The Founding Dispute With the Baptist Tradition

The Church of God in Christ exists because the Baptist tradition would not hold the doctrine its founders came to believe. Charles Harrison Mason and Charles Price Jones were both licensed Baptist ministers in Mississippi in the 1890s, and both began preaching entire sanctification, the Wesleyan holiness teaching that a believer could be made completely free from sin in this life. The Mississippi Baptist State Convention treated the doctrine as a departure from Baptist teaching and pushed both men out around 1896. Rather than abandon the doctrine, Mason organized a new church at Lexington, Mississippi, in 1897, taking the name Church of God in Christ from a phrase in the first letter to the Thessalonians that he said had come to him directly.

For a decade Mason and Jones led the young church together as a Holiness body, until Mason traveled to Los Angeles in 1906 for the Azusa Street Revival and returned convinced that speaking in tongues was the required evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Jones was not convinced, and the disagreement broke the partnership. At the church's 1907 general assembly in Jackson, Mississippi, Jones led the members who rejected the tongues doctrine into what became the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., and Mason reorganized the remaining body as an explicitly Pentecostal church, keeping the Church of God in Christ's original legal name and charter for himself. A single expulsion from the Baptist tradition over sanctification had produced, within a decade, two separate denominations divided again over tongues.