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.
[2] Denouncing the inroads of theological liberalism on one hand, and the allure of worldly prestige on the other, Green left the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1926.
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.
[4][5] When Green's students required more preaching opportunities than what was available to young ministers in training, a "chain of tabernacles"—the People's Christian Movement—was organized.
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.