“A Dogged Inch‐by‐Inch Affair”: The Church of the Nazarene in Australia 1945–1958

Abstract

The Church of the Nazarene began work in Australia in 1945 at the instigation of a handful of disaffected Australian evangelicals, marginalized from more orthodox believers in their holiness radicalism. They were often looked upon as holy rollers and sinless perfectionists, purveyors of a brand of religion thought to be populist, coarse, and theologically suspect. In America in the 1940s, the holiness movement churches had moved much further toward the traditional mainstream than was the case in Australia. The early Australian Nazarenes saw a decline in the religious fervour of other evangelical bodies, and saw themselves as raised up to champion a return to the apostolic fire of early Methodism. They were, perhaps naively, unaware of the lowering of religious tension in their own mother church. Differences between the ecclesiastical culture of Australian and American Christianity were to prove internal challenges to be added to the challenge of external opposition.