarene churches, and the denomination.
Crow: As individuals, we want to be connected to something that’s meaningful and makes our lives better—and having examples helps. When I try to figure out what it means to be Nazarene, and a general superintendent (or notable Nazarene) comes and shares their story, I have a demonstration of what this means.
Benefiel: Let’s revisit why the idea of story is important. Narratives function almost like concentric circles: you have a personal story that’s part of a family story, which, if you’re Nazarene, is part of a religious story, which is then part of a larger Christian story. There are narratives within narratives, and sometimes these stories compete with each other. One challenge is to know if our story has resonance with or is an alternative to stories found elsewhere. The Christian story is an alternative to secular stories found in the broader culture. In evangelism, we invite people into a different story than the one they are living. The Nazarene story is part of the broader Christian story but is also distinct in ways that separate it from other denominations and religious bodies. Knowing our story helps us know where we fit and how to respond to competing stories.
Leclerc: A particular denomination’s identity comes out of a particular historical context, sometimes even a reactive context, which may decide to discontinue or reaffirm something that came before. The question of identity is not simple. In the Church of the Nazarene, a series of things happened that led to decisions that resulted in a denomination. While there were commonalities, there were also differences that had to be negotiated in the merger of different people from the West, East, and South. The issue then, as now, is how do we negotiate difference for the purpose of unity? We have 100 years of history that plays this out in different times and in different ways. Our identity is constantly being negotiated between a historical place, those things we find in common, and those things on which we differ. But the major theme of why we exist is what will carry us through to the next century.
Cassell: EUGENIO, AS A GENERAL SUPERINTENDENT, DO YOU SEE THESE DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE?
Duarte:Absolutely. All six world regions have their own history. You will find Nazarene churches formed in areas where there was no other church. That congregation is not going to be the same as one planted in a city where people come from other denominations to form a Nazarene church. While the two may not look the same, the difference is positive: It makes us richer. What unites us is our message and our mission.
Cassell: HOW DO WE KEEP OUR IDENTITY FROM GETTING CONFUSED IN THE MIDST OF DIFFERENCE, AND HOW DO WE ALLOW FOR VARIED EXPRESSIONS AND STILL CALL OURSELVES NAZARENE?
Brian: We need to understand that part of our identity is about dealing with difference. We need to articulate a common story that allows for difference.
Leclerc: If you sift through the history of the different branches that formed the Church of the Nazarene, there were two commonalities. One was theological and experiential, and the other was practical. The founders wanted a church that proclaimed the optimism of grace and affirmed that entire sanctification makes a significant difference in individual and communal life. They all centered on the theological identity of Christian perfection, which came from within the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition. That commitment unified them doctrinally. The second and more practical unifier is their affirmation to be a church of the poor, both at home and around the world. They wanted to be for the downcast and the oppressed and lift people out of their despair. From the beginning, Nazarenes identified these two principles as the unifying force of the movement. Now, we can continue to talk about our theological heritage, the other articles of faith, and any other reasons for being Nazarene, but the question we need to continually ask is about our faithfulness to these two things because they are the reason we exist as a unique denomination.
Cassell: ARE WE FAITHFUL TO THOSE TWO THINGS? KEN, AS A NAZARENE RESEARCHER, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?
Crow: Surveys from Nazarene Research Services say we care and are involved in compassionate ministries at home and abroad. In practice, religious groups tend to rise in social class, and the more we move away from our roots as a church of the poor, the harder it is to connect back. If we’re not attentive to our message, we will drift from it. We’ve got to continue to tell the story and continue to affirm who we are, what we believe, and why.
Benefiel: John Wesley identified a lack of vitality among some Methodists who began moving away from the movement as they rose in social class. Socioeconomic mobility is a powerful sociological force. As people prosper, they draw their identity from a wider net and get more signals from the world around them. As a result, their primary group has less influence on how they think and act.
Brian: A distinctive of our historical identity is not just being a church in service to the poor but a church of the poor. This is a more radical idea. At the same time, we have such diversity within our churches, from large and affluent to small and urban and rural, as well as bivocational clergy assignments (in which some pastors are struggling to pay bills and make time for church work) that this is a difficult challenge to overcome.
Leclerc: One of the things that rallied early Nazarenes is a deep criticism of the affluence of Methodists. After a hundred years of history and social lift, we have become—at least in the United States— what we so violently criticized in our beginnings, which is fascinating.
Cassell: AS A DENOMINATION, ARE WE WRESTLING WITH HOW TO NEGOTIATE THE ECONOMICS OF A GLOBAL CHURCH AND A USA/CANADA CHURCH AND THE INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL? IS THIS PART OF OUR IDENTITY DIFFICULTIES?
Benefiel: Sure, and it’s not just us, but a trend within American denominations over the last few hundred years. There is a connection between the two things Diane mentioned: proclaiming holiness throughout the land and concern for the poor. Wesley ties these together and says ministry to the poor is a means of grace that is tied to our sanctification. For Wesley and Bresee, their primary motivation was not to help poor people move up the socioeconomic ladder—a sort of social do-good-ism—but to welcome the poor into a community because this is the nature of the kingdom of God. Even the poor cared for the poor because this was a means of grace. This all flowed from an understanding that the very nature of the kingdom is to care for the lost, the poor, and the broken.
Brian: This is particularly challenging today because many churches are not in areas that can welcome the poor, nor do they have the resources to help.
Benefiel: How we define the poor is important. The economic dimension of ministry among the poor is important, but “the poor” is a larger category, which includes the disenfranchised and the broken. It’s people who are in nursing homes, in prison, and who are caught in addictions. It’s not as though you have to go looking for poor people, especially in this society where people are broken and families are fractured. The church is meant to move out and take up residence where people are in need—physical and spiritual need— because this is at the very heart God’s incarnation in Christ Jesus. That’s the good news of the gospel.
Duarte: I recently visited Brazil where a Nazarene church is planted in the midst of the worst poverty imaginable. The church is missional and outward-focused and is starting new churches in areas where others have failed. The amazing part of this story is the church is made up of poor people—people who didn’t have means, people who were drug addicts and were marginalized. One of the best cardiologists in that country is from that church. As a poor child, he came to the pastor and said, “Pastor, do you believe I can be a doctor?” The pastor responded, “Yes, you can be a doctor.” There was no way this could happen financially, but the church wanted him to be a doctor. They supported him because the church knew where it came from and believed God could do the same for others.
Cassell: HAVE WE LOST SIGHT OF THAT PART OF OUR IDENTITY?
Leclerc: We are a hundred years removed from those early memories, and we need to retell those stories because they give us an ethos. A book my college students read is Donald Dayton’s Discovering Our Evangelical Heritage. The book looks at what it meant to be a holiness person in the 19th century when holiness people were for gender and racial equality and against slavery. I continue to be amazed at these students who, just by reading these stories, get inspired and ask, “What issues would they address now, and what should we be doing?” It’s important for new people coming into our churches to be introduced to that collective memory for it expresses our rich theological heritage.
Benefiel: There’s a lot of literature these days about the postdenominational era, which reflects a suspicion of denominations and a move toward generic evangelicalism. Many ask why there are so many denominations, especially young people, who wonder if this reflects division rather than unity. This is a good critique, but it misses a few points. First, it misses the particularity of the narrative—that a group emerges out of a particular time, space, and culture, which shapes its unique story and sets it on a unique trajectory. This history of a people wrestling (with Scripture and theology) over what it means to be Christian in the world becomes part of the narrative thread. Without such traditions to draw from, you’re an orphan with no story to rely on. This leaves you at the mercy of whatever other stories are out there, some of which may not be grounded in the gospel and are more pseudo-Christian or culturally Christian. Without that history and narrative, you are adrift.
Leclerc: Generic evangelicalism resulted when we sought to preach the gospel as generally as we could to as many people as we could, and we lost denominational distinctives. We are suffering the consequences of this now. One response is to retell the narrative and bring in new stories. Another strategy is to take our belief system and say, “We need to get back to our identity by making sure that we believe this, this, and this.” As a theologian, I understand the need to emphasize doctrinal statements, but that is not going to solve the problem because our identity arises from a particular narrative.
Cassell: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DENOMINATIONAL STORY AND LOCAL CHURCH IDENTITY?
Crow: My family switched denominations when I was young. We went to a Nazarene church because we had relatives in the congregation, but also because we had a pastor who, without belittling any other denomination, focused on the Nazarene story and how the larger story was expressed in that particular congregation. We understood the way Nazarenes did things and why, and that we were people that came out of the Wesleyan revival and how that developed in our particular town. Sometimes special speakers helped this process, and visiting missionaries helped us identify with the mission of the church worldwide. In my family’s case, a pastor filled an important role in explaining to new people who we are and what we’re about, which tied us to the denomination. All to say, we need to understand that we typically understand the denominational story through the eyes of the local church and vice-versa. Each helps us understand the other—you can’t separate these two things.
Cassell: KEN, YOU BUILT RELATIONSHIPS AND CONNECTIONS WITH NAZARENES THROUGH THIS PASTOR AND THE CONGREGATION AND LEARNED THE DENOMINATION’S HISTORY. WE CALL THAT “RELIGIOUS CAPITAL”— THAT IS THE VALUE THAT COMES FROM BEING PART OF A GROUP. WHAT CAN WE DO TO BUILD “NAZARENE CAPITAL” AND GIVE PEOPLE A DEEPER CONNECTION TO OUR STORY AND TO THEIR LOCAL CONGREGATIONS?
Crow: We need two things: Nazarene capital (or religious capital) and social capital. Research says the connection for new people tends to be through the pastor. We aren’t good at linking people to a larger group in the congregation. If a new person or family is only linked to the pastor, their social capital is lost when the pastor leaves. So, we have to develop broader relationships. That needs to be an intentional strategy, whether by small groups or something else. Nazarene capital comes from telling the story and giving people a place to serve in that story.
Cassell: IS NAZARENE CAPITAL ENOUGH?
Brian: Part of that capital relates to our actions and our practices, the things we do and why we do them. While younger people are increasingly skeptical of denominations, our best response is to explain why our particular denomination exists. It’s not because we don’t like other people, but because there’s something we want to emphasize in the broader Christian story.
Crow: And in some ways, not so much in telling, but in demonstrating.
Brian: Yes, living it out, but not just the pastor, but empowering the congregation to be the body of Christ.
Benefiel: Denominationally, there are four focal points that can help us build Nazarene capital. The first is ministerial education, because you have to have people who can tell the story and invite people into it. The second is publications, because these (from Sunday school literature to denominational magazines) communicate our story. Third, is the old Methodist idea of conferencing— this is the “connection” that results from coming together and being a part of something larger than you. This happens at gatherings like district assemblies, general assemblies, and conference events. Fourth is inviting people, especially youth, into mission experiences. We need to invite people to participate not only in worship but in practices and ministry opportunities that engage the community.
Cassell: EUGENIO, IN YOUR TRAVELS, DO YOU SEE YOUTH CONNECTING TO A DENOMINATIONAL STORY?
Duarte: In their own ways, they are connecting, but we need to make sure our local churches and denominational structures are flexible enough to allow them opportunities. We have to make space for our young people—space to allow them to connect in ways that reflect who they are.
Benefiel: Christian Smith, in his book, Souls in Transition, says teens and those in their 20s in the United States are not as churched as previous cohorts. Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, in his book, American Grace, has done extensive research in this area. He says that people in their 20s are not identifying with the church, so that the largest and fastest-growing category is “no religious preference.” He says this is because they do not identify with what the church tends to represent in our society. His research suggests that the move to generic evangelicalism, beginning in the 1980s, shifted the ground from a primary witness around the gospel of Jesus Christ to a cultural conservatism, especially with respect to particular political issues young adults tend to reject en masse.
Cassell: IS THE CULTURAL IDENTITY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE REJECTING A CARICATURE? IS THERE AN OPPORTUNITY THE CHURCH CAN SEIZE?
Brian: In 2010, Kenda Creasy Dean published an important book using a Wesley sermon title, Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Drawing on sociological data, it says young people have faith, but see a disconnect between the story and how it’s lived out.
Leclerc: In my work, I see two areas where young people find the church falling short. The first is irrelevance— the church has little relevance to their personal lives, goals, and where they want to be. Second, is the issue of isolationism—they are relationally connected but see a church that largely retreats from secular culture. I find potential in our Nazarene narrative. Wesley and early Nazarenes did not try to keep themselves sanctified by rejecting the world. They were among the broken and worked in the very crevasses of society. The holiness message of love demands full engagement with the world. The Wesleyan message meshes well with the felt needs of postmoderns.
Cassell: I SEE THIS IN MY WORK WITH COLLEGE STUDENTS AND YOUNG PEOPLE. WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP THEM?
Brian: We need to create opportunities for them to serve and live out their faith. Nazarene identity is something that has roots and pillars, but it’s fluid as well, and it changes. It allows for diversity, and they are part of that diversity. Being a global church is one of our greatest (for lack of a better word) “selling points.” In my experience, new people are impressed by this and want to be a part.
Benefiel: The tension of “in but not of the world” is something we need to take seriously. If we only emphasize “in” the world, we become like the world. If we only emphasize “not of the world,” we become irrelevant and isolated. Both are necessary. Holiness is not just being separate; it is also participating in God’s incarnational love that thrusts us back into the heart of the world.
Crow: The separation of children and youth by age groups and the isolation of our young people from older demonstrators of the faith have inhibited our ability to pass on identity. Christian Smith’s research suggests that young people who make a successful transition to adulthood have adults who have invested in them, especially parents. Such involvement helps young people form opinions and beliefs and be people of faith. This kind of investment develops religious capital and contributes to the church’s mission.
Leclerc: More than my generation, young people don’t fear difference because they’re in high schools with peers from different cultures and different religious experiences. Their ability to handle difference is an incredible skill, which will benefit the church, now and in the future.
Cassell: WHAT ARE PLACES WHERE YOUNG PEOPLE CAN FIND A FIT WITH CHRISTIAN AND DENOMINATIONAL IDENTITY?
Leclerc: Pentecost is significant in our narrative and an incredible metaphor for us. In the 19th-century Holiness Movement, the Pentecost story was significant in affirming the equality of all people—every person has equal worth and potential in the kingdom of God. Our Nazarene identity says God created every person for a unique purpose, so we need to affirm the dignity and worth of all people as children of God. That’s something that resonates with young people.
Cassell: WE’VE DISCUSSED THE DENOMINATION’S CONNECTION TO THE POOR. NOW, HOW DO WE CONSIDER ENTIRE SANCTIFICATION AS A THEOLOGICAL ISSUE CENTRAL TO NAZARENE IDENTITY?
Leclerc: We have two different roots that inform this question: one is Wesley’s articulation of sanctification in England in the 1700s, and the other is the 19th-century American context, which had many similarities with Wesley, but some differences. In the latter 20th century, these differences polarized debate. The way forward is to embrace both aspects of that heritage, but also to recognize that the language expressing the religious experience of sanctification is really metaphorical, and different kinds of metaphors appeal to different kinds of personal experiences. Regarding youth, we need to find new metaphors that communicate spiritual reality that resonate in this cultural context. I’m concerned that our youth are not catching the spiritual reality enough to even begin to articulate metaphors. Entire sanctification is central to our identity, but how we work out the particulars of how that’s communicated is a different issue. Problems arise when we say our way is the only way to express spiritual reality.
Cassell: RON, YOU HAVE WORKED EXTENSIVELY WITH A PROJECT THAT FOCUSES ON THE LANGUAGES OF HOLINESS. TELL US ABOUT IT.
Benefiel: The Languages of Holiness Project has looked at the two sources mentioned (classical Wesleyanism and the American Holiness Movement), as well as others, and has concluded that holiness finds expression in various languages. Each is influenced by the heritage, culture, context, customs, and practices of the holiness community from where it emerged. The four expressions are: 1) the language of purity, which focuses on consecration; 2) the language of power, which centers on the filling of the Holy Spirit; 3) the language of love, which focuses on Christian perfection—being perfected in God’s love and God’s love for people; and 4) the language of the kingdom community, which gives witness to the kingdom and participating in God’s holy character. People tend to gravitate to one of these, but some languages, like purity and power, may overlap. There are common themes with the four expressions that help unite us. Each of these contributes to a fuller understanding of sanctification.
Brian: This is another area in which our diversity can work for us and bring a fuller picture of God’s love and grace. Our understanding of sanctification is dynamic, not static, so we have to constantly pursue, rethink, and learn as we look at theological foundations and constructs, which give our understanding of sanctification something to stand on.
Cassell: IS OUR STRUGGLE TALKING ABOUT HOLINESS OR LIVING IT OUT?
Crow: While our theologians are doing better in helping us describe it, we have always struggled over language. If I don’t describe it like you describe it, you may suspect that I didn’t really experience it, but the crucial issue is this: did we experience it? Is God able and willing to do more than just forgive my sins? Can God deliver me from being dominated by sin? I was fortunate to have people that could not only explain it but demonstrate it. When I looked at their lives, I saw something that rang true for me.
Leclerc: In the early 1970s, we got caught up in legalistic understandings of holiness and missed the freedom that the experience brings. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop addressed this in A Theology of Love, published in 1972. She noticed all kinds of statements saying what holiness should be, but pointed out that we had a “credibility gap” in living it out. Pastors raised with this legalistic understanding didn’t want to pass it on but lacked new learning in how to proclaim and live out the experience. While this experience is at the core of who we are, unless young people experience and become passionate about communicating Holiness, we are just one generation from extinction.
Cassell: HOW CAN WE HELP PASTORS NEGOTIATE THROUGH DIFFERENT VIEWS OF HOLINESS?
Benfiel: One way to communicate our story and theology is through hymnody. Worship music has changed in the last few decades to emphasize praise choruses, but much of our earlier music was by people who were part of our tradition, like Haldor Lillenas and Charles Wesley. Such music spoke of Christian experience, commitment, consecration, and testimony—it told our story. Many new songs do not call people to consecration or to a life of holiness in the same way that our hymnody did. This can be a valuable resource to utilize.
Leclerc: Besides hymns, we need education. We need literature that explains our heritage, which won’t be in a local Christian bookstore. Nazarene Publishing House has materials that connect to our heritage and appeal to younger generations. Some of their recent books are excellent in helping pastors express our identity and theology.
Brian: In telling our story and pursuing holiness, we need to focus on holiness rooted in the scandalous love of God as expressed in the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus. This gives us the diversity needed to understand that the Spirit works differently in different lives and in different generations.
Cassell: WOULDN’T IT BE WONDERFUL TO BE SO CAUGHT UP WITH CHRIST WE HAD TO COME UP WITH NEW LANGUAGE— NEW METAPHORS—TO DESCRIBE HOLINESS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF SANCTIFICATION?
Leclerc: I have to interject a humorous story. I was teaching a sophomore-level theology class for non- Religion majors. I had two days to explain sanctification, trying to use various metaphors. One student, struggling to understand, was suddenly struck with a metaphor and exclaimed, “I get it! It’s like in poker where you go all in!” To use a poker metaphor for entire sanctification would have some Nazarenes rolling over in their graves, but he was searching for language he could relate to and understand.
Benefiel: We also need examples of transformation. In middle class environments, few lives are so hopeless they have no hope but God. This is why we need to reach out into the margins, where resurrection stories are. Transformation is not only a witness of personal testimony, but the power of God to the whole church. That’s what makes us optimistic about grace—it is the power of God. Even entire sanctification is a miracle of grace.
Cassell: WE NEED TO REMEMBER WHO WE WERE BEFORE WE CAME TO KNOW CHRIST.
Benefiel: That’s right. This isn’t nostalgia; this is our calling and our reason for being. Why did God raise up the Church of the Nazarene? It’s this proclamation of holiness, this pursuit of holiness of heart and life, and ministry to and among the poor, and how those come together. Stories of resurrection and transformation happen when we are actively engaged, especially with those who know their only hope is God.
Brian: These radical stories can help rejuvenate and revive us, but we also need to see everyday examples of consecration, holiness, and deliverance. These should also be part of our story.
Benefiel: When we communicate about our identity, our name, “Church of the Nazarene,” is important. J. P. Widney, denominational co-founder, arrived at this name after a night of prayer. It came to him that the new denomination’s name needed to reflect Jesus of Nazareth. To be a Nazarene was to be despised, to be esteemed of low birth, and to come from the wrong side of the tracks. As the Bible says, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” The name reminds us we are called to take up residence and identify with those from the wrong side of the tracks.
Leclerc: Not only are we called to love the least of these, but we’re also called to love each other. In discussing Nazarene identity across our church, we’ve lost the ability to love each other in our dialog. Do we love each other with the pure love of God that we proclaim is a part of the holiness message?
Brian: Pastors would be more willing to identify with and speak on holiness if we could acknowledge that our understandings and experience vary.
Duarte: Every single story of revival shows people willing to pay a price for renewal. If we are revived, the struggle over language and how to go about this will not be a problem. My prayer is for God to revive the Church of the Nazarene.
Cassell: THIS FITS WITH OUR DISCUSSION OF IDENTITY, ESPECIALLY AS WE CONSIDER WHAT IS LOST AND NEEDS TO BE REGAINED. IF WE PAY THE PRICE TO PURSUE A RENEWED VISION FOR THE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE, WHAT WILL THAT LOOK LIKE?
Duarte: The Church of the Nazarene has not abandoned its need for renewal and revival, but it is not always clear who should take initiative and how this should be done within our various structures: Should things be done top-down or bottom-up? We need to find ways to bring the right people to the table and dialog about what needs to be done, which requires listening and working together.
Cassell: RUSTY, DOES THAT MAKE SENSE IN A LOCAL CONTEXT? DO PASTORS NEED TO TALK MORE WITH DIFFERENT GROUPS IN THE LOCAL CHURCH?
MARTI: Yes, across the board this is a very good answer. Within a local congregation, it is a positive step to have conversations with a variety of voices at the table. It is also important to consider how the radical optimism of grace may positively affect notions of identity in the broader context of cities, zones, districts, and regions. As our identity grows and changes, we need to rely on the creative power of the Spirit.
Leclerc: Every voice matters. It’s not just about power-structures. At our inception as a denomination, there was this sense that it’s a people’s church. Age, gender, ethnicity and other kinds of diversity matter. We need to do all we can to listen to every part of the church.
Benefiel: With respect to identity, pastors may want to consider John Wesley. In Wesley’s small groups, people held each other accountable for acts of mercy and acts of piety. These acts of devotion were the means of grace that led people to maturity in Christ Jesus and perfected them in holiness. Accountability was central to the effectiveness of the Methodist revival and is something we need to look at again.
Cassell: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE GLOBAL CHALLENGES TO NAZARENE IDENTITY?
Duarte: We cannot build a Holiness denomination without Holiness literature. In Africa, the Church of the Nazarene serves in over 80 different languages. Four years ago, we had literature in only 40 of those languages, so we are training pastors using literature that is strange to them. Most of the holiness literature we have comes from the United States. If that pool keeps growing, we hope that will help grow the church everywhere.
Crow: As a denomination, a commitment to missions—taking the gospel and the good news about deliverance from the denomination of sin around the world—has motivated us all along the way. Being a global church may make us think we’ve arrived, but missions is still important and ought to motivate how we organize ourselves.
Brian: We’ve progressed from a church with a large missionary operation to a global missional church. As a global church, we need to encourage global conversations. Nazarenes in the United States and Canada need to hear from our brothers and sisters in Africa and Latin America and other parts of the world. We need their voices and their relationships as we consider Nazarene identity.
Benefiel: Philip Jenkins’ book, The Next Christendom, projected that the growth of Christianity in places like Africa, Latin America, and Asia would have a major impact on the theology and the ethos of the faith. This is especially true of the Church of the Nazarene. Seventy percent of all Nazarenes now live outside the United States and Canada, and their annual growth rate is at six or seven percent. This will have a major impact on the way we think about theology, mission, organization, and structure in the years ahead. A whole new church is coming, which is exciting.
Duarte: Most of our resources, especially financial, still come from the United States. One area I am concerned about is theological education and the theological formation of the church for the global Church of the Nazarene.
Cassell: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE RESOURCES THAT HELP WITH UNDERSTANDING NAZARENE IDENTITY?
Leclerc: There’s Our Watchword & Song: The Centennial History of the Church of the Nazarene, which was published by Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City in 2009. It covers a wide variety of topics and themes in positive ways.
Brian: Timothy Smith’s 1962 book, Called Unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years, is still a classic work by a first-rate historian. More recent is Stan Ingersol’s Nazarene Roots: Pastors, Prophets, Revivalists, & Reformers, published in 2009. Ingersol’s book focuses on the key men and women who formed the denomination and is especially good for pastors and laity. Janine Metcalf did a documentary on women in ministry, Ablaze with Love, that provides stories and parts of the tradition we don’t hear about as much and is available at Nazarene Publishing House. Holiness Today (holinesstoday.org) and Grace & Peace Magazine (graceandpeacemagazine. org) are helpful resources on our identity for laity and pastors; so is NCN News (NCNNews.com). District superintendents are also a helpful resource for stories on the Nazarene faith tradition. It is common for districts to have education and training days that teach on our identity.
Benefiel: I’m encouraged by the way our regional schools (universities, colleges, and seminary) have taken on clergy resourcing. The accessibility of online theological education and video conferencing is greater than it’s ever been. There are modular courses, which are provided by Global Clergy Development (usacanadanazarene.org). Ministerial education is perhaps the central place to focus our resources to help with understanding and telling the story in the next generation. The Nazarene Archives, led by Stan Ingersol, in the Global Ministry Center in Lenexa, Kansas, is a very helpful resource for pastors, students, and scholars in understanding our faith tradition.
Crow: It is expensive to produce holiness and denominational literature. Financially, we may feel we need to cut back instead of advance, but doing so affects our ability to tell the Nazarene story. In addition, we need to understand that telling the story is not just the responsibility of a few but all of us. We need to take responsibility, get involved, and find ways to make this work.
Cassell: BESIDES THESE RESOURCES, WE CAN DO MORE TO LOOK AT NAZARENE IDENTITY IN GATHERINGS THAT ALREADY EXIST, LIKE DISTRICT AND GENERAL ASSEMBLY, AND OTHER EVENTS LIKE MISSION 2015 OR NAZARENE YOUTH CONGRESS, OR OTHER OPPORTUNITIES FOR DIALOGUE.
Brian: It is often difficult for bivocational pastors to make it to denominational events because of cost or scheduling. It is crucial they have connection to our fellowship and know what goes on in such gatherings. We need to find ways to include them.
Leclerc: As I shared earlier, the theology of Pentecost has underscored the importance of the equality of all people. From the beginning of the Church of the Nazarene, women took an important role in the church’s development and female clergy were ordained from the church’s inception. Cultural forces, primarily from outside, have pushed those numbers down. Recently, in a desire to be proactive, the general superintendents invited a few prominent women clergy to talk about these issues and created action points from those discussions. One of those is that every minister who goes through the course of study has to take a class on the theological, biblical, historical foundations of women in ministry. Educating ministers on these issues is important in maintaining the Pentecostal theology of the equality of all persons. If the general superintendents had not been open to that kind of dialogue and had not understood the need to be proactive, these doors for women would not be opened.
Cassell: THANK YOU, PANEL MEMBERS, FOR SHARING YOUR VALUABLE INPUT ON THIS IMPORTANT TOPIC. WE’VE LEARNED THAT IDENTITY DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN BUT MUST INTENTIONALLY BE PURSUED, AND THAT WE NEED TO BE OPEN TO LISTEN AND LEARN FROM EACH OTHER AS WE GRAPPLE WITH WHAT IT MEANS TO BE PART OF THE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE.
*Editor’s Note: Transcripts of conversations can be especially difficult to edit, especially for smooth readability. This transcript was adapted and edited, and in places, condensed or reworked for brevity and clarity, while trying to ensure that the spirit of what was said remained.
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"100 Years Since Bresee's Call to Evangelism" Written by Stan Reeder
A century after his death, John Wesley’s influence on Methodism had waned. Phineas F. Bresee sensed the impetus for the Church of the Nazarene in 1895, in large part due to this loss. We are now approaching this same century point since the loss of Bresee's influence on the Church of the Nazarene (he died in 1915). This is a time in our denomination’s history to reflect upon what could be argued was Bresee’s “first calling”: from his early days as a Methodist Episcopal pastor in Iowa to his last years as general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, Bresee passionately emphasized the importance of evangelism—this is a matter in which Bresee never wavered.As a pastor less than 30 years old, during his appointment as pastor of Chariton Methodist Episcopal Church in Iowa (1866-68), Bresee had a great passion to see people accept Jesus as Savior. A layperson by the name of Fred Harris, who himself would later become a Methodist minister, left behind memoirs that give us valuable insight into Bresee’s passion for lost souls. Harris writes that Bresee “had a great passion for soul-saving and no Sunday’s work seemed to satisfy him unless he had the joy of seeing some one saved.” On “many a Sunday evening,” he would go “into his room alone, would prostrate himself before God in humiliation and sorrow because souls had not been saved.”1
The passion for evangelism intensified as his ministry progressed. More than a decade later, in 1881, during the second Methodist Episcopal Iowa State Convention held in Des Moines, Bresee delivered an address on “The PastoralOffice.” After being careful to note the ultimate source of power as the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the agent, he claimed that the first calling of a pastor was to the work of “an evangelist,” ministering in
that large borderland where the Church and the world meet and mingle, where those who are not Christians, yet permeated largely with Christian thought and Christian principles, sit in our sanctuaries and abide in our homes, and when just outside of this circle there are large numbers almost under the shadow of our church who are devoid of all Christian life.²
The church and the pastor have their first responsibility there, he said.
The pastor must always be evangelistic. It would seem to be a poor ministry of thegospel of Jesus Christ that was not an evangel to unsaved men. It would seem a very barren ministry that gathered no souls to the crop.³
The matter of saving souls was something for which the pastor must take responsibility: “And no special evangelist can take the place or do this work for the pastor.”⁴
Even though evangelism was the first priority for the pastor, Bresee was clear that “this is not a priestly or ministerial office.” And, although the church sanctuary was a place were people should be urged through preaching to accept the gift of salvation, he also urged all Christians to go out into
the highways and hedges . . . the places where there are those who have not heard or who have not been pressed with the privileges of the gospel. Weare to go to them with the gospel of holiness and constrain them by love and kindness. There is work for all in this mission of mercy.⁵
Later, Bresee would implore, "You— brother, sister—are the connecting link by which the living wire is to be connected to the dead soul. "⁶
If people are to be reached, they must be sought outside of religious assemblies. They are at the beaches, at places of amusement and entertainment, or finding recreation in the mountains, while not a few are in places of dissipation. No doubt many of those are within reach of personal influence and unless somebody goes out into the highways where they are, and insome sense compels them to come in, they will never hear.⁷
Although Bresee’s pastoral ministry typically resulted in many conversions and yearly gains in church membership, his most significant emphasis on evangelism followed what has been described as his mystical “ball of fire” experience, in which he received a fresh infilling and power for the great work still to follow. As he reflected on the experience to E. A. Girvin, he reminisced about his ministry at Fort Street Methodist Episcopal Church after this special anointing in early 1885:
I have never gotten over it, and I have said very little relative to this; but there came into my ministry a new element of spiritual life and power . . . there were more persons converted; and thelast year of my ministry in that church was more consecutively successful, being crowned by an almost constant revival. When the third year came to a close, the church had been nearly doubled in membership, and in every way built up.8
This renewal of passion for the lost spilled over into his next ministry in the newly formed boomtown of Pasadena, California. He reported to the 13th Annual Session of the Southern California Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1888: “The spiritual condition of our work is very gratifying; more than four hundred conversions reported during the year. . . . From a membership of 1,072 we have increased to more than 1,700.”9
Bresee carried this passion for lost souls into the formation of his new denomination: the Church of the Nazarene. On October 30, 1895, the local church minutes reflect the Articles of Faith and General Rules established during the organization of the First Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles. The first responsibility articulated is evangelism: “Feeling clearly called of God to the carrying on of His work in the conversion of sinners . . . . This work we aim to do through the agency of city missions, evangelistic services, house-tohouse visitation, caring for the poor, comforting the dying. To this end we strive personally to walk with God and to incite others so to do.”10
Eight years following the organization of Los Angeles First Church, the congregation moved into its first permanent home. On March 22, 1903, a dedication service was held. The service progressed as one might expect, until
Brother Joseph Jamison led in prayer, in conjunction with which the heavens opened and the presence of the Master was peculiarly manifest. The regular offering forthe work of the church was made. Just as the sermon was about to begin, a weeping man came to the altar asking for prayers that he might be saved. It seemed to strongly emphasize the fact that the one great thing here is not preaching, or singing, or giving, but salvation. For that, all things must wait. It was but a few minutes of prayer until the penitent man heard the voice of God, "Thy sins are all forgiven thee." And he sat beside the altar to hear the word of life.11
In a Nazarene Messenger article from 1910, Bresee exhorts: “The Pastor is a soul winner. Not by a spasmodic effort, but by all kinds of methods—preaching the Word of Life, individual effort, bringing personal influence to bear on family life, leading the children as well as the older ones to the feet of Jesus.”1²
Throughout Bresee’s entire ministry, his urging of Christians to continue and grow in evangelism effectiveness never lessoned in intensity. The year before his death, in 1914, Bresee wrote a letter to L. E. Gratton who was seeking his help in securing a pastorate. Part of Bresee’s advice is striking in its imagery: “Make of yourself a real Bible student, and while you are doing this scratch gravel to save men. Get heaven down—burn with the fire of the Mount of Transfiguration. Make the garden patch where you labor the most productive because of the most intense farming that there is in the country.”1³
One hundred years have passed since the death of Phineas F. Bresee; 100 years since the church he founded has heard his voice pleading for the souls of lost people; 100 years since the passion and love of his soul impressed evangelism upon the Church. Bresee asked a series of questions of his previous denomination 100 years after the death of its founder, John Wesley. These are the same questions that we must answer today as we approach this 100th anniversary of Bresee’s death:
Why is it that churches grow old and break down? Is it that thedivine power is failing? Are the Everlasting Arms growing weary? Is it that which God would do in the past He is unwilling to do now? Or is it rather that the divine power is wasted and lost in the human machinery, through which the world tries to make it act? Is the ecclesiastical wheelwork becoming so multiplied and so complicated that the motive power has no chance to accomplish results? Is the Church aiming too much to become an educational and social power and forgetting to go out with Christ to the highways and byways of life?1⁴
1. Carl Bangs, Phineas F. Bresee: His life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1995), 78.
2. Ibid., 114.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 115.
5. C. J. Kinne, Soul Food for Today: From the Writings of P. F. Bresee, (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1995).
6. Harold Ivan Smith, The Quotable Bresee, Beacon Hill (Kansas City:Press of Kansas City, 1983), 202.
7. Ibid.
8. E. A. Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1916), 83.
9. Donald P. Brickley, Man of the Morning: The Life and Work of Phineas F. Bresee (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1960), 99.
10. Ibid., 137.
11. Ibid., 151.
12. Harold Ivan Smith, 158.
13. Ibid., 197.
14. Harold Ivan Smith, The Quotable Bresee (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1983), 90. This quote is originally from a publication entitled The Preacher.
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"Our Dissenting Nazarene Heritage" Written by Andrew J. Wood
Church historians tend toward classification. When we look at Christian history, we tend to look for commonalities and differences; that is, shared testimony and different testimony. When looking at commonalities, we look for “family resemblances” in different churches, different beliefs and practices, and, most especially, in different time periods and geographical areas.When looking at differences, we want to be careful not to overstate them and to be clear about why Christians believed or practiced as they did. In other words, why did they feel this or that issue was important? We try to understand our fellow Christians in ages past, which is a sufficient cause to do our work. Yet, we also hope that this will aid us in understanding ourselves and our fellow Christians in the present.
How might we classify the Church of the Nazarene? At the simplest or broadest level, Nazarenesare Christians. Second, Nazarenes are part of the very large family of Protestant Christian churches. More specifically, we are evangelical Protestants; much of Nazarene identity, historically and presently, is a shared identity with evangelical Christians through the ages and around the world.1 Among evangelical Protestants, we are Wesleyan evangelicals. That is, we belong to the family of churches that look to John and Charles Wesley and the evangelical revival in England as a historic marker of who we are. It is at this level of specificity—that Nazarenes are evangelical Wesleyans—that we come up against a key problem in our self-understanding and especially in our terminology. Historically, there is another word for a church that is: 1) Protestant, 2) Evangelical, and 3) Wesleyan. It is a word Nazarenes rarely use. That word is Methodist.
Why do we not use “Methodist” as a description of who we are? Many, perhaps even most, followersof Wesley in Britain and America (and in much of the world) have and still call themselves Methodists. I think this is largely because we have preferred to label ourselves a Holiness church and have most often done this precisely to distinguish ourselves from mainline Methodism, which rejected the emphases of the Holiness Movement.
Let us be candid. Nazarenes have a strained relationship with mainline Methodism. Much of how we understand ourselves has been specifically in comparison to Methodism. However, while we describe ourselves as evangelical, Wesleyan, and Holiness, we may be missing an opportunity to think more clearly about how we came to be and much of the historic thrust of Nazarene mission and identity. Within the family of Christian churches, we are best understood as a dissenting church within the Methodist tradition. That is, we are within the Methodist family; within it, we have disagreed or dissented from the eventual emphases of “mainline” Methodism (the Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and now, the United Methodist Church).
WE TRY TO UNDERSTAND OUR FELLOW CHRISTIANS IN AGES PAST, WHICH IS A SUFFICIENT CAUSE TO DO OUR WORK. YET, WE ALSO HOPE THAT THIS WILL AID US IN UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES AND OUR FELLOW CHRISTIANS IN THE PRESENT.
We are not the dissenting wing; we are not alone in disagreeing. For example, we have common (and largely unexplored) dissenters’ ground with the African- American Methodist Churches and an especially close family resemblance to the Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church as fellow Holiness dissenting churches within the Methodist tradition/family. There is a long history of intra-Methodist dissent, marked not only by the debates within mainline Methodism but also by the list of churches that have “come out” of mainline Methodism, seeking to be more Methodist than the mainline Methodists were.
We see this clearly in Phineas F. Bresee, first general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, and B. F. Haynes, first editor of the Herald of Holiness. Bresee and Haynes did not reject Methodism. From 1857 to 1894, Bresee was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church (37 years). From 1873 to 1911, Haynes was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (38 years). They did not reject the Methodism deep in their bones! Rather, they believed that the Church of the Nazarene was to be what mainline Methodism said it was and had been but was no longer.
Nazarene origins are best located in disagreementsthat were internal to Methodism. If Nazarenes by the early 1900s could no longer affirm the main thrust of Methodism in America, they could still find historical and current models of piety within it. Beyond John and Charles Wesley, few would have doubted the piety of Bishop Francis Asbury, E. M. Bounds, or E. Stanley Jones, who lived and died as Methodists. Nazarenes then and now have known and have worked with dissenting Methodists who remained within the mainline Methodist world. It is ironic then—with Nazarenes setting out to be more Methodist than the mainline Methodists—that we today often seem unable or unwilling to understand ourselves as members of the broad Methodist family. Nazarene doctrine has clearly been shaped by Methodist doctrine, and it is here that the word “Wesleyan” is a most appropriate descriptor of Nazarene identity. From prevenient grace to universal atonement to Christian perfection, our doctrine has been thoroughly steeped in Wesleyan and/or Methodist beliefs (including those of the Holiness Movement, which were obviously steeped in 19th-century Methodism). Much has been written about the Nazarene church’s Wesleyan theology, and rightly so.
In polity and mission, however, the Methodist family resemblances are both especially strong and widely unacknowledged. It has been commonplace to describe Nazarene polity as a blending of episcopal and congregational polities. This is misleading and, in the former case, imprecise if not simply inaccurate. Nazarene polity is, at base and most fundamentally, a Methodist polity. It is modified with certain specific congregational elements, most particularly in the call of a pastor and corresponding lack of appointment and in itinerancy.
Yet our superintendency or episcopacy is very Methodist and in certain ways more Methodist than that of the United Methodist Church today.² We have itinerant general superintendents who are elected by the general assembly, travel throughout the church, and preside throughout the church. We do not have diocesan episcopacy (where bishops are elected by a specific area and only preside/travel in that set area like, for example, the Episcopal Church). We balance lay and clergy representation in decision-making bodies. We meet quadrennially at the general level (from 1928 to 1980 we met in the same years the as the mainline Methodist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church). We meet annually at the district level (Nazarene districts combinethe functions of United Methodist districts and annual conferences).
There is a Wesleyan/Methodist tradition of polity and ministry, not just a Wesleyan/ Methodist tradition of doctrine. Instead of a fusion of episcopal and congregational polities, I believe a more accurate characterization of our fusion is that Nazarenes are basically Methodist in polity but decidedly more “free church” and democratic in sentiment and culture. This fits most of the dissenting groups in Methodist history that modified their polity to be more open and less autocratic than mainline Methodism (e.g., the Methodist Protestant Church, The Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, and even the Evangelical United Brethren). Mainline Methodism elects its bishops for life; Nazarene general superintendents serve terms, face reelection, and have age limits to their service, each being a “free church” and democratic amendment to what is basically Methodist polity.
Early Nazarenes were attempting to recreate the best features of “primitive” or early Methodism itself: the emphases on evangelism, sanctification, a mobile clergy and superintendency, and high moral standards. They left behind those parts of Methodism, as it was then, that they did not favor: worldliness, bishops who mistreated clergy they disliked through the appointment system, rejection of Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification, and so on. Early Nazarenes were attempting to “get it right” through what Bresee called “organized holiness.” This encouraged and required ongoing discussion, largely carried out through the pages of the denominational magazine, the Herald of Holiness. The passion and zeal of early Nazarenes was precisely for this sanctified conference, for this more “Methodist” Methodism.
Methodism has a long tradition of members who feared that Methodists were declining in spiritual power, had lost their way, and needed to get back to the piety of their former days. In Methodist history, such people are called “croakers.”³ Nazarenes are inheritors of this tradition. We should not be surprised when we find Nazarenes making this same argument today— that Nazarenes have lost our way and need to get back to the piety of former days. This is a family resemblance of Methodism (and Protestantism in general).
We Nazarenes have this in our blood. We are idealists. We want a holy church. We want our church to be all it should be. In so many of our debates with each other, everyone in the debate is arguing that we should live up to high ideals—wejust disagree on what that looks like or how to get there.
That too is not surprising—at least not to a church historian! A church committed to high ideals and a big mission is more likely to have arguments than one that has little idealism or missional commitment. We are a church of idealists born of a Methodist tradition that grew rapidly and spread the gospel around the world—all while it was arguing vigorously with itself! We are best understood as a dissenting church within the Methodist tradition. We may be more than this, but we are not less. In this, we are not now, nor have we been, alone. There are many living witnesses among us to this tradition and there are many in other churches as well. Moreover, there are a great host of witnesses to this who have gone on to their reward, one Phineas Bresee among them.
1. “Evangelical” has many meanings historically. The authors of the four Gospels are known as “Evangelists,” as the Greek word for gospel is the original word from which the English words “evangelical,” “evangelism,” etc., derive. Yet there is also a Protestant anchoring to the term. For example, the largest Lutheran sect in the U.S. is called the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) even though the term “evangelical” in its later American usage does not normally include the Lutheran family of churches. Evangelical theology in some cases refers to the theology of the major Protestant reformers, perhaps especially that of Luther and Calvin. More commonly, evangelical refers to the wide range of churches whose heritage is Protestant and traceable to the Great Awakening or Evangelical Revival of the 18th century, including the evangelical ministry of John and Charles Wesley.
2. United Methodists now elect their bishops only by “jurisdiction”—similar to Nazarene regions—and those bishops only travel and preside within that jurisdiction. Methodism before 1939 had itinerant general superintendency that the Church of the Nazarene maintains. Most Methodist churches (e.g., the AME church) have largely stayed with the itinerant general superintendency theory of episcopacy inherited from pre-1939 mainline Methodism.
3. John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 181. Wigger says, “So common were complaints about American Methodism’s lost zeal that dissidents become known by the widely recognized label of ‘croakers.’” He goes onto say, “Methodist croakers were troubled by the conviction that amid Methodism’s great success, ‘we have become a people very different from our Fathers . . . we have fallen from their exemplary piety and virtue, and from their regard to God.’”
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"My Journey into the Church of the Nazarene" Written by Philip R. Hamner
I grew up across the street from a small Nazarene church, which years later I learned was struggling to survive. As a Roman Catholic kid, the little Nazarene church was just one of many in my city. When I finally walked into a Nazarene church, I was a 19-year-old college sophomore at my best friend’s wedding. I was present because my friend was marrying a Nazarene; he was Roman Catholic too. He had made the transition to joining the Nazarenes. He seemed quite comfortable with the transition, and to be honest, I did not understand how he could be. This first encounter with Nazarenes was both exciting and strange all at the same time. I found the people to be warm, welcoming, and exceedingly friendly. I also found the whole “way” of being the church was unfamiliar to me. The people considered one another family. They entrusted their lives to one another and were quite open with one another.This was strange to me, because church in my world simply was not like family. It was deep and meaningful, but it lacked the sense of journeying together. These Nazarenes were convinced their lives not only mattered to God, but to one another. So, I began to attend this Nazarene church from time to time, just as I continued to participate in mass. Honestly, I found the combination of experiences to be very fulfilling. So, for a while I lived in two worlds: the church of my family heritage and a new church where I felt I was with family.
This arrangement worked well for about a year until I could no longer continue in both directions. Too many questions were rising up within me, andtoo many future decisions required a choice: Which church would be my home? I made the decision to visit another Nazarene church near my college. I had never attended there and knew no one.
The church surprised me with its welcoming spirit. I was greeted at the door and made to feel a part of their larger family. Over time, I found myself participating in worship, discipleship, and service for God and on behalf of the church. Then, came the day when the pastor preached a message of real hope: The real hope was in a Savior who would give me the assurance of salvation here and now. For the very first time, I sensed that God did indeed forgive me for my sins. I sensed the deep and abiding presence of the Holy Spirit at work in me, leading me to serve God and serve others. I could not keep silent about what God had done in me. I did not know what to call it; I had no vocabulary by which to speak about it, but no one seemed to care. I stood in the midst of the community and told my story. Many nodded their heads in agreement; others shouted expressions like, “Amen” or “Praise the Lord.” It was as if they knew exactly what had happened to me.
I was greeted at the door and made to feel a part of their larger family.
Nearly 30 years after that blessed day, I reflect often about the how and why I am still a Nazarene. Here is what I have discovered in my journey thus far:
Nazarenes Are People of Christian Hospitality
The first reason why I have remained in the Church of the Nazarene is the hospitality I found in it. This is not to say that other Christian bodies are unhospitable or unwelcoming. In fact, over the years I have enjoyed the fellowship and kindness of the Lord from many Christians of various denominational backgrounds. Still, something was decidedly different among the Nazarenes in this regard. I was not simply greeted with a warm handshake and a smile; I was welcomed into their homes, into their lives. Over the next three years, the Nazarene church in South Bend, Indiana, fed me at their dinner tables, took me into their life events, prayed over me, and encouraged me in my walk with Christ.
I was amazed at how these generous Christians anticipated the various steps in my own journey. At final exam times, I would receive care packages of snacks and beverages to help me study and to beshared with my friends. Every Sunday—and I mean every Sunday—one of the families in the church made sure I shared Sunday lunch with their families. I was invited to join the choir and included in all-church events. I received regular notes and cards of encouragement. The senior adults decided to come to my world, so they scheduled a day trip to my university. I was invited to offer them a tour of the campus and to share about my life there.
Systematically, I made the circuit of home visits with the senior adults. Sometimes it was around dinners, but most often it was an invitation to just come and chat. As I look back on those visits, I was amazed at how the Holy Spirit guided our conversations. They were never intrusive. They were always welcoming, loving, genuinely interested in what mattered to me. They always ended the same way too: Hands were laid on my shoulders, and prayers were offered so that I might follow Christ in faithfulness and obedience. These were not contrived events. They were genuine expressions of deeply Christian people living out their faith.
In all of these conversations, I was never urged or encouraged to abandon the faith of my childhood. These Nazarenes only encouraged me to fall in love with Jesus and to remain obedient to him. This made all the difference in the world to me. Christian hospitality is the set of attitudes and actions, which reflect the mind and heart of Jesus Christ. These precious saints were determined to be Christ to me. It made all the difference in the world as to whether I would be a visitor, or whether I would settle into my new family.
Nazarenes Love to Share Their Faith
At the same time the South Bend Nazarenes were practicing Christian hospitality, they were also willing to tell me their stories of God’s faithfulness. I watched and listened to testimony after testimony of God’s rescue, healing, and forgiveness. These Christians were quite open and transparent about their journeys of faith. They were honest and confessional. Often, they would recount the stories of pain and hopelessness that led them to receive Christ as Savior and Lord. Their openness and transparency was so very appealing to me. I wanted to know more about their stories. I was excited by the ways they witnessed to Christ’s presence in their lives. I was especially drawn to the stories of assurance in response to faith. These were not stories of emotional hype or simply of trips to the altar. Many of the stories included times of prayer at the altar, and there was a deepsense of emotion wrapped up in the telling of the stories; however, the assurance the Nazarenes bore witness to was something deeper than surface issues. They had deep confidence that God did love them, and that he gave everything for them. This was energizing. The very thought that God was deeply invested in relationship with me was exactly what I needed to hear. I had always believed that God loved humanity, but I was still unsure about me. Why would God focus God’s attention on me when there were so many other needs in the world? The Nazarenes who welcomed me taught me this was who God was. He was not an impersonal being, but a loving Lord deeply committed to me and my well-being. I found myself seeking out these stories of assurance. I attended special services when testimonies would be highlighted and celebrated. The Nazarenes taught me how to tell my own story. They showed me how to recount God’s gracious activity in my life in order to encourage and lead others into saving faith. In other words, their witness became a means of revelation to me. That revelation led to faith, which led to witness coming forth from me, which became revelation. The work of God’s faithfulness became the passion of my life through the testimony of the Nazarenes.
Nazarenes Celebrate the Possibilities of Transforming Grace
While these things were sufficient to move my heart and encourage me in faith, it was the doctrine of Christian Perfection that settledmy heart and mind with the Nazarenes. From my earliest memories, I sensed a desire to please God, to serve God well. I was not a Roman Catholic in name only; I was vigilant in my practices of piety. I believed in the disciplines of the Christian life. I learned how to pray the prayers of the daily office. I wanted nothing more than to please God with a life of faith and obedience.
When I met my first Nazarenes, they talked about things like holiness of heart and life. They spoke and testified to freedomfrom sin in this life. They preached, witnessed to, and celebrated the presence and power of the Holy Spirit to remove sin and fill the heart with love. They spoke of power for holy living and bearing witness. These Nazarenes were not arrogant about their spiritual lives. They boasted of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work on the cross in washing away the stain of sin. This spoke directly to my need. Those first Nazarenes told me that I should not give up the disciplines of the Christian life that had been built into me by the church of my childhood; they knew better than that. They told me that Roman Catholics knew instinctively how to live and practice acts of piety and acts of charity. These Nazarenes held out in front of me the promise of the Spirit to fulfill the Father’s purposes in me. They encouraged me to commit to corporate worship, to Bible study, and to prayer.
In the end, I found the depth of God’s mercy in entire sanctification, not at an altar. Rather, I found the deeper work of the Spirit by kneeling at a chair in my pastor’s office. He prayed over me and for me. In that moment, I found what my life had been longing for. By grace, I knew deep in my being a purity of heart and life that would carry me from that moment to the present.
I owe these Nazarenes everything. They made a place for me and showed me how God had gifted me for service in his church. I cannot imagine being anywhere else. Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift!
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"No Cross, No Crown: Phineas Bresee and the Self - Emptying Way to Holiness" Written by Julie C. Best
In August 1885, things were looking up for Phineas Bresee. More than a year earlier, after a series of crises in Iowa had decimated Bresee’s finances and ministry plans, he received a charitable gift that opened the way to a new home and a new start among the Methodists on the Southern California Conference.1The Bresee family left all they had known in Iowa and hitched their private rail car to a California-bound train.² Soon after arriving, Bresee received a new church assignment and multiple committee appointments, including the planning of the Holiness camp meeting just getting underway.³
More than 400 people gathered in Long Beach to hear Bresee give the Friday night keynote address at the camp meeting. He opened his sermon with the question: “Behold, we have forsaken all and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?”⁴ The sermon’s title, “No Cross, No Crown,” addressed this question, but also anticipated a deeper challenge. Later, at age 58, Bresee would resign from the security of his life in Methodism to follow his heart’s call to preach the gospel to the poor. He would eventually bring many Holiness people under the large ecclesial tent of the Church of the Nazarene.
Today, Bresee is memorialized for his many pioneering achievements: founding a nationally-organized Holiness church, establishing a church-based university and publishing operation, as well as his enterprising work among the poor. What is not so commonly-known is that Bresee also bore his share of crosses and experienced his share of trials. He began ministry at the bottom of the ecclesial ladder and had to work through many challenging circumstances. He sometimes struggled to feed his family and meet his financial obligations. In his early ministry in Iowa during the Civil War, Bresee experienced strong opposition from Southern sympathizers for preaching against slavery (he was a strong abolitionist). He related that his life was threatened for “preaching the duty of men to uphold the government.”⁵ Later, after rising in prominence, Bresee lost his life savings when a failed mining venture resulted in sudden financial ruin and feelings ofembarrassment.⁶ His support of prohibition in Pasadena, California, prompted the public press to viciously malign him, and his likeness was burned in effigy after delivering a fiery temperance sermon. ⁷ Later, disappointed by close friends and a church system that failed to accommodate his vision, he left his church home, his ministry profession, and was thrust “under the stars.”⁸ Yet, that repository of pain yielded treasure and pearls of wisdom in rarified form. Such trials and tribulations matured and prepared Bresee for the work ahead.9
One of the most prominent themes woven into Bresee’s life and ministry and throughout his sermons is “self-emptying.” The Greek word for self-emptying is kenosis, the same word that Paul used to describe Christ’s humility in the second chapter of Philippians, where Jesus surrenders all of his divine privileges as God and swathes himself in flesh, becoming fully obedient to suffer death on a cross. In a sermon from Matthew 10:39, Bresee describes losing one’s life for the gospel’s sake, which is a form of self-emptying:
He that loseth his life—the word loseth means to leave behind, to forsake, to abandon, to be parted from. He who leaves, forsakes, abandons, is parted from his own life, really finds life. The self-life wrought out by man’s own device, by human invention and skill, centering in and about himself, is a no-life, a real loss of opportunity and possibility; while he who forsakes his own devising, abandons his own interests, leaves behind his own life, finds real and higher life. In this text, we have the highest touchstone, the highest principle, the divinest fact.10
In another sermon, he explained that the baptism of the Holy Spirit “imparts power to the soul,” not for greatness but for emptiness.
Great men and great deeds have little place in the thought of men illuminated by the Holy Ghost. But the power of humility, of gentleness,tenderness, power to be broken-hearted and contrite; . . . the power of being so lost to self, that God can shine. Not the power of genius, or human learning, or eloquence, but the power to be an empty vessel, that God can use to pour the water of life through.11
Bresee’s understanding of selfemptying as integral to holiness grew over the course of his life and crystallized in his later years as he observed how this principle applied to Scripture and to his own spiritual journey.
Not the power of genius, or human learning, or eloquence, but the power to be an empty vessel, that God can use to pour the water of life through. - Phineas Bresee
I love the cause of Christ with an intensity begotten of the fire off heaven’s altar. It drew me from my home in early youth. It has increased and strengthened and become more fervent as the days have gone by. My antagonism to worldliness and formality and earth-seeking becomes more and more intense. My soul looks up to God for heights and depths of anointing such as my earlier ministry knew nothing about.1²
Bresee, who did not disclose much in his sermons, revealed on one occasion how his religious upbringing differed from this later understanding.
People are led to seek for the religion of Jesus Christ where it is not, and seek for that which is not in it. I myself was. . . . I was thus inspired with the conviction that learning was the door-way to, and the great preparation for usefulness. The trend of my religious teaching was self. There was much truth in it, but the Cross was not the center; it did not lead to self-crucifixion and the enthronement of the Christ.1³
Bresee later wrote that, “God’s great call is not to usefulness, it is unto holiness.”¹⁴ So what accounts for this change? It was not an intellectual exercise in theology but a profound encounter with a holy God.
In 1866, on a blustery winter night in Chariton, Iowa, Bresee said, “I threw myself down across the altar” because “my religion did not meet my needs.”¹⁵ Buffeted by waves of disgruntled parishioners and barraged by storms clouds of doubt, Bresee “prayed and cried to the Lord.”¹⁶ God met his need, and he received “the baptism with the Holy Ghost.”¹⁷ In his words, the experience “took away my tendencies to worldliness, anger and pride, but it also removed the doubt.”¹8 Bresee later described this experience as his entire sanctification.
After this experience, God blessed Bresee’s ministry in Iowa, and Bresee continued to rise through the Methodist ranks. Yet, this act of self-surrender established a habit of self-emptying that safe-guarded his heart amidst crisis generated by two life-changing events: A destructive storm blew away his hopes for a church-planting enterprise in an underdeveloped area of Council Bluffs, and a deluge of subterranean river water rushed into the Mexican silver mines where Bresee’s investments were “for all practical purposes destroyed in an hour.”19
H. D. Brown, a Bresee associate, observed that had Bresee’s “wealth not taken wings, he would have continued a Methodist preacher in Iowa to the close of his life”²0 but that “God . . . knewhow to uproot, and still protect, His man.”²¹ Bresee offered another perspective:
I felt some degree of embarrassment at the thought of remaining in a country where I was supposed to be wealthy, when, in fact, I was very poor. Hence I deemed it best to take a transfer to some distant Conference. I formed the firm conviction . . . that I would never more attempt to make money, but would give the remainder of my life . . . to the direct preaching of the Word of God.²²
By divesting him of his wealth and position, God fashioned Bresee's life to fit the mission of preaching holiness to the poor. Bresee wrote later, “There is in the soul that God anoints the very elements of the commission inwrought in the very being. No one can really go unless he is the embodiment of the commission itself.”²³
Bresee soon learned that self-emptying is only the first act of a two-part drama, the precursor of dying that leads to rising, of travail that turns to triumph. The rising action that follows selfemptying is the exaltation that God bestows on his faithful Son and other servants who follow him to the cross. However, exaltation is not automatic. Unlike salvation and sanctification, which are free gifts in Christ, Bresee wrote, “Exaltation in the kingdom of God is not a gift; it is won.”²⁴ “The mind of Christ is the new way to glory—the way of humiliation, of shame, of burden bearing, of suffering, making ones’ self of no reputation. . . . Counting all earth with its honors and riches but dung that we may win Christ and know Him in the fellowship of His sufferings and the power of His resurrection.”²⁵
Perhaps when Bresee preached at the holiness camp meeting in 1885, he may have thought he was in his second act: that what he had lost in the first act would now be restored, that the warm reception into the conference would be the rising tide to lift him out of chaos onto shore. God would do more in Bresee’s life than turn the tables; He would lift his servant’s gaze to new heights of glory.
On one cool evening in 1885, after much seeking and prayer, in what Bresee had referred to as “the greatest experience of his life,”²⁶ his eyes were opened to perceive an “indescribable ball of condensed light” descend from the sky accompanied by a voice instructing him to “Swallow this.” When he tried to obey, he felt a burning sensation on his lips that lasted for days. Afterward, Bresee reported, “There came with it into my heart and being, a transformed condition of life and blessing and unction and glory, which I had never known before”²⁷ and “There came into my ministry a new element of spiritual life and power.”²8
Bresee’s visionary encounter strengthened him to endure the greatest trial of his life of losing his place within Methodism and for the pioneering efforts that followed.
Many of us have gone forth as Isaiah went, with our souls filled with the heavenly vision, and with the precious touch of the live coal on our lips; feeling, I have fire enough in my bosom to burn up the sins of the world, and light enough to shine away the darkness, and triumph enough to break down opposition and prejudice, and to capture the strongholds and bring them into captivity to Jesus Christ.²9
It does come true that these men who are despised and persecuted, and who have left the world and have the divine passion buring in them are the men who move the world. - Phineas Bresee
And yet, Bresee encountered among Southern California Methodists an increasing hostility toward holiness as well as resentment among “Come outers,” those who had left Methodism, toward those who had stayed in. The more he poured out love and prayers, and tears and testimonies upon them, the more it only fortified their defenses.³0 In a poignant testimony, Bresee disclosed how he suffered brokenness and betrayals by those he had once held close.
How often have I for a moment grown sick at heart and faint of spirit. The very ones I thought would stand closest to me, and by their confidence, prayers, and testimony, by their unworldliness and faith help to scale the walls, or shout the victory until the walls would fall down, have turned away, grown formal, or have driven their arrows through my soul until my spirit has quivered with unutterable pain.³¹
One of the formative lessons Bresee learned about self-emptying is that it is the way to holiness. Kenosis leads to theosis, or union with God, whereby one’s nature becomes so completely consumed by holy love that selfish pursuits are superseded by a passionate allegiance to serve a holy God no matter the cost. Holiness for Bresee was more than wholly dying to self; it was becoming fully alive to commune with Christ along the path from suffering to glory. Bresee described this theosis as holiness:
There is a life which is as far above all this [struggle for worldly things] as the heavens are above the earth, a life hid with Christ in God, a life in the pavilion of infinite love under the wings of the Almighty. It is a life in which Christ lives in the heart, and which has holy communion with Him. It is a constant triumphant march through this world. It is a life of loving service and filled with divine joy. One asks, “Are there no trials?” Yes, but He says, “My grace is sufficient.” Is that not enough?³²
Like the apostle Paul, Bresee was notspared suffering or pain but was given heavenly grace that so elevated him to a higher plane, he could testify that “the privilege of bearing reproach for Him, of suffering the loss of all things for Him, of filling up in our lives the measure of His suffering which remains, in order that holiness may be preached and testified to, is the sweetest joy which comes to us under the stars.”³³
The preaching that was to dominate the last years of Bresee’s life illustrates the two-fold dynamic of self-emptying and union with God: He proclaimed, “The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of divine mystery, where up is down, and down is up’ where the crown is a crown of thorns’ where the glory is bloody sweat; where the throne is a cross’ where the higher you go the deeper down into these things you enter;”³⁴ and “There is such a thing as so standing with Christ and being so filled with his passion that we go deeper down and rise to higher heights of glory . . . .”³⁵ For Bresee, glory awaits just beyond Gethsemane. Jesus is the way; and the way to Jesus is through the self-emptying demands of the cross. While preaching at the Long Beach holiness camp meeting in 1885, Bresee proclaimed: “We must get out of our dignity and get down upon our knees. We want to escape the cross. But no cross, no crown. You cannot get around the cross, you must take it up and bear it for Jesus.”³⁶
If Bresee were alive today, pastors would imitate his methods and multitudes would flock to hear him speak. Yet his success is just part of the story. Bresee’s message for the church today would be much like the one he gave in 1885: “Those who lose their lives that they may find them, find life in the place which God gives them in this universe. It does come true that these men who are despised and persecuted, and who have left the world and have the divine passion burning in them are the men who move the world.”³⁷
Bresee’s life inspired a movement because God moved him from death to life. His life marked history because the Holy Ghost had first conformed his life to his message of preaching holiness to the poor. Bresee faithfully bore the stigma of reproach; and in displacement, his testimony grew stronger and more powerful. Because Phineas Bresee embraced the cross as he followed his Lord, this “Prince in Israel” entered glory to receive the crown of life. No cross, no crown!
1. Timothy Lawrence Smith and W. T. Purkiser, Called Unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962), 95.
2. Ibid.
3. Carl Bangs, Phineas F Bresee: His Life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1995), 131-141.
4. Phineas F. Bresee, "No Cross, No Crown," Southern California Quarterly Review Vol. 1, No. 7 (September 1885): 119.
5. Bresee, "Righteousness in Politics," in Sermons on Isaiah (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1926), 63.
6. Smith and Purkiser, 95.
7. E. A. Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1984), 88. See also H. D. Brown, Personal Memories of the Early Ministry of Dr. Phineas Bresee (Seattle: H. D. Brown, 1930).
8. "The Real Work," Nazarene Messenger Vol. 7, No. 38 (1903): 3.
9. Warren Wiersbe, "Principles Are the Bottom Line," Leadership Vol. 1, No. 1 (1980): 81. As Wiersbe discusses, character shapes ministry, and Bresee’s character was refined by his life experiences, which enabled him to be a true servant leader.
10. Bresee, "Losing and Finding Life," in Sermons from Matthew's Gospel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1900), 175.
11. Bresee, "Baptism with the Holy Spirit," in The Double Cure, or Echoes from National Camp Meetings (Boston: The Christian Witness Company, 1894), 335.
12. Bresee, "Fidelity Is Better Than Fruit," in Sermons on Isaiah (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1926), 57.
13. Bresee, "The Motive to Endurance," in Sermons (Los Angeles: Nazarene Publising Company, 1903), 85-86.
14. Bresee, "The Rest Giver," in Sermons from Matthew's Gospel, 196.
15. Girvin, 51.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 52.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 76.
20. Brown, 31.
21. Ibid.
22. Girvin, 76.
23. Bresee, "The Gaze into Heaven," in Sermons on Isaiah (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1926), 43.
24. Bresee, "Ambition Versus Humility," in Sermons from Matthew's Gospel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1900), 219.
25. Bresee, "The Mind of Christ in Us," in Sermons (Los Angeles: Nazarene Publising Company, 1903), 69.
26. Aaron Merritt Hills, Phineas F. Bresee : A Life Sketch (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1930).
27. Girvin, 82.
28. Ibid., 83.
29. Bresee, "Fidelity Is Better Than Fruit," 56-57.
30. Ibid., 57.
31. Ibid.
32. Bresee, "Losing and Finding Life," 178.
33. Bresee, "The Motive to Endurance," 89.
34. Bresee, "Ambition Versus Humility," 218.
35. Bresee, "Ambition Versus Humility," 220.
36. Bresee, "No Cross, No Crown," 119.
37. Bresee, "Losing and Finding Life," 174.
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