Charles Harrison Mason, a Split That Built a Denomination

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.