The practical tension inside come-outism showed itself within a generation. A movement that refused formal membership rolls, ordination credentials, or a governing assembly still needed some way to coordinate camp meetings, missionaries, publishing and, eventually, its own Bible college, and through the twentieth century the Church of God, Anderson, developed conventions, a general assembly, and ministerial credentialing much like any other denomination, while continuing to insist it held no formal creed beyond the New Testament itself and no denominational name beyond the plain description it started with.
The movement is easily confused with the many other unrelated bodies that also use the name Church of God, including the much larger Pentecostal Church of God of Cleveland, Tennessee, which shares no institutional history with Warner's reformation. What survived intact from 1881 was the underlying doctrine, that sectarian division is itself sin and that entire sanctification carries an obligation to seek visible unity with all other genuine believers regardless of denominational label, a conviction reflected in the church's continuing membership in ecumenical bodies such as the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, an ecumenical impulse embedded in the movement's come-outist origin rather than added to it later.