The People's Methodist Church
Born in a one-room cabin in Ashe County, North Carolina, Green became an educator and, following a high-profile religious conversion, a prominent and fiery Methodist Episcopal Church South minister and evangelist.The college remained non-denominational while promoting a distinctively Wesleyan-Holiness view on entire sanctification, with Methodist Evangelist and Holiness pamphleteer John R. Church as its first board chairman.Conservative and anti-Socialist Green decried the love of wealth and regularly criticized prominent American religious institutions, as Communist sympathizers during this period were prone to do for vastly different reasons.The EMC had a similar origin with a prominent pastor and revivalist (J. H. Hamblen) at the helm who left the Methodist Church on matters of conscience and doctrine.In 1960, the EMC and another Wesleyan-Holiness body associated with higher education, the Evangel Church (headed by Azusa Pacific College president C. P. Haggard), had come together to form a new California District.