What was Phineas F. Bresee facing when he entered the Fourth General Assembly in 1915? It is easy to remember the assembly because it came shortly before his death. But that can make us read the meeting backward, as though everyone there already knew how the year would end. They did not. The records show something more ordinary and, in some ways, more revealing: a young denomination trying to decide how to carry a growing work.
Bresee entered that Assembly as one of three general superintendents. H. F. Reynolds and E. F. Walker served with him. The church then moved to a four-person general superintendency. After Edgar P. Ellyson declined the fourth position, William C. Wilson was elected.
Why add another general superintendent? The answer is found in the kind of church the Nazarene movement was becoming. It was not standing still.
Earlier in 1915, the Pentecostal Mission had united with the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene in Nashville. The union brought additional home and foreign missionary work into the denomination, including work connected with India, Cuba, and Central America. Later that year, the Pentecostal Church of Scotland joined the denomination. The Woman’s Missionary Society also received general-level recognition in October, with Susan N. Fitkin becoming its first general president.
The church was growing in more than one direction.
That makes Bresee’s last Assembly worth looking at carefully. He was not simply attending another denominational meeting before an unexpected death. He was participating in decisions about how a young church would organize itself for a larger mission.
The contemporary church press gives us another glimpse. The 1915 Herald of Holiness reported Assembly matters alongside district news, education, missionary activity, and ordinary church work. Central Nazarene University was receiving attention, and reports from congregations continued to fill the pages.
Then history changed the meaning of the Assembly.
Bresee died on November 13, 1915. William C. Wilson, the man elected to the new fourth position, died on December 19. The expanded leadership structure had barely been established before two of its chairs became vacant.
It would be tempting to make that the whole lesson. I think that would be too small.
The deeper question is what we believe about leadership. When a church is growing, it needs faithful leaders. Bresee’s influence mattered. Wilson’s election mattered. The work of Reynolds, Walker, Fitkin, pastors, missionaries, teachers, and local congregations mattered. Christian ministry is not carried out by invisible people.
But Scripture gives us a necessary correction when our respect for leaders becomes dependence on them.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3 that one servant plants and another waters, “but God gave the growth.” He is not dismissing either worker. He is putting their work inside a larger reality. A few verses later he says that no other foundation can be laid except Jesus Christ.
That changes how I read Bresee’s last Assembly. The important question was not whether Bresee himself could guarantee the church’s future. No leader could. The question was whether the church could faithfully build on Christ while using the structures, leaders, and gifts God had provided.
1915 gives us a sober answer. Leaders are necessary, but they are temporary. Institutions can continue. Mission can continue. The church can mourn deeply and still move forward.
So the question behind Bresee’s last Assembly is not merely what happened before his death. It is what kind of church the Nazarenes were becoming while he was still there.
They were becoming a church that had to learn how to carry a growing mission beyond the lifetime of its founders. Bresee mattered greatly to that story. But he was never its foundation.
That foundation, as Paul reminds us, is Christ..