Formal merger negotiations between the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Pilgrim Holiness Church moved through the 1950s and 1960s, and on June 26, 1968, delegates of both bodies completed the union, forming The Wesleyan Church. The merged denomination retained its predecessors' Wesleyan Holiness doctrine, teaching entire sanctification as a second work of grace, and historically required its members to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and membership in secret societies, expectations that have relaxed in some respects over subsequent decades.
The Wesleyan Church is governed through a system of district conferences and a General Conference, led by a Board of General Superintendents, and it ordains both men and women to ministry. Its headquarters relocated over the twentieth century from Marion, Indiana, home to its affiliated Indiana Wesleyan University, through Indianapolis in 1987 to its present offices in Fishers, Indiana, since 2004. By 2011 the denomination reported worldwide Sunday attendance of about 475,000 across more than 5,000 congregations in over 80 countries, with total worldwide membership counted at roughly 368,000, a global reach that today reaches well beyond the church's origins among antislavery Methodists in the American Northeast and Holiness revivalists in the Midwest.