The history of The Wesleyan Church in Latin America isn’t only a missionary-origin story of a North American denomination carrying the gospel southward. It’s also a story of local agency and leadership within Latin American communities who received the message of holiness, embodied it within their own contexts and through their faith, leadership and missionary vision gave the church deep indigenous and popular roots (grassroots) in the region.
The arrival of what would later become The Wesleyan Church in Latin America wasn’t the direct work of the denomination constituted in 1968. Its missionary roots in the region can be traced through several earlier Wesleyan-Holiness bodies that eventually became part of its historical heritage. One of these roots reaches back to 1900, when Willis Brand, a young pastor from Pomona, California, read a pamphlet about South America titled “The Forgotten Continent” and sensed a divine call to take the gospel to that region.
From then on, Brand publicly shared his missionary vocation and in 1902, during the annual assembly of the Holiness Church, he was commissioned as a missionary to Peru. In April 1903, he married Martha Dillworth and in September they sailed from the port of San Francisco. Finally, they arrived at the port of Callao in November 1903, marking the beginning of a missionary work that would eventually take deep root among the northern Peru populations.
The Brands arrived in South America amid a prolonged revival cycle and the missionary awakening from the late 19th century onward inspired various churches connected to the holiness movement. Among them were the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which began its work in Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela between 1895 and 1897; the Free Methodist Church, present in the Dominican Republic since 1889; and the Church of the Nazarene, whose work among Mexican communities in Los Angeles began in 1903.
Peru wasn’t the only missionary stream that would eventually become part of the Wesleyan historical inheritance in Latin America. A second important line developed in Guatemala through the Holiness Christian Church. On October 23, 1912, K. Hawley Jackson and J. M. Taylor undertook a missionary journey connected with the establishment of the denomination’s Central American work. That ministry became established in Guatemala and continued despite the subsequent United States’ denominational reorganizations. In 1919, three conferences of the Holiness Christian Church united with the International Apostolic Holiness Church, forming the International Holiness Church. In October 1922, the International Holiness Church received the Pilgrim Church, adopting the name Pilgrim Holiness Church. Throughout these organizational transitions, the Guatemalan missionary work remained and eventually became part of The Wesleyan Church’s historical heritage.
This developing missionary movement also acquired an important Hispanic and Caribbean dimension. Among the earliest Hispanic ministers within this Wesleyan-Holiness tradition was Rev. José R. Figueroa, a Cuban minister ministerially trained in the United States. In December 1919, Figueroa arrived in Jamaica as the first missionary of the International Holiness Church and began his ministry through a small mission in Kingston. By January 1925, a contemporary interdenominational missionary directory again listed Rev. J. R. Figueroa in Santiago de Cuba in connection with the International Holiness Church. His trans-Caribbean ministry provides early evidence that Latin American believers weren’t merely recipients of North American missionary activity. They were becoming ministers, missionaries and pioneers who crossed national and cultural boundaries to participate actively in the expansion of the Holiness message.
A third stream developed in Mexico. In 1920, Francisco and Nettie Soltero were commissioned by the Pilgrim Church of California, under the leadership of Seth C. Rees, to begin missionary work in Mexico. They arrived in San Luis Potosí on January 27, 1920, where they established what would become one of the most significant centers of the movement’s ministry in the country. When the Pilgrim Church united with the International Holiness Church in 1922, this mission in Mexico became part of the newly constituted Pilgrim Holiness Church.
During the following decades, the Holiness Church concentrated its work in northern Peru, particularly among the Indigenous and mestizo populations of the Jequetepeque Valley. The Pilgrim Holiness Church, for its part, initially established itself in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and later extended its work to Ciudad Valles. However, it was among the Indigenous peoples of the Huasteca Potosina that its ministry experienced its greatest awakening and achieved notable expansion.
In both Mexico and Peru, missionaries from the United States planted the first seeds of the church. Their initial strategies included distributing tracts from door to door, visiting various towns, and even establishing a small clinic and the English School in Chiclayo, Peru, both founded by Sister Isabel Baker beginning in 1915.
Nevertheless, the decisive task of expansion of the missional work came through local trust networks within the Indigenous/mestizo leadership. Evangelizing and establishing churches fell to courageous itinerant preachers: indigenous and mestizo lay leaders, without formal theological training and of humble economic condition, yet driven by the fire of the Spirit. They proclaimed a practical and simple gospel with profound ethical implications. As a result of their labor, by 1930 nearly 10 holiness congregations had been organized in the Peruvian department of Lambayeque; and by 1940, about 45 churches and preaching points in the Huasteca Potosina, Mexico.
In the history of the work in Mexico, the figure of the Indigenous leader Alejo Castañeda stands out. Several months before the arrival of the Solteros, he had already organized a group of believers in a village of the Huasteca. The Castañeda family played a decisive role in the establishment and expansion of the Pilgrim Church in the country. They were joined by a group of courageous and committed young people, among whom were Juan López Portillo, Salvador Ponce, Jesús Aguilar, and David Mascorro. Indeed, the ministry developed by the Solteros during that first decade would not have been possible without the contacts, support networks and evangelistic work of Indigenous and mestizo laypeople.
A similar process took place during the early decades of the Holiness Church in Peru, whose growth likewise depended to a great extent on Indigenous and mestizo leadership. Melchor Vásquez, one of the first young converts through the ministry of the Greer missionaries, together with Santos Urrutia, assumed responsibility for the work in Chiclayo when the Greers returned to the United States. The two formed a dynamic ministry team that fostered the expansion of the church toward Pomalca and Tumán.
Another outstanding figure was the itinerant evangelist Juan Tarrillo, considered “the greatest evangelist of the Holiness Church.” Converted to Christianity in 1924, only a few months later he was already distinguished as a tireless colporteur — an evangelistic distributor of Christian literature — whose work extended through Pacasmayo, Ferreñafe, Guadalupe, La Viña, and Saltur.
Consequently, the roots of today’s Wesleyan Church in these Latin American regions were deeply Indigenous and grassroots. Its first congregations were formed largely among families of humble means — agricultural workers, tradespeople and communities often located at the margins of social power. From those communities emerged lay leaders whose faith, courage and evangelistic labor gave lasting shape to the church. Their story reminds us that the Wesleyan witness in Latin America was not merely planted from abroad; it was nurtured, expanded and made local by believers who became protagonists of the holiness movements in their own lands.
Their story continues to remind today’s Wesleyan Church that the mission of God is most deeply rooted when local believers are trusted and empowered to lead it in their own communities.
A companion article (on August 21) will consider another essential dimension of this same history: the women whose teaching, preaching, pastoral visitation, musical instruction, medical service and institutional leadership helped consolidate the holiness churches in Latin America.
Rev. Edinson Camacho is pastor of Iglesia Nueva Generación in Duncan, South Carolina, and REDIL director (Red de Iglesias Latinas) in the upstate of South Carolina.
*The article is based on “La historia de La Iglesia Wesleyana en América Latina: 120 años expandiendo la misión” published by Wesleyan Publishing House in Fishers, IN.
Resources:
International Apostolic Holiness Church. “Revised List of Preachers,” 1918 in “International Holiness Church,” (1882–1922) collection. Wesleyan Church Archives.“Pacific Bible College” in “Nazarene Messenger” 8, n. 11 (September 10, 1903).
Plunkett, A. Harlin. “Minutes of the Seventeenth Session of the Indiana Annual Conference of the Holiness Christian Church.” (Sullivan, IN, September 9–12, 1912).
Sepúlveda, Darío Escobar y Paula Gabriela Núñez. “El establecimiento y expansión de la misión evangélica The Christian and Missionary Alliance en el sur de Chile” (1897–1905) in “Cultura y Religión,” 14, n. 2 (2020).
