Church of God in Christ

Heritage

Founded by Charles Harrison Mason, son of formerly enslaved parents, as a holiness body in 1897 — the name came to him walking a street in Little Rock — and reorganized at Memphis in 1907 after Mason received Spirit baptism at the Azusa Street revival. Memphis remains its seat; Mason Temple there is where Dr. King preached the "Mountaintop" sermon the night before he was killed.

Theological family

Trinitarian Pentecostal in the Wesleyan-holiness line: salvation, sanctification as a work of grace, and baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. The church's official doctrine sits squarely in historic trinitarian Christianity.

Who decides what

Episcopal: a Presiding Bishop and General Board over jurisdictional bishops, each jurisdiction holding its churches — a structure with roots in Mason's lifetime of personal oversight. Women serve powerfully through an organized Women's Department with its own leadership line; COGIC historically ordains men to the pastorate, and the taxonomy records rather than argues that boundary.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor should expect worship with the throttle open: choirs, Hammond organ, shouting, dancing, tarrying at the altar, testimony — and should also expect deep reverence, consecration and fasting; COGIC holiness is joy and discipline in the same service. Baptism by immersion, the Lord's Supper, and foot washing are practiced.

What it has always cared about

Holiness of life; the power of the Spirit; consecrated prayer and fasting; and endurance — the church grew from a fellowship of the formerly enslaved and their children into a global communion while carrying, for a decade, credentialing for hundreds of white ministers no other body would ordain.

Its gift to the wider church

The sound of American worship. Gospel music's pioneers were disproportionately COGIC — Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Andraé Crouch, the Winans, the Clark Sisters, the Hawkins family — and through them the choirs, rhythms and freedom that now mark worship in every tradition, far beyond Pentecostalism. Add to that a piece of church-history grace: many founders of the (white) Assemblies of God held their first credentials under Bishop Mason.

Commonly confused with

With the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) and the Church of God of Prophecy — different bodies, two of them in different families. Also with the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite, an Anabaptist body sharing three words and nothing else.

Range of views inside it

Real range congregation to congregation in worship style, in how holiness standards are taught, and in engagement with charismatic renewal currents; jurisdictional culture varies. On women's ordination to the pastorate the official position and local practice have their own long conversation inside the church.

Where Church of God in Christ churches are on the map

917 Church of God in Christ congregations appear on The Church Map, across 45 states.

• California — 102
• Texas — 92
• Illinois — 57
• Florida — 53
• Georgia — 53
• North Carolina — 44
• New York — 39
• Michigan — 36
• Pennsylvania — 32
• Virginia — 31

Moments this body was part of

• 1897–1907 — The Church of God in Christ

  Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ as a holiness body in 1897; after receiving Spirit baptism at Azusa Street he reorganized it in Memphis in 1907 as a Pentecostal church. Because COGIC was for years the only incorporated Pentecostal body able to credential clergy, hundreds of white ministers — including many future Assemblies of God founders — held ordination under Bishop Mason.

  For nearly a decade, much of white American Pentecostalism was ordained by a Black bishop — a fact both streams are still learning to remember together.

• 1906–1909 — Azusa Street

  In a former livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a revival led by William J. Seymour — a Black holiness preacher, the son of formerly enslaved parents — ran for three years and launched global Pentecostalism, now counted in the hundreds of millions. Black, white, Latino and Asian worshipers prayed together under a Black pastor in Jim Crow America; the participant Frank Bartleman wrote that at Azusa "the color line was washed away in the blood."

  Modern Christianity's fastest-growing stream began as an interracial prayer meeting led by the son of enslaved people. Its later divisions were a departure from its birth, not an expression of it.

• 1914 — The Assemblies of God organizes

  About three hundred Pentecostal ministers met at Hot Springs, Arkansas in April 1914 to bring order and cooperation to the scattered revival — founding what became the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world, with a missions force that today serves in over 250 countries and territories.

• 1916–1970 — The Great Migration replants the Black church

  Six million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern and western cities, and the Black church moved with them — historic congregations swelled, storefront churches by the thousands opened, COGIC became a national church, and in Chicago Thomas A. Dorsey fused blues and sacred song into gospel music, which reshaped the worship of the whole American church.

  Gospel music — born in the migrating Black church — may be the most widely shared gift any American tradition has given the others.

• 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.