September
2006
Going Home - Glenn Griffith
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With any movement there are individuals who serve as pioneers, receiving notice for how they both blazed the way and set the tone for those who followed. One such leading figure was Glenn Griffith (1894-1976). J. Gordon Melton actually calls the entire Conservative Holiness movement the “Glenn Griffith Movement.” As Wallace Thornton notes, this claim is overstated. Nonetheless, Griffith was an important leader in the formation of the movement, and he clearly typifies its central concerns.
Converted in 1925, Griffith became an evangelist and superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene. He became disenchanted with what he viewed as a slack attitude toward worldliness and a growing spiritual coldness in the church. In 1955 Griffith returned his credentials to the denomination and, following a revival in Nampa, Idaho, issued a call for the formation of a new group: the Bible Missionary Union, later renamed the Bible Missionary Church.
At his separation, Griffith wrote a pamphlet titled Nineteen Reasons Why I Left the Church of the Nazarene. Griffith’s reasons represent the concerns of the Conservative Holiness churches toward the established Holiness denominations. He claimed he saw a cold, dead formalism in the Nazarene churches and a reluctance to preach the law as a prelude to offering the gospel. He charged that many in the Church of the Nazarene stressed loyalty to the church more than loyalty to God and that they favored a seminary-educated ministry over a self-educated ministry. Some charges resembled Fundamentalist positions against liberalism, such as Griffith’s complaint that the church was using the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in some denominational literature. Most of the specifics, however, dealt with the toleration of worldliness—of women wearing the wedding band and other jewelry, cutting their hair, and wearing slacks, for example. Griffith reaffirmed opposition to watching television, participating in Sunday sports, and holding church dinners and said that Church of the Nazarene scorned those who still preached such standards.
Griffith’s stay with the Bible Missionary Church proved brief. He came to believe that any Christian who was a party in a divorce could not remarry. When the Bible Missionary Church reaffirmed its stand that the innocent party could remarry, Griffith left. In 1959 he helped found the Wesleyan Holiness Association of Churches. The Bible Missionary Church remained one of the larger denominations in the Conservative Holiness movement. Griffith’s new group, although much smaller, likewise continued as a force in the movement.
Taken from “A Fundamentalism File Research Report” by Mark Sidwell. This work is entitled “The Conservative Holiness Movement” http://www.bju.edu/library/collections/fund_file/chm.html
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