Reimagining Success by Art Roxby

ELSIE WALLACE

When DeLance and Elsie Wallace moved to Spokane, Washington, they had a passion to spread holiness. They fostered a mission, which Elsie headed. C. W. Ruth, the Church of the Nazarene’s assistant general superintendent, preached a revival there in January 1902. He reorganized the mission into a church and upon the congregation’s unanimous consent, appointed Mrs. Wallace as its pastor. Later that year, Bresee ordained her to the ministry—the first woman he ordained. Elsie and DeLance established other churches in Washington and Oregon. Bresee urged Elsie to pastor Seattle First Church until it grew strong. Later, she conducted a revival in Walla Walla, where a new church was organized, and she was urged to become its pastor. She remained there for nine years. She was appointed as the district superintendent of the Northwest District in 1920.

After a short stay in Kansas City, while her husband served as manager of the Nazarene Publishing House, Elise Wallace returned to Washington to again pastor Seattle First Church. After another stint as an evangelist, she moved to California and pastored three churches. She retired

in 1941 after over 40 years of highly effective pastoral and preaching ministry.

Mary Lee Harris Cagle, deeply involved in the mergers that created the denomination, also stands out as one of the strongest female leaders the Church of the Nazarene has known. She represents the many female leaders who met and influenced Bresee, but history does not record all such encounters.

Bresee stood strongly with the Holiness Movement’s affirmation of women preachers, their ordination to the ministry, and the use of their gifts in public ministry. For him, it was a given so much so that when an explicit statement on the issue was called for, it was reasoned that the obvious inclusion of women in all levels of leadership would make an argument unnecessary.

Oh, to return to those glory days when female leadership was a given! If recent statistics continue, we might just be on our way.

DIANE LECLERC is professor of historical theology at Northwest Nazarene University.

1. Susie Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preacher’s

Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Knoxville:

University of Tennessee Press, 2002). 2. Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical

Heritage (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 200. 3. Nancy Hardesty, Great Women of Faith: The

Strength and Influence of Christian Women (Grand

Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), 90. 4. E. A. Girvin, Phineas F. Bresee: A Prince in Israel (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1916), 91. 5. Rebecca Laird, Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation (Kansas City:

Nazarene Publishing House, 1993). 6. E. A. Girvin, 115. 7. Rebecca Laird, 51, 53. 8. Minutes of the Third General Assembly, October 7, 1911, Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene,

Afternoon session, Nashville.

INTERVIEW

Embracing and Practicing Holiness:

An I n t er v i e w wi t h T. Scot t Da n i e ls

The doctrine of holiness is central to our beliefs as Nazarenes. But what role do spiritual practices have in our becoming holy? Where do we need to enlarge our understanding of holiness? Grace & Peace asked Scott Daniels, who serves as lead pastor of Nampa (Idaho) College Church of the Nazarene, to discuss these and other questions. G&P: What have you learned about the importance of spiritual disciplines as you’ve sought to live a life of holiness? DANIELS: Like many people in the Holiness tradition, I was raised looking for a particular experience—a moment of surrendering everything I am to Christ, inviting Him to cleanse me of my sins. The experience of commitment made a significant difference in my life, and being filled with the Spirit was crucial. However, the development of a life of holiness is more than just making some decisions; it is more than just sort of gritting my teeth and saying, “Holy Spirit, help me do better this time.”

As I sought to live out that commitment, I realized that I am who I am because I’ve practiced holiness. When Paul writes in Romans that we should give our bodies as living sacrifices, he’s essentially saying, “Listen, when we were slaves to sin, it was like we woke up every morning and said, ‘Hey, Sin, here are our bodies. Do with them what you want.’” We practiced being sinners. We did things that engrained practices of sin deep into who we are. I think the Holiness tradition at times has said that all these sinful practices we’ve built up in ourselves can simply be eradicated without effort.

Paul also says we are no longer slaves to that. So now we should “present”—and I even love the verb there in Romans—we should “present and keep on presenting” the members of our bodies as instruments of righteousness. I know a lot of us—

not only in the Holiness tradition but also in broader Protestantism—have been suspicious of spiritual disciplines, some of the Christian practices of the church. But I’m convinced that we become who we are through practice—in a sense, from the ground up—through the things we do with our bodies. Practice shapes who we are. In the Holiness tradition, we’ve got to recover these disciplines: prayer, fasting, confession, participation in the sacraments, meeting together, works of service. These aspects of the disciplined life become—and I think the key word here is become—the means of grace that God uses to bring about His transformed work in our life.

I’m certainly not saying we can do away with what we used to call a crisis experience, that we can

do without making a decision to give all that we are to Christ. My wife and I will soon celebrate our 26 th anniversary; on February 23, 1990, when we walked out of that sanctuary, we were married. We made a commitment to each other. We couldn’t be more married than we were. But I have to tell you, over 25 years later, I am so much more married than I was in 1990. Part of being so much more married is that I’ve been practicing the married life and what it means to be committed to this one person—to live together, to eat together, to share life together, to have children together, to weep together, to laugh together, to do the routines of putting up Christmas decorations and taking them down together. The practices of life together have formed in us the reality of the married life.

The same is true for holiness. We come to a place where we say we are fully God’s, but that is just the beginning of this journey of learning all that it means to be fully God’s, just the beginning of practicing it until it gets deep down into our bones and reverses the sinful habits that were formed in us before we committed our lives to God. Holiness takes practices. I like to put a set of parentheses around the “s” at the end: Holiness takes practice(s). God uses all sorts of means of grace to make us the people He wants us to be. Practice shapes who we are.

Where the Body of Christ goes, where the grace of Christ goes, transformation follows. Those practices of service and transformation as individuals and as communities are critical for our own lives as individuals and as the Church.

G&P: In what other ways do we need to enlarge our understanding of holiness? DANIELS: We fail to embrace all of what holiness means when we think only in personal terms. Even when we think about the practices of holiness, we think of what we used to call piety—personal piety, devotional life, and prayer—things that are very much centered around the self. There isn’t anything wrong with these things; we need to be healthy, holy people as individuals. However, as John Wesley would say, “There’s no holiness but social holiness.” The more I read the Scriptures, the more I’m convinced that God doesn’t want just holy individuals. He wants a holy people—a people like the nation of Israel, who learned God’s life and became witnesses to God’s life in the world. As a pastor, I’ve wondered a lot: What are the practices we do together that make us holy?

Some friends have helped me to rethink worship as not just something we show up to do because it’s a habit. As we gather for worship—whatever day of the week that is—it is God calling us and drawing us close to Him, forming us by His Word and His presence, and sending us out, back into a life of service in the world.

Both of those things are important. First, our collective worship, our gathering close to each other and to the heart of God, is so critical in forming who we are, as well as those practices that are wrapped up in that—everything from the call to worship, to singing, to giving in the offering, to hearing the Word, to confessing, to gathering around the Lord’s Table, to prayer. All of those things we do together— that communal part of worship—are central in forming who we are.

Second, then, is that we are sent back into the world to make a difference, to be instruments of God’s salt and light in the world. We do these practices not because we’re good people and good people do nice things but because we’re the Body of Christ in the world. Where the Body of Christ goes, where the grace of Christ goes, transformation follows. Those practices of service and transformation as individuals and as communities are critical for our own lives as individuals and as the Church. This is one way God transforms the old creation into His new creation.

T. SCOTT DANIELS earned his M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, where he also received his PhD in Christian Ethics and Theology. Daniels has served as dean of the Azusa Pacific University School of Theology and now serves as lead pastor of Nampa College Church of the Nazarene. Scott is also the author of Seven Deadly Spirits, The First 100 Days: A Pastor’s Guide, Embracing Exile, and the New Beacon Bible Commentary John 13–21: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition.

Small Churches Do Make a Big Impact

B y R i ch

H o us e a l I n the U.S. and Canada, most Nazarene church members attend a large church; however, most Nazarene churches are small. By small I mean less than 100 people in worship attendance. For that matter, most evangelical churches are small—in fact, most Protestant churches are small. 1 If less than 100 people in worship is the norm for Protestant churches, and we know from Nazarene statistics that the Africa and Eurasia regions are growing because they are starting a lot of small churches, then let’s celebrate our small USA/Canada Nazarene churches and find ways to start and support more of them.

Several years ago, my counterparts in the Assemblies of God (AG), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), the Presbyterian Church-USA (PCUSA), and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) shared their groups’ worship attendance figures with me. Although these groups vary widely geographically, have different political outlooks, cover the spectrum of Protestant beliefs, and vary in organizational size, their distribution of churches by worship attendance is remarkably similar to that of the Church of the Nazarene. It is clear that the typical Protestant church is small. Small churches What is not as obvious, however, is how big a contribution they make to the denomination and the Kingdom of God. make big Small Churches Make a Big Impact In 2019, there were 3,583 Nazarene churches with less than contributions to 100 in average worship attendance. That represents 76.1 percent of all Nazarene churches, which means that three out of every the denomination four pastors lead a small congregation. On the other hand, the people attending these churches make up only 39.4 percent of and the the overall average attendance. This means that most Nazarenes attend a church that is larger than 100. All the same, nearly 40 percent of Nazarenes in small churches is still a sizable Kingdom of God. proportion of the church.

What is interesting is that the combined efforts of all these small churches results in their receiving 42 percent of all new Nazarenes. 2 That’s eight percentage points higher than their proportion of attendance! (See Table 1.) They also raise 29 percent of all money received at the local church level and contribute 26 percent of the World Evangelism Fund (WEF). Considering that many of these churches are in small town and country settings without the economic strength of urban and suburban areas, or ethnic congregations whose attendees often have below average income levels, their contribution to WEF is no small feat.

Table 1: USA/Canada Churches of the Nazarene, 2019

Worship Attendance Size 1 to 99 100 to 249 250+ Totals

% of Churches

76% 17% 7% 100%

% of Total Worship Attendance

39% 29% 32% 100%

% of Total New Nazarenes

42% 30% 27% 100%

% Total Raised

33% 29% 38% 100%

% of Total WEF

33% 30% 37% 100%