Church of God (Anderson, Indiana)

The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) began as a protest not against a particular church's discrimination or doctrine, but against denominational organization itself. Daniel Sidney Warner (1842-1895), an ordained minister of the Church of God (General Eldership), a body descended from the German Reformed evangelist John Winebrenner, had embraced the Holiness movement's teaching of entire sanctification, a second, post-conversion work of grace that cleanses the believer's heart. In October 1881, when the Northern Indiana Eldership rejected reforms Warner proposed, he and five companions withdrew at its meeting in Beaver Dam, Indiana.

Warner did not intend to found another denomination. Drawing on Holiness-movement suspicion of church hierarchy, he taught that denominational structures divided Christians who should instead recognize their unity simply as believers in Christ, a stance the movement described as coming out of Babylon, an allusion to Revelation's call to leave a corrupt religious system. He carried this message through his periodical, the Gospel Trumpet, and through camp-meeting revivalism across the Midwest, and though the movement he began has functioned, in practice, as a denomination ever since, it has never adopted a formal creed or membership roll, holding that living faith in Christ, not enrollment on a church register, is what makes someone part of the church.

What began with six people at Beaver Dam grew, through Warner's revivalist preaching and the wide circulation of the Gospel Trumpet, into congregations across the American Midwest and beyond within a generation. In 1906 the movement's publishing operation relocated to Anderson, Indiana, which became the center of its administrative and educational life; Anderson University, and the seminary now called Anderson University School of Theology, both grew from Bible-training schools founded to prepare its ministers.

The movement, whose members historically preferred simply to be called Christians rather than adherents of a denomination, today operates its international offices under the name Church of God Ministries, headquartered in Anderson. It reports congregations in roughly 90 countries, with a 2020 count of about 7,800 congregations and 887,000 members worldwide, though because the movement maintains no formal membership rolls, such figures are necessarily estimates rather than an audited count. It is counted among the classic denominations of the American Holiness movement, alongside bodies such as the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, and the Church of the Nazarene, sharing their emphasis on entire sanctification while remaining doctrinally and organizationally distinct from each.