What kind of year was 1915 for the young Church of the Nazarene? It is tempting to remember it mainly for two deaths. Phineas F. Bresee died on November 13, and William C. Wilson died on December 19. Yet that memory can make the year smaller than it was.
1915 was doing several things at once. The church was enlarging its leadership, receiving new work, organizing missionary ministry, strengthening education, and continuing ordinary congregational life. It was also losing two general superintendents.
A young church was still taking shape
Only seven years had passed since the 1908 Pilot Point union, and the denomination was still developing its structures. At the beginning of 1915, Bresee, H. F. Reynolds, and E. F. Walker were serving as general superintendents.
Then the Fourth General Assembly in Kansas City called for four general superintendents. Bresee, Reynolds, and Walker were reelected. Roy T. Williams withdrew from consideration, Edgar P. Ellyson was elected but declined, and William C. Wilson was finally elected on the eleventh ballot.
Mission was expanding
On February 13, the Pentecostal Mission united with the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene in Nashville. The union brought additional home and foreign work into the denomination, including missionary work connected with Cuba, Central America, and South America.
In November, the Pentecostal Church of Scotland also united with the denomination.
Women’s missionary work was receiving wider organization too. On October 8, the Woman’s Missionary Society received general-level recognition, and Susan N. Fitkin became its first general president.
Education and ordinary church life continued
The story does not stop with mergers and denominational offices. Central Nazarene University in Hamlin, Texas, opened its fifth annual session on September 14, and the Herald of Holiness reported on its spiritual character. The same church press carried district news, new churches, camp meetings, college activity, missionary reports, and local ministry.
While leaders were making decisions in Kansas City, congregations and workers were still praying, building, teaching, preaching, and serving.
Then grief entered the center of the story
Bresee participated in the Fourth General Assembly only weeks before his death. His death was followed by Wilson’s on December 19. Now a four-person general superintendency had lost two members within weeks.
It would be easy to read this as evidence that the young denomination was in danger of collapsing. But the rest of the record does not support such a simple conclusion. The work continued, and the vacancies were addressed through established processes in early 1916.
So what was 1915 doing at once?
It was grieving and growing. It was consolidating and expanding. It was developing offices while learning that offices cannot guarantee permanence. It was building institutions while discovering again that leaders themselves are temporary.
For me, that is where 1 Corinthians 3 becomes more than a convenient verse for a history article. Paul does not deny the importance of servants. He names planting and watering as real work, and he says each worker is accountable for that labour. But he refuses to let the church confuse its servants with its source. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” He later says that the foundation is Jesus Christ.
That does not make Bresee or Wilson unimportant. Their work mattered because they were servants, not because the church belonged to them.
Six things were happening in 1915, but perhaps one lesson holds them together: a church can lose significant leaders without losing its reason for being. Some years bring painful farewells. Yet the work of Christ is never finally secured by the presence of one person.