All out for souls! — 

By Steve Hoskins (March/April 2025) — 

Last week I attended the Church of the Nazarene’s M25 (Mission 2025) conference in Kansas City, Missouri, with about 4,000 other members of my church. The conference has become a recurring gathering of Nazarenes held between our every four-year General Assembly (a convention when elected representatives from churches around the world get together to do the business of our denomination and elect church leaders to oversee the work of our church) and designed to keep the church inspired and focused as it goes about the task of winning the world to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

The crowd was a good cross-section of a church that numbers about 2.7 million members and over 30,000 churches in 165 countries across the globe. The conference was a three-day meeting with large worship gatherings, mega-seminars, regular seminars, and a good number of exhibitors from denominational ministries and Nazarene partners designed to promote a renewed commitment to the task of evangelism among us.

I spoke to 56 of my former students who reminded me that I have grown old and a number of friends and folks I sat in classes with during my undergraduate and seminary days who were happy to be old with me. It was a fun gathering.

That the Church of the Nazarene is in need of a consistent and continual renewed commitment to evangelism is not something new nor is it germane only to our denomination. The M25 conference is the continuation of a series of mid-quadrennium conferences on evangelism that began in 1947 as we entered our fourth decade of existence. The ‘hot holiness’ days of our infancy and continual revivals had begun to fade and we were settling in to the reality of being an ‘organized’ church complete with assigned budgets, denominational initiatives, Sunday school contests, and some real success in creating a nation-wide, international holiness church with a growing cloud of administrative tasks.

In the mid-40s we were called to an “All Out For Souls” evangelistic renewal in a  sermon by J.B. Chapman, a denominational General Superintendent, who laid on the pulpit as he preached, beating the drum and crying out for renewal. His words struck a chord. That “All Out For Souls” sermon resulted in “The Mid-Century Crusade for Souls” (think Billy Graham revivals in the early years), an eight year denomination-wide emphasis on soul-winning evangelism with revivals in churches, tents and radio airwaves, the creation of Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City to train evangelistic pastors, and the Evangelism Conference (today’s Mission conferences) which held its first event on the campus of the seminary with a slate of preachers and papers aimed at bringing renewal to a denomination that had begun to sense receding waters in both membership gains and souls saved at revival altars.

At the conference D. Shelby Corlett, who had just finished a lengthy term as editor of the denomination’s magazine, The Herald of Holiness, and was headed back to pastoral ministry to join the effort put it bluntly: “It has been an apparent fact that for some time we have been reaching few new people in our revival meetings. We need a revival! … Primarily, we need a revival among all of us: superintendents, general church executives, our college men, our evangelists, our pastors, our missionaries — all of us need to have a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon us.” And so it continues.

The Church of the Nazarene is part of the Holiness Movement wing of the pan-Methodist family history, begun out of a merger of Holiness Movements and churches in 1907-1908 when the word Nazarene was code for “Angry Methodist.” Groups from different regions of the United States, almost all the children of the Methodist Church and born out of the holiness revival fires of the National Holiness Association of the late nineteenth century came together to create a new denomination in the new century.

The vision of its founding leader, Phineas Franklin Bresee, who in 1907-08 had grown old after a long and fairly successful career as a Methodist minister and regular delegate to the Methodist General Conference, started the Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles in 1895 to do ministry to the poor in downtown urban centers and bring revival to regularly scheduled church services.

Bresee’s church had as many as seven services on a Sunday including an evening “Glory Room Prayer Service” where the sanctified prayed until the glory of God filled the room no matter how long it took. It held three services throughout the week that featured a Wednesday night prayer meeting, a Youth Evangelism service, and a Tuesday afternoon meeting for the “Promotion of Holiness” just like Phoebe Palmer.

Bresee’s church chose its name to identify with “Jesus, the lowly Nazarene,” and shot its arrows at the goal of the Methodist “preferential option for the poor” in preaching the gospel and dressing like Salvation Army officers, men and women alike, without the marks and colors of the Army on their shoulder pads and suit coats.

By the time of the merger, Bresee’s church had created a network of churches on the railroads of the West Coast that stretched all the way to Seattle ministering to the poor and often disenfranchised. Holiness Churches, evangelistic associations, and missions from the east coast, Texas, and some scattered throughout the great expanse of the United States with a similar vision joined the Nazarenes from California and brought with them even larger dreams of doing the same thing in missionary work around the world. (The title of the great Timothy Smith’s book accounting of that drama from the early days, Called Unto Holiness, captures the mergers and events well and you can find a good history there.)

As I wandered the hallways of the convention center in Kansas City during M25, my radar kicked in. As a historian, I work with two things: time and dead Nazarenes. Time is always interesting not only as a reminder of the past, but, as Augustine says in his Confessions, the ways that God has always drawn our attention back to his memories and his intentions for our future. The times in which we live are in no less need of this reminder than we were when the Evangelism Conferences started in 1947.

This may be news to some of you in the broader pan-Methodist family, but occasionally there is trouble in churches. Mine is no different. Perhaps what I saw in Kansas City was a mirage or maybe it was a small oasis in what has been a difficult desert. Navigating the crowd at M25, I did not see any MAGA hats or “Bring Back Joe” T-shirts. I did not hear anyone preaching (in front of a crowd or in the hallways) a political agenda. Hopefully, we are showing signs of getting past the divisiveness of recent days.

As to dead Nazarenes, well there were a few there. I believe I have the best job in the church because working with dead Nazarenes is much easier than working with living ones. The dead have less to prove and let their work and the words stand as their testimony. I was there to be a part of a series of workshops on the history of Nazarene evangelism and how my church has done evangelism in its storied past.

I reminded the folks that there was a time in 1930 when Los Angeles First Church, Bresee’s Church, put a metal sign on the street by the door of the church that simply read “War Declared on Hell.” I showed a church fan from Nashville, Tennessee, First Church that asked the people in the pews to write down the names of unsaved people and backsliders on the back of the fan along with their names and addresses so we could go and seek them out. Some of my history colleagues such as Jim Fitzgerald and Ryan Giffin reminded us that church bulletins used to be a great evangelistic tool and the constant reminder of the urgent task of winning to Christ those who do not yet know him as Savior and Lord.

As a historian, you are always aware that in history two things happen: Things get better and things get worse and almost always at the same time. The Church of the Nazarene’s M25 conference is proof of this. Christians still need stories from the past to find inspiration for the future. We do need to have a good dialogue, Platonic style, about the definition of Evangelism and how that includes words like revival, compassion, and mission(ary). We need to think long and hard about why and how revival meetings were the key to evangelism and may need to be a part of our future. We need, as the Wesleyan Keith Drury of blessed memory, told us to figure out “the main thing” and be sure it remains so. All of this is key for the Church of the Nazarene and all of us who are working together with a Wesleyan Methodist witness for Jesus Christ in these days.

So let us give thanks as we turn our face toward the sun of a brighter tomorrow. Let us accept that our history is not the past, as much fun as that was, but that history, our history and our efforts at the tasks God is giving us to do like evangelizing the world for Christ’s sake, history is a creation of things out of our past of life with the living God designed to be a roadmap to a better future. Events like M25 are signposts along the way. Our history has much to teach us. All we have to do is pay attention. 

Steven Hoskins is professor of religion at Trevecca Nazarene University. He teaches courses in Christian history and ministry and is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene, serving a church hsitorian fr the MidSouth District. This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Good News.