Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)

Heritage

It began as an eight-member Christian Union at Barney Creek, Monroe County, Tennessee in 1886 under R. G. Spurling, seeking Christian unity beyond creeds. The 1896 Shearer Schoolhouse revival in Cherokee County, North Carolina brought sanctification and speaking in tongues — a full decade before Azusa Street, a fact the church cherishes. A. J. Tomlinson joined in 1903 and led the growing movement, which took the Church of God title in 1907 and settled its headquarters at Cleveland, Tennessee; after Tomlinson's removal in 1923, the body continued under new leadership while his following became the Church of God of Prophecy. RCMS 2020 counts 5,921 US congregations.

Theological family

Trinitarian holiness-Pentecostal: justification, sanctification, and baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by tongues, with divine healing and premillennial expectation — the classic three-blessing Southern Pentecostal pattern, held with evangelical seriousness.

Who decides what

Episcopal for a Pentecostal body: an International General Assembly, an executive committee headed by a general overseer, and state and regional overseers with real authority in appointing pastors. The General Assembly has met since 1906.

What a first-time visitor would find

From southern gospel to contemporary worship depending on the congregation, with the Appalachian revival inheritance never far below the surface: expectant singing, shouted praise where the Spirit and the congregation are willing, prayer for healing, and altar response as the sermon's intended destination.

What it has always cared about

Its pre-Azusa revival memory; Appalachia as a mother region; Lee University and its schools in Cleveland; world missions that have made the global church vastly larger than the American one; and the long discipline of distinguishing itself politely from every other Church of God.

Its gift to the wider church

Proof that Pentecost did not need a city: the fire fell on a mountain schoolhouse ten years before Azusa Street, and this body carried mountain revival into a communion spanning the globe.

Commonly confused with

Endlessly, with the other Churches of God — the Church of God of Prophecy shares its entire history to 1923 and is a separate body since; the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) is a holiness body that is not Pentecostal; the Church of God (Mountain Assembly) is a separate 1906 Appalachian body; and the Church of God in Christ is the historically Black Memphis-based Pentecostal denomination. The parenthetical hometown exists precisely for this.

Range of views inside it

Range in worship style from traditional revivalism to contemporary; in how formally holiness expectations are taught; and between its American congregations and a much larger international church.

Where Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) churches are on the map

2 Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) congregations appear on The Church Map, across 2 states.

• Alabama — 1
• Virginia — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 1994 — The Memphis Miracle

  The all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America dissolved itself at Memphis in October 1994 and was refounded the next day as the interracial Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America, with COGIC's leadership central to the new body. In the middle of the proceedings, a white pastor knelt and washed the feet of a Black bishop while the assembly wept — the moment participants themselves called the Memphis Miracle.

  The movement born interracial at Azusa in 1906, segregated for eight decades, publicly repented and rejoined itself in the city where COGIC was born.