Joseph Widney - Religion

Religion

Widney was raised in the Greene Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Piqua, Ohio, where his father, Wilson Widney, was a steward. His uncle, Robert Samuel Maclay (February 7, 1824 – August 18, 1907, was the first Methodist missionary to China, as well as an early Methodist missionary to Japan and Korea.

He was an active lay leader of Los Angeles First Methodist Episcopal Church, and was close friends with one-time pastor, Rev. Phineas F. Bresee. The Widneys were mainstays of the "District Aid Committee," an organization devoted to securing better support for underpaid pastors. Dr. and Mrs. Widney and his sister, Arabella, were active in the evangelistic endeavors which Methodists carried on among the poor and unfortunate.

According to historian Timothy L. Smith, "all records agree that Widney was an honored citizen of both the city and the church he loved."

He was instrumental in the support and enlargement of the Los Angeles City Mission (the Peniel Mission), especially from October 1894 when the 900-seat Peniel Hall located at 227 S. Main Street in Los Angeles was dedicated. The Peniel Mission, founded in 1886 (as the Los Angeles Mission) by Theodore Pollock Ferguson and Manie Payne Ferguson (born Carlow, Ireland, 1850; died 1932), was undenominational and nonsectarian. "Their entire work, like that of most of the city holiness missions, was oriented toward soul saving and the promotion of holiness".

According to Smith, "all the available evidence indicates that neither Bresee nor Widney was contemplating any change in his relationship with Peniel Mission or with the Methodist church". By early October 1895, Widney and Bresee were "frozen out" of the Peniel Mission. According to Smith, "Certainly J. P. Widney must have been disillusioned when A. B. Simpson, leader of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and reportedly an extremist on divine healing, appeared as a special worker at the mission in May .

Bresee and Widney determined to form a new organization in which their program of a church home for the poor might be fully carried out. They announced a service for Sunday, October 6, 1895, in Red Men's Hall located at 317 S. Main Street in Los Angeles, a short distance from the Peniel Mission. A Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that the leaders "announced that although no name had been decided upon for the new denomination, its work was to be chiefly evangelistic and its government congregational".

After three weeks of meetings, on October 30, 1895, Bresee and Widney organised the Church of the Nazarene. Widney was suggested the name of the infant denomination. Smith explains, "The word "Nazarene" had come to him one morning at daybreak, after a whole night of prayer. It immediately seemed to him to symbolize "the toiling, lowly mission of Christ."

In October 1898, Bresee and Widney each resigned as superintendent as they did not believe in life tenure in a church. The delegates from the various churches voted to limit the term of office for general superintendents to one year. They were subsequently re-elected to an annual term.

Widney returned to the Methodist church as a minister and was appointed to the church's City Mission of Los Angeles (formally organized in 1908), where he ministered to thousands over the next several years.

In 1899 the Southern California Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church accepted his credentials. He was appointed the superintendent of the city missionary work of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, and was also listed as the pastor of the Nazarene Methodist Episcopal Church, which met initially in his home at 150 W. Adams Street. Growth of the congregation necessitated the construction of a 500-seat building at Ninth and Santee Streets on a property owned by Widney. Widney met the entire costs of construction and ministered without compensation. The new building was dedicated on Sunday, June 3, 1900. The new facility incorporated on the ground floor a free reading room, a bath house for men to use, and two stores.

In 1903 this church was renamed the Beth-El Methodist Episcopal Church. The congregation soon relocated to a new property purchased by Widney at the corner of Pasadena Avenue and Avenue 39, as the Ninth and Santee Streets location was not successful in attracting non-churchgoers. Widney eventually resigned from the Methodist Episcopal church in 1911.

Widney advocated: "Man's religions must discard the impedimenta of wornout creeds and ecclesiastical forms, or else themselves be discarded. ... Abstruse creeds must go. Ecclesiastical shackles must be cast off. It must present to the world an understandable Faith, Church forms and rituals that are simple, a front not broken by the wrangling of sects: a Faith so simple and a Way of Life so plain.... Not until this is done can Christianity do its best work for the world" (All-Father, 2–3). According to Frankiel, "his attempt to unite all religions around faith in the "All-Father" was also a return to what he saw as his own root in the American West, via the desert; to the roots of Western culture; and to the roots of humanity in a primitive sense of nature and life".

Believing that Sunday should be a day of rest, and that "those who spend all of their Sundays in churches are guilty of breaking the commandments", Beth-El had only one service each Sunday – a morning service. Dr. Widney conducted the Sunday services there for thirty-six years, while one of his younger brothers, Rev. Samuel A. Widney, led the Sunday School and served later as co-pastor. Dr Widney played the violin during the services, while his brother Samuel played the violoncello, and Samuel's wife, Anna, played the organ.

Widney was regarded as "rather liberal in his religious views" because "He holds no respect for ministers of the gospel who continually seek publicity, who dabble in politics and are always raising a rumpus. Nor does he believe in fads or freak religion. He simply teaches the old-time Bible religion."

In his book The Genesis and Evolution of Islam and Judaeo-Christianity, published in 1932, Widney explained, " The central thought of the work is The evolution of one general world-faith out of many, and too often hostile, racial religions of mankind. The world was once civically racial. It is so no longer. The economic laws of commerce have welded it together as one."

Widney was influenced by the teachings of accused heretical preacher David Swing and Thomas Starr King, a broad-minded, religiously inclusive Unitarian minister, whose "style of liberalism was laced with a Transcendental mysticism and a grounding in love of nature... laid a foundation for liberal Christianity in California tradition"; Widney described King as "as one of the few great and broad-minded spirits of the church" (Frankiel, p30.). According to Widney, these two felt "called upon to step over the ecclesiastical lines which we have drawn about the simple, kindly, trusting life and teachings of Him we call Jesus of Nazareth" (Three Americas, 65).

As Sandra Frankiel summarises, "Widney's new religion would recognize that all religions are essentially one. Its basic principles included a positive view of human nature."