The Unity of All Believers (Come-Outism)

Daniel S. Warner experienced what he understood as entire sanctification in 1877 while serving in the Churches of God associated with the tradition of John Winebrenner, and within a year he had concluded that this body, too, functioned as a sect, holding its own creed and membership rolls in ways he judged incompatible with the New Testament church's original, undivided unity.

In 1881, at a gathering in Beaver Dam, Indiana, Warner and a small group of associates launched what they insisted was a reformation movement rather than a new denomination, publishing the Gospel Trumpet as their chief organizing tool in place of any formal governing structure, conference system, or ordained hierarchy.

Warner taught that the visible unity Christ had established among believers had been lost through centuries of denominational division, each new sect adding another wall, and that this unity would be restored only as sanctified believers came out from under every sectarian name, human creed, and formal membership roll and recognized one another simply as the church, the same plain name, Church of God, that the movement adopted for itself, intended as a description of what it believed the whole body of the truly sanctified already constituted rather than as a denominational brand competing against others for the title.

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.