Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship

Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship belongs to the Pentecostal (Trinitarian) family of churches.

Governance: episcopal.

Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship reports 109 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).

A Black-founded church from 1889 Arkansas that taught its people, against the whole weight of the age, that the saints of the Bible looked like them.

Heritage

William Christian, born into slavery in Mississippi in 1856 and later a Baptist preacher in Arkansas, founded the Church of the Living God at Wrightsville, Arkansas in 1889 — seventeen years before Azusa Street, making it one of the earliest American denominations founded by a Black man without descent from a white parent body. Christian organized his congregations as "temples" under the motto Christian Workers for Fellowship, and taught pointedly that many figures of Scripture, from David to Job, were of Black lineage — doctrine aimed squarely at the racist religion of his day. The church spread through the mid-South and Southwest. RCMS 2020 counts 109 congregations.

Theological family

A holiness body with its own distinctive accents, usually grouped with the Pentecostal family though it stands nearer the holiness side: new birth and holy living are central, and reference works have long noted its teaching that genuine speaking in tongues means actual human languages. Its ordinances are baptism by immersion, footwashing, and the Lord's Supper — historically observed with water and unleavened bread.

Who decides what

Episcopal: a chief bishop and general assembly over the connection of temples, an order Christian himself established and his family and successors carried forward.

What a first-time visitor would find

Worship in the Black church tradition with a holiness center: congregational song, testimony, preaching, and the ordinances — including footwashing — kept with seriousness.

What it has always cared about

The dignity of Black believers asserted as doctrine, decades before academic theology took up the theme; fellowship as an organizing principle, written into the church's own motto; and endurance from Reconstruction-era Arkansas to the present.

Its gift to the wider church

It gave American Christianity one of its earliest institutional declarations that the Bible is not a white book — a corrective the whole church needed and mostly refused, preached from Arkansas in 1889.

Commonly confused with

With the House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth — a separate body founded through Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate around 1903, despite the overlapping titles; and with the Church of God in Christ, the far larger Memphis-based Pentecostal denomination.

Range of views inside it

A small connection with a strong internal identity; variety shows mainly in locale and congregation size rather than doctrine.

A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of an individual temple, including how the historic ordinance practices are kept today. Overlapping "Church of the Living God" titles defeat name-based matching, so our data cannot reliably distinguish these bodies. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "congregations of this body typically…" and yield to the church's own materials.

Sources: Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Estrelda Y. Alexander, IVP Academic) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)

Where Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship churches are on the map

1 Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

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