Charles Harrison Mason

Charles Harrison Mason and Charles Price Jones built the Church of God in Christ together out of a shared conviction that Holiness preaching had grown too comfortable, that conversion alone was not the same as the deeper experience of sanctification the two men believed scripture also promised. Their Mississippi Holiness congregation, expelled from its Baptist association for preaching that doctrine, incorporated under the Church of God in Christ name in 1897, and the two led it jointly for a decade. What ended the partnership was a trip Mason took alone. In 1907 he traveled to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles and returned to Mississippi convinced that speaking in tongues marked a further baptism in the Holy Spirit that Christians should actively seek. Jones rejected the teaching, and the two men split, each keeping a share of the congregations; Mason retained legal control of the Church of God in Christ name and led its Pentecostal wing forward. That legal incorporation turned out to matter beyond the denomination's own membership. Because few Pentecostal bodies of any race held formal denominational status in the movement's first years, and because Mason was willing to ordain across racial lines at a time when doing so was unusual, a number of white ministers who went on to found their own Pentecostal denominations were first ordained through the Church of God in Christ. Under Mason's leadership, which continued until his death in 1961, the church grew from that single Mississippi split into one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the country, and its emphasis on sanctification, Spirit baptism and an expressive, musically rich style of worship remains recognizably descended from the theology Mason brought back from Los Angeles in 1907.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

During the First World War, Mason publicly held that Christian nonresistance forbade military service, and he directed Church of God in Christ ministers and members to seek conscientious objector status under the 1917 Selective Service Act, a documented wartime stance distinct from the denominational split with Charles Price Jones and the 1907 Azusa Street trip that occupy his first article. That preaching, combined with the unfamiliar and racially mixed worship the young Pentecostal movement practiced, drew the attention of the wartime Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, which opened a file on him, a documented federal surveillance distinct from anything connected to his earlier ordination disputes with Jones.

In 1918 Mason was jailed at Lexington, Mississippi, on the accusation that his preaching against the war amounted to disloyalty, even though he had also sold war bonds to support the war effort, a documented and seemingly contradictory federal response distinct from the internal church politics his first article traces. He was released without conviction, and the episode did not end his ministry or his willingness to preach nonresistance again in later conflicts.

That the same bishop remembered for a decade-long partnership with Jones and a decisive 1907 trip to Los Angeles was also, within the same movement's first years, jailed by his own government for teaching that Christian nonresistance overrode a wartime draft, marks Mason's 1918 arrest as a documented case where a denomination's theological conviction collided directly with federal wartime authority rather than remaining a matter of internal church dispute.