J.B. Chapman

James Blaine Chapman (1884-1947) was a minister, president of Arkansas Holiness and Peniel Colleges, editor of the Herald of Holiness, and general superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene.

Chapman was born 1884 in Yale, Illinois, the second son and fifth child in his family. The family moved to Oklahoma when he was fourteen years old, where he was converted to Christianity in 1899. Chapman's first academic instructor was his wife, a schoolteacher. When he took a pastorate at Vilonia, Arkansas in 1908, he enrolled at the Arkansas Holiness College there at age 24. After graduating in 1910, he left to pursue further study at Texas Holiness University in Peniel, Texas under president Roy T. Williams, where he received his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1913. Peniel College later awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 1918, and Pasadena College did the same in 1927.

He began to preach at the age of sixteen, uniting with the World's Faith Missionary Association of Shenandoah, Iowa and then the Texas Holiness Association before forming his own Independent Holiness Church. He married Maud Frederick in 1903, at the church's first annual convention. His first pastorate was a church in Durant, in Indian Territory, which he organized in 1905 and would become part of the Holiness Church of Christ, but he also became pastor of a church in Pilot Point, Texas in 1907, for which he left Durant in 1908. That same year the Holiness Church of Christ joined the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, and Chapman moved again, this time to a pastorate at Vilonia, Arkansas. He left in 1911 after graduating from Arkansas Holiness College to pursue further education at Texas Holiness University. His only other pastorate would later be at Bethany, Oklahoma from 1918-1919.

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