Evangel Church

The Evangel Church was a Wesleyan-Holiness Evangelical Christian denomination from 1933–1960.

The denomination was centered in the U.S. state of California with eight churches and 675 members at the time of its merger with the like-minded Evangelical Methodist Church.

The denomination was founded as the Evangelistic Tabernacles by Azusa Pacific College figureheads Dr. William Kirby and Dr. Cornelius Paul Haggard on March 27, 1933.

Kirby, president of the college from 1937–39, had previously led a movement away from the direct leadership of the Quaker/ Friends meeting influential in the school's ecumenical founding. Kirby joined the faculty in 1924 and quickly became an unofficial spokesman for the school's fundamentalists. Kirby and his theological allies challenged the increasingly Modernist stances of their founders. Kirby and company broke away from the local Friends church in 1933 and began a new, Wesleyan-Holiness congregation on campus—which eventually became "the school church." This change diminished Quaker influence (as well as related funding) and solidified the school's identity as an Evangelical Holiness institution.

C. P. Haggard followed Kirby as president and led the nondenominational school through several re-locations, four name changes, mergers with Wesleyan colleges, and rescued it from the brink of financial exigency following the shift toward stronger Evangelicalism. He is the namesake of the theology school and served as president for nearly four decades.

During this time of mergers and moves, students and faculty had planted many local churches which organized as the Evangelistic Tabernacles and later the Evangel Church—"the Tabernacle Movement" in shorthand.

In the late 1950s, Haggard approached the General Superintendent of the fledgling Evangelical Methodist Church (or "EMC"), Dr. J.H. Hamblen, about a partnership between his new network of churches and the EMC. According to Hamblen, "I made it a matter of prayer that God would send a man who could take my place if anything should happen [to me]. At the Phoenix Conference as I was preparing to call the Conference to order, a tall, ruddy faced young man came in the front door. God spoke to my heart, ‘There comes your man.’ I was not sure who he was, but I arose and went down the aisle. He reached out his big hand and greeted me and said, ‘I have come to join you.'”

...
Wikipedia