New Year’s Eve 2003 marked the 165th anniversary of the birth of Phineas Bresee near Franklin Delaware County, N.Y, the second child of Phineas Philip and Susan Brown Bresee. Converted in a protracted meeting in 1856, Bresee received a Methodist exhorter’s license soon afterward. The family moved to Iowa the following year, and he became an apprentice-preacher on the Marengo charge. He was ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1859 by Bishop Matthew Simpson, and ordained an elder in 1861 by Bishop Levi Scott. Until 1883, he served Iowa Methodism at Pella, Grinnell circuit, Galesburg circuit, East Des Moines, Chariton, Wesley Chapel (Des Moines), Council Bluffs First, Red Oak, Clarinda, Creston, and Center Church (Council Bluffs). He also served a partial term as presiding elder and engaged in a variety of Annual Conference committee assignments.

In 1883, Bresee requested transfer to the Southern California Conference, serving subsequently at Fort Street in Los Angeles, Pasadena First, and then three other Los Angeles churches: Asbury, Simpson, and Boyle Heights. There was also another term as presiding elder. In both Iowa and California, Bresee was elected delegate to the General Conferences of 1872 and 1892 respectively.

Bresee’s life and career took a fresh direction in 1894—the part best known to Nazarenes. After one year in the Peniel Mission, a ministry to the urban poor, Bresee joined with J.P. Widney in founding an independent congregation that is today Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene, mother church of the Nazarene movement on the West Coast. Bresee largely fashioned its superintendency. In 1896, the Nazarene Messenger began, one of two roots of the present-day Holiness Today. By 1907, when his group merged with the eastern Association of Pentecostal Churches of America to create the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, Bresee had Witnessed its expansion along the Pacific tier of states, with other congregations scattered east of the Rockies. In 1908, further merger with the Southern-based Holiness Church of Christ generated a truly national denomination and struck a blow against the sectional and cultural schism that had plagued the American religious soul; Methodists would not bridge the same gap for another 31 years.

J B. Chapman, Southern churchman, reflected on the meaning of Bresee to the aspirations of the founding generation of Nazarenes: “The first time I saw Dr. Bresee in the pulpit was when he arose to lead the devotional service on the afternoon of the opening of the 1908 General Assembly. His patriarchal appearance so impressed me that I think I was more or less prepared for the marvelous address he gave on the 60th chapter of Isaiah. It was the presence and bearing and emphasis of the man that made the impression and constituted this an occasion of a lifetime—yea, even of a century. I suspect it was the climax of Dr. Bresee’s life and ministry and I suspect it was the climax in life for many of us who were there.”

STAN INGERSOL, Denominational Archivist

Sources: The Phineas F. Bresee Collection The Pentecostal Advocate (January 25, 1912); The Preacher’s Magazine (December 1938).