Church of God in Christ

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Church of God in Christ

Largest African American Pentecostal denomination.

African American ministers Charles Harrison Mason and Charles Price Jones founded the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in 1895 in Lexington, Mississippi, in an abandoned cotton gin building. Mason named the church in 1897, claiming that God revealed the name to him as he was walking the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, through a Bible verse: “For ye brethren became followers of the churches of God which in Judea are in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14). In 1897 the church was chartered, with Jones at its head, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Mason and Jones were former Baptist ministers who were expelled from the church for being too closely aligned to the Holiness Movement. Churches in the Holiness tradition are characterized by charismatic leadership, a simple lifestyle, enthusiastic worship that is rich in music, lay participation, and the priority accorded to the experience of baptism in the Holy Ghost.

In March 1907 Mason, along with ministers D. J. Young and J. A. Jeter, traveled to Los Angeles, California, to experience the Azusa Street Revival, led by William Joseph Seymour, where impassioned services and glossolalia (ecstatic speaking in tongues) attracted thousands of people. Today, this occasion is considered the birth of modern-day Pentecostalism. There Mason received the “gift of the Spirit,” as manifested by glossolalia. Mason and Seymour spent time together and became friends. Jones and Jeter split with Mason over the issue of glossolalia, since they felt, unlike Mason, that it was not necessary to validate one's baptism in the Holy Ghost. The split was complicated by legal disputes regarding the ownership of church properties. After these were resolved, Mason controlled the Church of God in Christ, and Jones and his supporters founded the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. in Selma, Alabama. Mason soon afterward became COGIC's senior bishop.

Like the Azusa Street Revival, Mason's church was multiracial. These multiracial revivals and churches were regarded as a symbol of eminent eschaton, or last thing, looking toward the time mentioned in the New Testament “when all nations shall come to Christ.” Mason ordained many white ministers, and from 1909 to 1914 the number of white and black Churches of God in Christ was roughly equivalent. Many white members split off, however, to form independent churches or to join churches of the Assembly of God, a white Pentecostal organization founded in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914.

Many Church of God in Christ cognate organizations were founded—such as the church's youth organization founded by Ozro Thruston Jones, Sr., in 1914. This growth was accelerated in 1917 when Mason traveled with Seymour to Washington, D.C., to hold a revival. The church founded a foreign mission board in 1926. It also founded a newspaper, The Whole Truth, edited by D. J. Young. Mason's wife Elise Washington Mason, whom he married in 1943, later became the paper's editor in chief as well as secretary of the home and foreign mission boards. To establish a church hierarchy, Mason consecrated five people to the office of bishop through the laying on of hands in 1933; one of the new bishops was Jones.

Understanding the importance of women in his church, Mason established a national supervisor of women for the denomination. The first was Mother Lizzie Roberson, who was succeeded by Mother Lilliam Coffey and then Mother Annie L. Bailey.

By 1933 the Church of God in Christ had spread to the forty-eight states. Part of its meteoric success can be attributed to the appeal of the passion and intensity of its worship services. As a sign of its dynamism and lay involvement, some attribute to COGIC the popularizing of congregation members shouting “Yes, Lord!” or “Hallelujah” during worship services. Mason himself refers to the exclamation “Yes, Lord!” as “the Church of God in Christ national anthem.” He describes a typical service by writing that “as the enthusiasm [of a service] grows, more and more people shout ‘Yes' and ‘Yes, Lord' as they feel moved” and that worshipers often come “out into the aisle to spin about with back bent, feet pumping in place, and hands raised high, fingers spread.”

In 1945 the church constructed a headquarters called Mason Temple in Memphis. At the time it was the largest building in the country owned by African Americans. The street in front of the building was renamed Mason Street in honor of Bishop Mason. At this church Martin Luther King, Jr., made his last speech, in support of a sanitation workers' strike, on the evening before his 1968 assassination. The building is now a national historical landmark.

At the death of Bishop Mason in 1961, Jones became the church's senior bishop. Aside from being an early youth organizer in the church, he was a pastor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bishop Jones, with J. E. Bryant, helped codify the official doctrines of the church by writing The Official Manual of the Church of God in Christ.

He was succeeded by Bishop J. O. Patterson Sr., who was Mason's son-in-law. Patterson established the C. H. Mason Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1970. Patterson changed the tradition that ministers should wear suits and ties during worship services, replacing suits with more formal ecclesiastical vestments. In 1984 he also helped established the World Fellowship of Black Pentecostal Churches. Bishop Louis Henry Ford succeeded him in December 1989.

The Church of God in Christ is today the largest African American Pentecostal denomination and one of the influential branches of the international Pentecostal movement sparked by the Azusa Street Revival. COGIC has more than 30,000 churches in the United States, with over 5.5 million members, as well as another two million members abroad.

See also Baptists.

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