At the end of the 2011 assembly season, nearly 11,000 Churches of the Nazarene around the world had been organized at least 10 years.
New Nazarenes Every Year
Wichita, Kansas, First, United States

Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Gelnhausen, Germany

What do these Churches of the Nazarene have in common? They are just 3 of the 340 older Churches of the Nazarene that have reported new Nazarenes every year of their existence, or at least since the denomination began keeping records of new Nazarenes. New Nazarenes are those received either by profession of faith or by transfer from other denominations.

Why include transfers from other denominations? Because in earlier years and in some parts of the world, it has not always been possible to receive members by transfer from other faith groups. New members from such groups had to be received by profession of faith if their former church would not issue a formal transfer. Rather than try to distinguish which professions of faith were new believers, we chose to combine the two categories and report them as “new Nazarenes.” That also seemed better than trying to classify which people have been reclaimed, which people had been non-believing church members, or even which of the new members had truly repented. These two categories, when combined, should represent exactly what we called them, “new Nazarenes.”

At the end of the 2011 assembly season, nearly 11,000 Churches of the Nazarene around the world had been organized at least 10 years. Of that number, there were 1,416 that had reported receiving new Nazarenes each year of the decade.

Churches organized at least 10 years

Received new Nazarenes each of last 10 years

Received new Nazarenes every year since organized*

Church of the Nazarene

             10,732

                    1,416

                         284

Africa

               1,504

                        143

                            35

Asia-Pacific

                   947

                          55

                              8

Eurasia

                   607

                          30

                            11

Mesoamerica

               2,061

                        153

                            24

South America

               1,382

                        179

                            40

USA/Canada

               4,231

                        856

                          166

*Or since records have been kept. New Nazarenes were first reported in USA/Canada in 1933. The rest of the world began reporting them for individual churches in 1982.

And of that group, 284 churches reported new Nazarenes every year since they were organized. This last group of churches has received more than 200,000 new Nazarenes over the years. While these churches represent less than 1 percent of all Nazarene congregations that have existed since 1908, they account for 5 percent of all reported new Nazarenes.

To see the lists of organized churches that have received new Nazarenes each of the past 10 years, go to www.nazareneresearch.org.

—Compiled by Dale Jones, director of Research for the Church of the Nazarene.



Holiness Today, July/August 2012


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