Why Simpson Never Called Us a Church

Back to the Branches (part Two)

When A.B. Simpson gathered the first believers into little fellowship groups back in 1887, he didn’t call them churches. He called them branches. Outside of the Gospel Tabernacle in New York.

At the time it was mostly practical — a way to gather people across denominational lines without competing with anyone’s home congregation. But the word he reached for carries more weight than he probably knew. “Branch” isn’t a neutral word in Scripture. It belongs to one of the oldest images in the Bible, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it running through Simpson’s whole vision for the Alliance.

Not a Church. A Branch.
Jesus said it plainly: “I am the true vine, and you are the branches” (John 15:5). Most of us hear that as a private devotional line — me, abiding in Jesus, one branch at a time. There’s nothing wrong with hearing it that way. There’s something wrong with hearing only that way.

In Israel’s Scriptures, the vine was never just about one person’s spiritual life. It’s the standing image for the whole covenant people — Psalm 80’s vine carried out of Egypt, Isaiah’s ruined vineyard, Jeremiah’s choice vine gone wild. (If the word “Israel” itself raises questions for you here, I’ve written more on how the Bible actually defines that peoplehood.) When Jesus calls himself the true vine, he’s saying: I am what Israel was always called to be, and I’m gathering a people whose whole life now flows from being joined to me.

There’s a second layer, and it’s a little more fun. Matthew tells us Jesus grew up in Nazareth so the prophets’ words could be fulfilled — that “he would be called a Nazarene” (Matt 2:23). Scholars have puzzled for centuries over which prophecy Matthew means, and the best answer turns out to be a pun. Natzeret, the town’s name, echoes two Hebrew words at once: netzer, “the shoot” Isaiah promised would grow from the stump of Jesse (Isa 11:1), and notzrim, “watchmen,” the ones Jeremiah promised would one day call Israel home (Jer 31:6). Jesus of Nazareth is both — shoot and watchman — growing out of a nowhere town whose name was hiding a promise the whole time.

So when the earliest believers get labeled “the sect of the Nazarenes” in Acts 24:5, it isn’t an insult invented from nowhere. It’s the shoot-people and the watchmen, both in one name — the Jerusalem family of Jesus’s own relatives, carrying his life forward the way a shoot carries the life of an old root.

Grafted In, Not Founded
If John 15 tells the branch where its life comes from, Romans 11 tells it where its manners come from.

Paul takes the same image and turns it toward every non-Jewish believer, gently but firmly: you are a wild olive shoot, grafted in — against nature, by mercy alone — into a tree that was already growing long before you arrived (Rom 11:17, 24). Then comes the warning Paul clearly expected his readers to need: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom 11:18).

It’s worth sitting with how odd Paul’s picture actually is. Olive growers in his world grafted the other direction — good stock onto wild trees, to improve them. Paul flips it on purpose. Gentile inclusion isn’t an upgrade we brought to the tree. It’s a mercy that shouldn’t have happened, given anyway.

Here’s a lovely footnote to that mercy that isn’t even in Paul’s text but sits right underneath it. Shavuot, the feast now remembered as the day Israel received the Torah, has an older layer too — it’s the traditional day for reading the book of Ruth. A Moabite woman, about as “wild branch” as it gets, grafted in so completely that she becomes the great-grandmother of King David (Ruth 4:17–22) — inside the family line generations before Isaiah’s shoot even grows from Jesse’s stump. Grace reaching back before the promise ever needed defending.

The natural branches, Paul insists, haven’t been discarded either. “God has the power to graft them in again” (11:23); “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (11:29). So the wild branch lives with two things held together at once: wonder that it was ever included, and respect for the branches it was grafted in alongside. Nothing belongs to it by right. Everything it has, it draws from the root.

Don’t Cut the Shoots
There’s an old rabbinic story about a brilliant teacher, Elisha ben Abuya, who wandered so far from the faith of his fathers that the tradition remembers him with a chilling phrase: he “cut the shoots.” He tore up the young plants in God’s own garden. It became rabbinic shorthand for the worst kind of theological betrayal — severing something living from the root that gave it life.

I’d gently suggest that supersessionism — the old habit of assuming the Church simply replaced Israel — is Christianity’s own version of cutting the shoots. It’s rarely meant maliciously. But underneath it sits an idea we wouldn’t accept anywhere else in our theology: as if one God planted Israel and a separate, unrelated God started the Church. There’s only one God, one garden, one root, one sap running all the way through. Guarding that isn’t a political statement about the modern Middle East. It’s just being faithful to the oldest confession Israel ever made — a confession worth digging into on its own.

Simpson Already Knew This
Here’s the good news: Simpson’s own instincts, read closely, were already reaching for this.

He talked constantly about “Christ in you” — not just Christ dying for us, but Christ living his life through us, the way sap rises through a branch. He read the whole Hebrew Bible as what he beautifully called an “alphabet” for the gospel — Moses, the tabernacle, the manna, the rock, not dead history but living letters spelling out the Messiah before he arrived. And he insisted the Alliance’s “old faith” was never about owning the right institution. It meant standing in a long, scattered line of faithful witnesses who kept the gospel at the center when the systems around them didn’t. (Paul, on the other side of that same struggle before Damascus, understood exactly what it cost to defend that center — a story worth its own telling.)

Most tellingly, the Alliance’s very first mission strategy put outreach to the Jewish people first — not as prophecy trivia, but as covenant order. At the 1912 annual meeting, Simpson opened the missionary reports with Palestine, “the divine order,” ahead of every other field on earth. He got the sequence right, even without all the Hebrew behind it that we now have access to.

And this is where Simpson’s “Coming King” language does its real work. It was never meant as a chart to decode or a countdown to run. It was a summons — a way of saying history has a direction, the nations matter, and we live now in the tension between the King who has already come and the King who’s coming to finish the job. That tension is what sent people out to the ends of the earth. It still does.

You can see the pattern alive in Alliance history, not just its theology. Michele Nardi, an early Italian believer touched by this same Word-and-Spirit witness, never left his own Presbyterian pulpit — and yet the ripples from his life helped seed a Pentecostal movement that took root as far away as Brazil, and eventually back home again in his own Italy. Nobody planned that. That’s what a sent people looks like: fruit borne further out than the sower ever gets to see.

Back to the Branches
None of this asks the Alliance to import a stack of new Hebrew vocabulary and call it a renewal. It’s simpler than that: recognizing what we already are, once our deepest instincts get read the way Scripture actually reads them. We are branches — wild branches grafted in by mercy, gathered by God’s own voice, sent out as witnesses to that same mercy.

That’s not nostalgia. It’s a summons. The root supports us. Christ lives in us. The Spirit sends us. And the nations are still waiting on a people who remember they were shown mercy — a people ready to help “Bring Back the King.”

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.