Three Bodies, One Formalized Doctrine

The Church of the Nazarene formed in 1908 when Phineas Bresee's Los Angeles congregation merged with several other regional Holiness bodies; its Manual states in its Articles of Faith that entire sanctification is wrought instantaneously by grace through faith, preceded by entire consecration, a formulation that has stood with little change since.

The Wesleyan Church took its present name and shape in 1968, when the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, itself organized in 1843 partly by ministers who left the Methodist Episcopal Church over its accommodation of slavery, merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a body that had emerged from the same 1880s and 1890s Holiness revival wave. Both bodies treat the second definite work as settled denominational doctrine written into a governing Manual or Discipline.

The Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, founded in 1881 by Daniel S. Warner, holds the identical doctrine of instantaneous entire sanctification but pairs it with a distinct and stronger claim, that sanctified believers should reject denominational organization itself as a further mark of the same holiness the second work produces, a distinctive not shared by the more conventionally organized Nazarene and Wesleyan churches even though all three trace their doctrine of sanctification to the same nineteenth century Holiness revival.