ministered to entire families. The Fergusons, the mission founders, believed that the Peniel Mission should focus, instead, on the "down and outer." In October 1895, Bresee and Dr. Joseph Pomeroy Widney, a leading Los Angeles physician and former president of the University of Southern California, joined with numerous lay men and women to form a new church. Widney suggested the name "Church of the Nazarene," because he said it identified the ministry with the toiling masses of common people for whom Jesus lived and died. The new church in Los Angeles prospered. In 1898 there were two new congregations in the greater San Francisco area. Widney also departed that year and returned briefly to the Methodist church before forming his own independent congregation. From 1903 on, Bresee began a process of systematic church planting, and by 1907 there were congregations of the Church of the Nazarene up and down the West Coast and as far east as Illinois. In 1907, Bresee led the Church of the Nazarene into a union with another Wesleyan-holiness denomination, the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, a similar group that originated in New England and extended from Nova Scotia, down New England and the Middle Atlantic states, and westward to Iowa. Meeting in Chicago for their First General Assembly, the two groups formalized their merger, adopting the name Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene and electing two general superintendents (bishops)—one from the western group and one from the eastern body. Bresee was the first general superintendent elected, and he was soon joined by H. F. Reynolds of Brooklyn as the second one. The following year, at Pilot Point, Texas, the Second General Assembly of the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene was held and a southern body, the Holiness Church of Christ, merged with the Pentecostal Nazarenes. E. P. Ellyson of Texas was elected to join Bresee and Reynolds on the Board of General Superintendents. Bresee served as the senior general superintendent of the church until his death in 1915. During these years, Bresee continued serving as pastor of Los Angeles First Church of the Nazarene until 1911, when he retired from that position. And he edited the Nazarene Messenger, a large weekly paper, from 1898 until 1912. Through the paper, he rallied his people and knit strong familial bonds among the Nazarenes. When a group of women wanted to create a Bible school in Los Angeles,