Wesleyan Methodists and Free Methodists developed from the anti-slavery crusade. The Salvation Army was oriented completely toward the poor. With other Wesleyans, Nazarenes have shared an ethic of social welfare. To neglect service in the welfare of others is to demonstrate a lack of purity. Holiness people should be preeminent in social service. This is what chiefly characterized the Early Church—their untiring service to bless their fellowmen and care for their widows and fatherless children.
Brown, the first district superintendent, co-founded an orphanage and maternity home in Seattle. She was pastoring the Juarez congregation and caring for 40 orphans when she died.
Other church-related orphanages operated in Oklahoma, Swaziland, and India. City mission work was primarily evangelistic but had other objectives, too. Mary Lee Cagle entered saloons to plead earnestly with the girls about adopting a more humane life. Upchurch and Johnny Hill Jernigan urged girls to leave brothels and offered places of refuge and redemption.
Other city missions assisted the homeless and addicted. Nazarenes operated other maternity homes in Kansas City, Mo. Medical missionaries also ministered to physical needs. The church deployed nurses to mission fields early on, and Nazarene hospitals opened in Swaziland and China in the s. David Hynd developed the hospital in Manzini, Swaziland. A surgeon from Glasgow, Scotland, he took construction manuals to Africa and oversaw basic construction.
He then supervised the hospital for nearly 40 years and founded the Swazi Red Cross. Kinne, founding manager of Nazarene Publishing House, organized the Nazarene Medical Missionary Union to raise funds to build Bresee Memorial Hospital in China, where he also was the construction manager.
