Early Ordinations

The recent column about Anna Hanscome, first woman ordained in the Nazarene lineage, prompted this question: Who was the first man to be ordained?

Unsurprisingly, the first ordination in the Nazarene lineage occurred in New England, where the earliest Nazarene parent-body, the Central Evangelical Holiness Association, was organized in 1890.

Fred Hillery appears to be the first ordinand. He was born in Barre, VT, in 1854 and converted and was baptized at 17 in Whitinsville, MA. In Providence, RI, he became a class leader and Sunday School superintendent in St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where he experienced entire sanctification through the influence of pastor T. J. Everett. Hillery grew very active in the New England holiness movement, later serving as president of several holiness associations, including the Douglas Camp.

Later pastors opposed his holiness views, so Hillery and others formed an independent mission in 1886. In July 1887, they reorganized as the People’s Evangelical Church with 51 members. In 1889, Hillery was ordained by a council of 13 ministers from various denominations.1

This was a typical ordination method for New England, long dominated by the Congregational Church that grew out of the Pilgrim foundation. A council of ordained ministers was formed, examined the candidate, and ordained them at the local church where they served.

Nazarene Archives holds the credential of a minister ordained by this method: John Norberry, ordained in 1895. Norberry’s poster-sized credential features ornate calligraphy and was signed by seven ministers: a Baptist, two Methodists, three Free Methodists, and William Howard Hoople, pastor of an independent holiness church in Brooklyn, NY. By 1897, Hillery, Hoople, and Norberry were united in the same denomination, the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, and Hillery edited and published The Beulah Christian, the denominational paper. The APCA stretched from Nova Scotia south to Baltimore and west to Iowa by the time it merged with Bresee’s west coast Nazarenes in 1907.

The first man ordained in the South was Ira Russell of the New Testament Church of Christ, which Robert Lee Harris organized in Milan, TN, shortly before his death in 1894. In 1896, the Milan congregation elected Russell to elder’s orders and J. M. Gailey, an evangelist from the Church of God (Holiness), officiated at the ceremony.

Three years later, Russell laid hands on George Hammond, Mary Lee Harris (later Cagle), and Mrs. Elliott J. Sheeks and ordained them during the first annual meeting of the Eastern Council of the New Testament Church of Christ. Cagle had already initiated the Nazarene work in West Texas, Sheeks served as pastor and secretary of the Eastern Council and later the Arkansas and Dallas Districts. Hammond was later pastor of Kansas City First Church.2

The first man ordained by Nazarenes on the Pacific coast was J. P. Widney, co-founder, co-pastor, and co-general superintendent with Bresee of the Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles. Widney was the one who proposed the “Church of the Nazarene” name.

Widney was a highly esteemed medical doctor and founder of the Los Angeles County Medical Society. He was also a businessman and early president of the University of Southern California. In his fifties,

Widney decided to also become a minister and had probationary status in the Southern California Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

According to Carl Bangs, this means he was undertaking the Course of Study for ministers when he helped form the new congregation.

The congregation began enrolling new members on October 20, 1895. At the Official Board’s first meeting on November 4, it elected Widney to elder’s orders and charged Bresee with preparing an appropriate ordination service, which occurred on November 12. Thus, Widney was the first person ordained by the parent body in the West and the first ordained by Bresee. Widney returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church a few years later, and his Nazarene credential was recognized by the Conference, which received him back as an elder.3

In subsequent years, Bresee and assistant general superintendent C. W. Ruth ordained some ministers on their own authority, such as Bresee’s ordination of Elsie Wallace in Spokane in 1902. By 1904, though, the annual assembly had become the entity that elected candidates to elders orders and the venue where ordination occurred—the pattern that was established in the united church from 1907 onwards.

Dr. Stan Ingersol, Ph.D., is a church historian and former manager of the Nazarene Archives.

1 Floyd Cunningham, et. al., Our Watchword & Song: the Centennial History of the Church of the Nazarene (2009): 57-59.

2 Robert Stanley Ingersol, “Burden of Dissent: Mary Lee Cagle and the Southern Holiness Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1989: 165-166; and J. M. Gailey, writing in Church Advocate and Banner of Holiness (Dec. 26, 1896): 2-3.

3 Carl Bangs, Phineas F. Bresee: His Life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene (1995): 198-205.