If you have wondered who currently serves as General Superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene, the answer is six names: David A. Busic, Gustavo A. Crocker, Filimão M. Chambo, Carla D. Sunberg, T. Scott Daniels, and Christian D. Sarmiento. The denomination’s official Board of General Superintendents website identifies these six leaders and publishes their jurisdictional assignments for the period from 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2027.
But what does a General Superintendent actually do, and why does this office matter to someone sitting in a local Nazarene congregation? I think those questions deserve a little attention because knowing who leads a church is not quite the same as understanding the responsibilities entrusted to its leaders.
A General Superintendent is an elected senior leader who serves the wider Church of the Nazarene through spiritual oversight and responsibilities defined by the denomination’s governing arrangements. The office belongs to a worldwide church rather than to one congregation or district. Its work must therefore be understood within the church’s constitutional structure, not simply as a matter of personal influence or seniority. The current Manual is the appropriate source for checking specific responsibilities and limits of authority.
The office also has a history worth knowing. At the First General Assembly in Chicago in October 1907, the Church of the Nazarene formalized a union with the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America. Phineas F. Bresee was elected the first General Superintendent, and H. F. Reynolds followed as the second. The office emerged in the context of bringing Wesleyan-Holiness bodies together, not from an already established international organization with the scale and structure we see today.
The process of union continued at Pilot Point, Texas, where the Second General Assembly met from 8 to 14 October 1908. The Holiness Church of Christ joined the united denomination there. Later, in 1923, the Sixth General Assembly selected 1908 as the official anniversary year. This history reminds me that the identity of a church can be shaped not only by its first formal gathering but also by the wider union through which its shared life took form.
That distinction matters when we consider the present leadership. According to the denomination’s 2025 statistical report, published in January 2026, the Church of the Nazarene had 2,764,205 members and 29,424 churches, including 22,593 officially organized churches, with a presence in 165 world areas. These figures give us a sense of the scale across which the denomination serves. They do not, by themselves, establish how effectively its leaders serve or how well different regions are represented. Numbers describe the reach of an institution; they cannot tell the whole story of its spiritual life.
I also find an important principle in the denomination’s historical account of its government. The founding arrangement sought to balance superintendency with congregational rights. In other words, shared oversight was not intended to make every established congregation merely an extension of central administration. The exact constitutional provisions have developed over time, so the original principle should not be mistaken for a complete description of today’s rules. Nevertheless, it helps explain why leadership and congregational responsibility must be considered together.
So, the six current General Superintendents are David A. Busic, Gustavo A. Crocker, Filimão M. Chambo, Carla D. Sunberg, T. Scott Daniels, and Christian D. Sarmiento. Their names answer the immediate question. Understanding the office’s history and responsibilities helps us appreciate the larger task they share: serving a worldwide church whose common identity must be maintained alongside the life and responsibilities of its local congregations.
For me, that is the more useful way to approach church leadership. We should know who our leaders are, but we should also understand what their office is meant to accomplish and the principles that guide its exercise. Leadership becomes clearer when we look beyond the names to the responsibilities those names represent.