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The Genesis of General Superintendency
Phineas Bresee found himself without an appointment in September 1895. One year earlier, he left the itinerant (appointive) ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), where he had served since 1857, to preach at a large independent city mission in Los Angeles. Now, Peniel Mission’s directors had fired him. Bresee, participating in holiness conventions in the Midwest, learned of his dismissal by telegram.
He was still a local preacher in the MEC’s Southern California Conference and could have returned to the itinerant ministry at some point, but pastoral appointments for the year were already fixed until the next annual conference.
In his dilemma, some sympathetic laymen, mostly Methodists, met with him. A few had followed him from church to church. They were willing to launch a new church that ministered to the urban poor if Bresee would consent to be their pastor. He agreed, and in due course he and Dr. J. P. Widney were elected as pastors and “general superintendents for life” of the new congregation, which adopted the name Church of the Nazarene.
Bresee was well acquainted with the term “general superintendent.” It was a Methodist Episcopal term that was used synonymously for “bishop.” The term’s roots lay in the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1784 at a Christmas Conference in Baltimore. John Wesley had authorized Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke to be “superintendents” of the Methodist societies in America. Instead, the Methodist preachers in America formed a denomination on their own initiative. They elected Asbury and Coke as its “superintendents.” The first Methodist Episcopal Discipline (1785) refers to their office as the Office of Superintendent.1
In 1788, Asbury and Coke began using the term “bishop” instead. No General Conference authorized the change, and some objected (including Wesley, when he learned of it). But the next General Conference did not reverse them, and superintendents were called bishops thereafter, a change reflected in subsequent editions of the Discipline.
The term “general superintendent” began cropping up in Methodist publications as a synonym for bishop by the mid-nineteenth century.
The term “general superintendent” began cropping up in Methodist publications as a synonym for bishop by the mid-nineteenth century. It was common enough that when the Free Methodist Church split from the MEC in 1860, B. T. Roberts was elected to be its “general superintendent.”2 The term was being used in the MEC Discipline by 1888, and mainline Methodists eventually defined a bishop as one serving as “a general superintendent for the church.”
Bresee was well acquainted with these terms, especially after serving as a delegate to the 1892 General Conference, where he was assigned to the Committee on Episcopacy. One of the issues that year was whether missionary bishops were general superintendents of the church. The matter concerned Bishop Thoburn in India and Bishop William Taylor in Africa. Taylor, an active participant in the holiness movement, had started Methodist churches and conferences in South America, India, and Africa. The 1884 General Conference elected him Missionary Bishop over Africa.
Until that point, missionary bishops were not considered general superintendents, but the question was renewed: was their superintendency confined to their mission area, or could it be general in scope? The General Conference decided to retain the status quo.3
The discussion occurred three years before the Los Angeles Nazarenes organized, so the election of Bresee and Widney as “general superintendents for life” contained three elements: the episcopal office itself, the Methodist Episcopal notion that the office was “for life,” and the implication that other congregations would be formed.
General superintendent “for life” lasted almost exactly three years. Widney grew increasingly uncomfortable with the up-tempo revivalism of Bresee and the Los Angeles congregation. The growing tension reached an impasse in October 1898 and was resolved when Widney and Bresee both resigned as pastors. The official board then called Bresee to be pastor again but did not extend this invitation to Widney.
In the discussion, several members noted that they had always been uneasy about the superintendent “for life” provision. Bresee agreed to let go of “for life.” Thereafter, he continued as general superintendent on a year-by-year basis, and in 1901, C. W. Ruth was elected co-pastor and assistant general superintendent to share the load.
When three regional churches united in 1907 and 1908 to form the present denomination, Bresee’s Manual for the churches in the West was the template for the Manual of the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, and so the episcopal office was carried over into the united church, with general superintendents serving terms that lasted from one General Assembly to the next.
Dr. Stan Ingersol, Ph.D., is a church historian and former manager of the Nazarene Archives.
1 Emory Bucke, ed., The History of American Methodism, Volume 1 (1964): 226.
2 After Roberts died, the Free Methodist Church reverted to the term “bishop.”
3 Carl O. Bangs, P. F. Bresee: His Life in Methodism, the Holiness Movement, and the Church of the Nazarene (1995): 173-174.
