ABSTRACT
Higher education was a vital part of the foundations upon which the Church of the Nazarene was built, and has always been an important part of the denomination’s story. Early Nazarene history is a story of the union of several small independent churches and para-church organizations which were created to promote the cause of Christian holiness, a concept growing out of John Wesley’s doctrine of Christian Perfection as shaped by the revivalism of nineteenth-century America. By the time of the 1908 merger between the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene and the Holiness Church of Christ, there were fourteen schools of various sorts being supported by members of these bodies. In 1944 the Nazarene General Assembly authorized the establishment of Nazarene Theological Seminary, to be located at Kansas City, Missouri, the site of the international headquarters of the denomination. Olivet Nazarene University grew from an elementary school founded by members of the Eastern Illinois Holiness Association at Georgetown, Illinois, in 1907.
