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.