Pentecostal Church of God
Pentecostal Church of God belongs to the Pentecostal (Trinitarian) family of churches.
Governance: presbyterian.
Pentecostal Church of God reports 990 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
Organized in Chicago in 1919 as a home for Pentecostal ministers who wanted fellowship without heavy machinery — now nearly a thousand congregations, with no relation to the many Churches of God.
Heritage
The Pentecostal Church of God was organized at Chicago in 1919 — first under the title Pentecostal Assemblies of the U.S.A. — by ministers of the revival who wanted a cooperative fellowship with light central structure; the early paper The Pentecostal Messenger knit it together. It took its present title in the 1920s, spent most of a century headquartered at Joplin, Missouri, and relocated in recent years to Bedford, Texas. RCMS 2020 counts 990 congregations, with historic strength through the lower Midwest and Southwest.
Theological family
Trinitarian, evangelical Pentecostal: salvation in Christ, baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by tongues, divine healing, and Christ's imminent return — classic Pentecostal doctrine of the Assemblies of God type, held by a separate and older-named fellowship.
Who decides what
A general conference with an elected general bishop and officials, district officials over regions, and local congregations that call their own pastors — conference oversight in service of essentially self-directing churches.
What a first-time visitor would find
Revival-toned Pentecostal worship ranging to contemporary: congregational singing or worship band, concerted prayer, prayer for the sick, tongues and interpretation received in order, and preaching toward response.
What it has always cared about
Fellowship over machinery, from the founding onward; evangelism and church planting through the American heartland; world missions; and ministerial training through its Bible institutes.
Its gift to the wider church
One more demonstration that the revival's center held without a headquarters-heavy church: a century-old fellowship that kept Pentecostal doctrine steady while letting local churches breathe.
Commonly confused with
Persistently with the Churches of God — Cleveland, Anderson, Mountain Assembly, the Church of God in Christ — to none of which it is related; the shared wording is coincidence of revival-era vocabulary. Also with the Assemblies of God, which it resembles doctrinally.
Range of views inside it
Range in worship style from traditional revivalism to contemporary, and in congregation size; the doctrinal core is uniform and uncontested.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of an individual congregation. "Pentecostal Church of God" wording overlaps many unaffiliated congregation names, and our name-based matching cannot settle affiliation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "PCG congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Pentecostal Church of God — about (Pentecostal Church of God) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
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