Flourishing Church Began Modestly

The Church of the Nazarene and the broad Pentecostal movement both had modest beginnings in Los Angeles, hardly suggestive of the impact either has had on Christianity.

Yet, when it was announced in 1895 that ex-Methodist minister Phineas Bresee and physician-educator Joseph Widney were forming a new church, The Times of Oct. 7 headlined it a “New Denomination.”

Headline writers downgraded the start to “A New Mission” in a story two weeks later about the inaugural service attended by 82 people.

But the Church of the Nazarene did indeed become a denomination, and today has more than a million members around the world.

The first church, on the present site of the Ronald Reagan State Building in Downtown Los Angeles, was given its enduring name by Widney, who felt the appellation of Jesus of Nazareth linked “Him to the great toiling, struggling, sorrowing heart of the world.”

The congregation was known for its rousing services, apparently to the dismay of Widney, who broke with the church in 1898 after a service in which “a great ‘outpouring of the Spirit’ ” sent leading church members streaming to the altar.

The wealthy physician, who had rescued the fledgling USC campus from bankruptcy in the early 1890s while serving as its president, broke with the church over its practices and teachings, and apparently because his efforts to finance church expansion had gone unappreciated.

Widney left the congregation and eventually built a small interfaith chapel at the base of Mt. Washington.

Meanwhile, Bresee carried on, saying in 1899: “The Holy Ghost fell upon the people in Pentecostal fashion, and probably 50 persons were on their feet at once praising God.”

It was on the ancient Jewish holiday of Pentecost, according to the New Testament’s Book of Acts, that the apostles were spurred by the Holy Spirit into forming the early church, speaking in strange tongues during that galvanizing experience.

Over much of Christian history, however, the phenomenon of speaking in tongues was limited to small groups and individuals.

But in 1906, the Pentecostal movement began at the Azusa Street Mission, a tiny church in what is now Little Tokyo, where speaking in tongues broke out as a repeatable, almost infectious experience in marathon, exuberant worship services.

The Times of April 18 headlined it a “Weird Babel of Tongues.”

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Many denominations emerged from that massive “outpouring of the Holy Spirit,” as believers put it. The Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ trace their beginnings to Azusa Street.

By December of 1906, Bresee condemned the Azusa Street revival. Speaking in tongues was “a senseless mumble,” Bresee wrote in an article for a national Nazarene magazine. The Pentecostal revival had an insignificant influence on the religious life of Los Angeles, he maintained, “about as much influence as a pebble thrown into the sea.”

Through a merger in 1907, the Church of the Nazarene became the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. The denomination often dates its beginning from another merger in 1908, but the word “Pentecostal” was dropped from its name in 1919 to avoid confusion with the then-burgeoning and controversial tongues-speaking movement. It has sternly rejected the practice ever since.