Our History
The Church of the Nazarene belongs in the Wesleyan tradition and as such claims a part of the apostolic church, its creeds and beliefs.
It was via the Wesleyan revival and the holiness movement of America in the nineteenth century that the Church of the Nazarene was founded. At the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, three groups of churches, the Association of Pentecostal Churches in America, The Church of the Nazarene and the Holiness Church of Christ came together. This culminated in 1908 when the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene was founded, the name was changed to the Church of the Nazarene in 1919 to avoid confusion with other Pentecostal churches. In 1915, the Pentecostal Church of Scotland was the first of several British Churches that joined the denomination.
The Church has always existed 'to serve as an instrument for advancing the Kingdom of God' and as such has always had a missionary zeal; by 2008 the church had reached 151 different world areas. In practise this means that world wide the church has approximately 1.7 million members in over 14,000 congregations. In the UK there are 90 churches.
