A New Holiness Group Foreshadowed the Nazarene Church
Nazarene founder Phineas Bresee sought holiness of life.
PHINEAS BRESEE grew up helping his dad farm stony land and run a sawmill in New York. As a young man, he became a Christian and immediately looked for ways to share the gospel. After his family moved to Iowa (where he helped erect their log cabin), a pastor asked him to speak to a Sunday afternoon service. He later said, “Although I put everything I knew in it, it was only about twenty minutes long. I wondered what in the world a fellow would ever preach about in another sermon, for I had everything in that.”
Bresee soon became a Methodist minister in charge of a small circuit, but times were tough. The Civil War broke out during his first year of marriage, and Iowa’s currency failed. Nonetheless, through prayer and perseverance he was successful in each post committed to him. He became presiding elder over a district before he was thirty. However, he grew ambitious, and began to experience doubts.
Desperate, he threw himself across the front of the altar one night and prayed. Afterwards he reflected, “[God] seemed to open heaven on me, and gave me, as I believe, the baptism with the Holy Ghost, though I did not know either what I needed, or what I prayed for.” Bresee became a proponent of holiness. He became widely known across the United States and in demand as a speaker.
Breese’s bishop in California was one of those Methodist bishops who did not agree with the growing emphasis on holiness. So after thirty-seven years in the Methodist Church, Bresee left. On this day, Sunday 6 October 1895, Bresee and his close friend J.P. Widney started a new holiness meeting. The Los Angeles Times reported, “The first service of the new church was held in Red Men’s Hall on South Main Street yesterday morning. The hall was filled with worshipers, the sermon of the morning being delivered by Dr. Bresee, who spoke from the words of the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways and see and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest to your souls.’”
Two weeks later, the little group took the name Church of the Nazarene. Their first church was barn-like. “We want places so plain that every board will say welcome to the poorest,” he said. In 1907 and 1908 two other holiness groups merged with the Nazarenes. Bresee led the Nazarenes until his death in 1915 and was a founder of Pasadena College. By 2008 the Nazarene Church was the seventeenth largest denomination in the United States—with an even larger number of members overseas.
—Dan Graves
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Nazarenes were an expression of the American holiness movement. Learn more in Christian History #82, Phoebe Palmer & 19th Century Holiness Revival
