Church of God of Prophecy

Church of God of Prophecy belongs to the Pentecostal (Trinitarian) family of churches.

Governance: episcopal.

Church of God of Prophecy reports 1,614 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).

The continuing church of A. J. Tomlinson — a Church of God that received its distinguishing words from a courtroom, and became one of American Pentecostalism's most racially integrated bodies.

Heritage

This church shares its entire early history with the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) — the 1886 Christian Union, the 1896 Shearer Schoolhouse revival, the 1906 first Assembly — until 1923, when A. J. Tomlinson was removed from oversight and led a continuing minority he regarded as the church's true succession. He led it until his death in 1943; his son Milton A. Tomlinson followed; and in 1952 a Tennessee court assigned the distinguishing designation "of Prophecy" to settle which body could use the undecorated title. From its early decades the church ordained and assembled across racial lines to a degree rare in the Jim Crow South, and it built Fields of the Wood, a biblical monument park in the North Carolina mountains. RCMS 2020 counts 1,614 US congregations.

Theological family

Trinitarian holiness-Pentecostal: justification, sanctification, Spirit baptism evidenced by tongues, divine healing, and a strong emphasis on the visible church — Tomlinson's conviction that The Church of God of the Bible is a discoverable, gatherable body.

Who decides what

Episcopal: a general overseer and international presbyters over a global church, with an International Assembly that historically acts not by majority vote but by consensus — the assembled church waiting until it can agree.

What a first-time visitor would find

Warm Southern Pentecostal worship — congregational singing, shouted praise, concerted prayer, altar response — in congregations that are, notably often, racially and ethnically mixed, in the US as well as across its large international fellowship.

What it has always cared about

Interracial assembly practiced early and kept; the theology of the church as a visible, covenanted people; Fields of the Wood as concrete devotion; sacrificial world missions from a modest American base; and consensus as a governing discipline.

Its gift to the wider church

Two gifts: an integrated Pentecostal witness sustained through the segregated South, and a working demonstration — rare anywhere in Christianity — of a global assembly that governs by consensus rather than by vote.

Commonly confused with

First and always with the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), from which it has been separate since 1923 and with which it shares everything earlier; then with the rest of the Churches of God — Anderson (non-Pentecostal holiness), Mountain Assembly (separate Appalachian body), and the Church of God in Christ (the historically Black Memphis denomination).

Range of views inside it

Range in worship style and language across a very international body; in how the distinctive church-visible teaching is emphasized today; and in local culture from Appalachian mother congregations to immigrant-majority urban churches.

A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of an individual congregation, including its racial composition — the body-level pattern is not a local guarantee. "Church of God" wording defeats name-based matching across this family, so our data cannot reliably distinguish these bodies. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Church of God of Prophecy congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: Church of God of Prophecy — about us (Church of God of Prophecy) · The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)

Where Church of God of Prophecy churches are on the map

9 Church of God of Prophecy congregations appear on The Church Map, across 6 states.

More of the Pentecostal (Trinitarian) story · Find these churches on the map