Church of God in Christ Beliefs

1. What the Church of God in Christ Is

The Church of God in Christ, usually abbreviated COGIC, is a Holiness Pentecostal denomination founded by Charles Harrison Mason, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, and governed by bishops. Its doctrine holds three works of grace: justification by faith, entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace, and the baptism in the Holy Ghost with speaking in other tongues as the initial evidence. COGIC is Trinitarian, practises water baptism by immersion, the Lord's Supper and foot washing as its three ordinances, and traces its Pentecostal experience to the Azusa Street revival of 1906 and 1907.

Reference works including Encyclopaedia Britannica describe COGIC as the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States and the largest of the historically Black Pentecostal bodies. The denomination has congregations across the United States and, by its own reporting, in many other countries, an international headquarters at Mason Temple in Memphis, a Holy Convocation that has gathered since 1907, and a seminary bearing Mason's name within the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

The description of COGIC as the largest American Pentecostal denomination follows Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on the Church of God in Christ. The membership figure most often repeated for COGIC, around 6.5 million, is the denomination's own reported number rather than an independently audited or survey-based count. Denominational self-reports of this kind are compiled differently from population surveys and the two are not directly comparable, so this guide describes COGIC's size qualitatively.

Where COGIC Sits Among Pentecostals

Most American Pentecostal bodies are congregational or loosely presbyterian in government, with local churches owning their property, calling their own pastors, and sending delegates to a fellowship that credentials ministers without ruling dioceses. COGIC runs the other way. It has bishops with real jurisdiction, a hierarchy of appointment, a body of denominational law, and clerical titles that a visitor from a Catholic parish would find legible on sight. Our guide to Pentecostalism and its origins covers the movement as a whole, including the Azusa Street revival and the doctrine of Spirit baptism in general; this page covers the one large Pentecostal body that kept an episcopate and a Holiness rule of life.

Names That Get Confused

Several denominations carry similar names and are separate bodies. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) grew from the Appalachian Holiness revival and shares COGIC's doctrine without sharing its history or leadership. Church of God in Christ, International was formed in 1969 by ministers who left COGIC after the reorganization of 1968. The Churches of Christ come from the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement and hold no Pentecostal doctrine at all. Oneness Pentecostal bodies, which reject the doctrine of the Trinity in favour of a modalist account of God, are a separate stream that COGIC has never belonged to; see our guide to Oneness Pentecostalism for that division.

2. Charles Harrison Mason and the Founding

Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ, and the body's doctrine follows the shape of his own religious life. Mason was born in Tennessee in 1866 to parents who had been enslaved, grew up in Black Baptist churches in Tennessee and Arkansas, and was licensed to preach as a young man. He read the autobiography of Amanda Berry Smith, the Black Holiness evangelist, and took up the Wesleyan teaching that God can cleanse a believer's heart of the inward inclination to sin in a work distinct from conversion.

Expelled from the Baptists, 1899

Mason and Charles Price Jones preached entire sanctification inside Mississippi Baptist life and were expelled from their association for it near the end of the 1890s. That expulsion is the reason COGIC exists as a separate body. The two men had already begun holding Holiness conventions, and Mason later said the name Church of God in Christ came to him in 1897 while walking a street in Little Rock, Arkansas, out of the phrase in 1 Thessalonians 2:14 about the churches of God in Christ Jesus. The teaching that got them expelled was the Holiness doctrine of a second work of grace, which the nineteenth-century Holiness movement had carried out of Methodism into Baptist and independent congregations across the American South.

Azusa Street, 1907

In March 1907 Mason travelled to Los Angeles to see the revival meeting at 312 Azusa Street led by William J. Seymour, a Black Holiness preacher whose services drew crowds across the colour line. Mason stayed about five weeks and reported receiving the baptism of the Holy Ghost with speaking in tongues. He returned to Memphis convinced that tongues was the scriptural sign of Spirit baptism, and Charles Price Jones did not accept that conclusion. The two men parted at the general assembly held in Jackson, Mississippi in August 1907, and Mason gathered those who followed him at Memphis that September. Mason kept the name Church of God in Christ, and Jones's following became the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., which teaches entire sanctification and rejects tongues as the necessary evidence of Spirit baptism.

Mason led COGIC from 1907 until his death in 1961, a tenure of more than fifty years that stamped the denomination's worship, its polity and its temperament. His biographers record his habit of collecting oddly formed roots and vegetables and displaying them in sermons as object lessons in the strangeness and inventiveness of God's handiwork.

An Incorporated Church in a Segregated Country

COGIC was among the first Pentecostal bodies in the United States to hold a legal charter, and that had consequences beyond its own membership. Historians of Pentecostalism record that a number of white Pentecostal ministers held credentials through COGIC in the years after 1907, because incorporation allowed a minister to solemnize marriages and to claim the reduced clergy railroad fares of the period. Many of those ministers organized the Assemblies of God at Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1914, and American Pentecostalism separated along racial lines from that point. The interracial character of the early Azusa meetings did not survive the era, and the 1994 Memphis gathering at which white Pentecostal leaders publicly repented of that separation is usually called the Memphis Miracle.

After Mason: The 1968 Reorganization

Mason's death in 1961 left the succession unsettled, and the dispute ran for seven years. A constitutional convention in 1968 produced the structure COGIC still uses: a General Assembly as the legislative authority, a General Board of twelve bishops, and a presiding bishop elected to lead. Bishop James Oglethorpe Patterson Sr., Mason's son-in-law, became the first presiding bishop under the new constitution. Ministers who rejected the settlement formed Church of God in Christ, International in 1969. Later presiding bishops have included Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr., elected in 2007, and Bishop J. Drew Sheard, elected by the General Assembly in March 2021.

3. The Three Works of Grace

The three works of grace are the organizing structure of COGIC theology, and everything else in the denomination's teaching hangs on them. The Official Manual of the Church of God in Christ sets out justification, sanctification and the baptism in the Holy Ghost as three distinct experiences, received in that order, each with its own scriptural warrant. A COGIC believer would expect to be able to name when each happened.

First Work: Justification

Justification is God's act of pardoning the repentant sinner who believes in Jesus Christ, received by faith and accompanied by the new birth. COGIC teaching here is standard evangelical Protestant doctrine: the sinner is guilty, Christ's death is the atonement, and God forgives and regenerates the one who repents and believes. Romans 5:1 and Acts 13:39 are the usual texts. Nothing in COGIC's account of justification is peculiar to COGIC.

Second Work: Entire Sanctification

Sanctification in COGIC teaching is a second, definite work of grace after conversion, in which the believer is cleansed from the inward disposition toward sin and set apart wholly for God. The classic Holiness texts are 1 Thessalonians 4:3, which says that sanctification is the will of God, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, which prays that God would sanctify the believer wholly in spirit, soul and body, and Hebrews 12:14, which sets holiness as the condition of seeing the Lord. Section 4 of this guide treats the doctrine in detail, since it is the point on which COGIC differs most sharply from Pentecostal bodies of Baptist or Reformed background.

Third Work: Baptism in the Holy Ghost

The baptism in the Holy Ghost is an endowment of power for service, distinct from both conversion and sanctification, and COGIC teaches that speaking in other tongues is its initial evidence. Acts 1:8, Acts 2:4, Acts 10:44 to 46 and Acts 19:1 to 6 carry the weight of the argument. The purpose named in the doctrine is witness and service rather than personal cleansing, since cleansing belongs to the second work.

Why the Three-Stage Structure Matters

The three-work pattern separates the Holiness Pentecostal bodies from the rest of the movement. Where a body inherits Wesleyan teaching, it keeps entire sanctification as its own experience and adds Spirit baptism as a third stage, and COGIC, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and the Pentecostal Holiness Church all did that. Where a body came out of Baptist or Reformed soil, William H. Durham's "finished work" teaching of 1910 collapsed sanctification into conversion, treated growth in holiness as progressive, and left two works instead of three. The Assemblies of God took the finished-work position, and the difference between the two families of Pentecostals dates from that dispute.

4. Entire Sanctification: The Central Doctrine

Entire sanctification is the doctrine COGIC was founded to defend, and it predates the denomination's Pentecostal experience by a decade. The teaching holds that after a believer is justified there remains in the soul an inward bent toward sin, inherited from Adam and untouched by pardon, and that God can and does remove it in a second definite work received by faith and consecration. The believer who receives it is understood to be cleansed in the heart, filled with perfect love toward God and neighbour, and freed from the inner divided will that Romans 7 describes.

The Wesleyan Background

John Wesley taught in the eighteenth century that Christian perfection, which he also called perfect love and entire sanctification, is available in this life. Wesley was careful about what he claimed: the sanctified believer remains capable of mistakes, ignorance, temptation and infirmity, and can still fall away, and the perfection in question is a perfection of love and intention rather than of knowledge or performance. American Holiness preachers of the nineteenth century, Phoebe Palmer chief among them, pressed the doctrine into a shorter and more definite form, teaching that the blessing is received instantaneously by an act of consecration and faith. That is the form Mason learned and the form COGIC carries.

How It Is Preached in COGIC

In COGIC practice, sanctification is preached as a crisis and lived as a discipline. The believer is called to consecrate everything, to seek the blessing at the altar, and to expect a definite work. Afterwards the sanctified life is maintained by prayer, fasting, separation from what the tradition calls worldliness, and submission to the counsel of the church. The word "saint" in COGIC usage names an ordinary sanctified member rather than a canonized figure, and the phrase "living saved" carries the whole moral programme.

What Catholic Teaching Says About the Same Question

Catholic doctrine agrees with the Holiness tradition on the point that matters most and diverges on the mechanism. Against the view that justification only changes a sinner's legal standing while leaving him inwardly unchanged, the Council of Trent taught in 1547 that justification is the sanctification and renewal of the interior man, so that the justified person is truly made righteous and not merely declared so (Session VI, chapter 7). The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the same point at paragraph 1989, saying that justification includes the sanctification of the whole being. A COGIC preacher insisting that grace really changes people has a Catholic doctrine standing behind him.

The divergence is over whether the inclination to sin is removed by a single subsequent act. Catholic teaching holds that baptism takes away original sin and all personal sins, and that concupiscence, the disordered inclination that remains and inclines toward sin, is left in the baptized for the struggle of the Christian life (CCC 1264). Catholic doctrine therefore expects holiness to grow through grace, the sacraments, prayer and mortification over a lifetime, and it warns against presuming that one is confirmed in grace, since 1 John 1:8 says that anyone claiming to be without sin deceives himself. The Catholic tradition does hold out a real summit, and its mystics describe a transforming union in which the will is wholly conformed to God's, though the Church has never taught that any Christian reaches it by claiming a blessing at an altar rail.

5. Baptism in the Holy Ghost and Tongues

The baptism in the Holy Ghost, in COGIC teaching, is a distinct experience following justification and sanctification, in which the believer is filled with the Spirit and empowered for witness, and speaking in other tongues is its initial evidence. The doctrine is drawn from the narrative pattern of Acts. Jesus tells the disciples they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them (Acts 1:8); at Pentecost they are filled and speak in other tongues (Acts 2:4); the household of Cornelius speaks in tongues when the Spirit falls on them, which is how Peter's companions know the gift has been given to Gentiles (Acts 10:44 to 46); and the disciples at Ephesus speak in tongues and prophesy when Paul lays hands on them (Acts 19:1 to 6).

What COGIC Means by "Initial Evidence"

Initial evidence is a technical term and it is worth stating precisely. COGIC does not teach that tongues is the only gift, or the greatest gift, or that a believer who has spoken in tongues has finished. It teaches that tongues is the first outward sign by which the baptism in the Holy Ghost is recognized when it occurs, and that the ongoing gift of tongues in worship is a separate matter that Paul regulates in 1 Corinthians 14. In practice the seeking of the baptism is a normal part of COGIC congregational life, done at the altar, often with others praying alongside, and members will speak of tarrying for the Holy Ghost. The wider argument over initial evidence across the movement, including the bodies that qualify it or reject it, is covered in our guide to Pentecostal beliefs and churches. What is particular to COGIC is that the doctrine sits third in a Holiness three-stage scheme, after a distinct work of sanctification.

Healing, Prophecy and the Other Gifts

COGIC teaches that the gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12:4 to 11 are given in the Church today, including healing, prophecy, discernment of spirits and the interpretation of tongues. Prayer for the sick with anointing oil, following James 5:14 to 15, is ordinary practice. COGIC's official doctrine distinguishes healing as a work of God in answer to prayer from any promise that God will always heal, and it does not teach that seeking medical care is a failure of faith.

The Catholic Position on Spirit Baptism

Catholic teaching holds that the Holy Spirit is given to the believer in baptism and that the gift is sealed and strengthened in confirmation, which the Catechism treats at paragraphs 1285 to 1321 as the sacrament by which the baptized are more perfectly bound to the Church and enriched with a special strength of the Holy Spirit. On tongues, Catholic doctrine reads Paul's own rhetorical question, "do all speak with tongues?" in 1 Corinthians 12:30, as expecting the answer no, and treats tongues as one charism among many distributed as the Spirit wills. The Catechism affirms charisms as graces of the Holy Spirit given for the good of the Church and directs that they be received with gratitude and submitted to the discernment of those who lead it (CCC 799 to 801, 2003).

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which began among students and faculty at Duquesne University in 1967, uses the phrase baptism in the Spirit to describe a release or stirring of grace already conferred in the sacraments rather than a new sacramental event, and successive popes have encouraged it while insisting on that reading. The Vatican established CHARIS in 2019 as a single service body for charismatic communities in the Catholic Church. A Catholic who has prayed in tongues at a charismatic prayer meeting and a COGIC believer who received the baptism at a tarrying service are describing overlapping experiences within different doctrines of how the Spirit is given. Our guide to the Holy Spirit in Catholic teaching sets out the Catholic account in full.

6. The Three Ordinances

COGIC observes three ordinances: water baptism by immersion, the Lord's Supper, and the washing of feet. The word ordinance rather than sacrament is deliberate in Holiness and Baptist usage, marking these as acts Christ commanded the Church to perform rather than as channels that convey grace by the working of the rite. The count of three, with foot washing included, marks COGIC out from most American Protestant bodies, which keep two.

Water Baptism

COGIC baptizes by full immersion, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and administers it to those old enough to profess faith for themselves. Baptism is understood as an outward declaration of a change already worked inwardly by God, following Romans 6:3 to 4 on burial and rising with Christ. Infants are dedicated in a service of blessing and are baptized later on profession of faith.

Catholic teaching baptizes infants and understands baptism as the sacrament that removes original sin and makes a person a member of Christ's body, the gateway to the other sacraments (CCC 1213). On validity, a baptism conferred with water and the words prescribed by Christ, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is a real baptism whoever administers it and in whatever Christian body. A COGIC believer received into the Catholic Church is therefore not baptized again, since the Church does not repeat a valid baptism. Our guide to baptism in Catholic teaching covers infant baptism and the recognition of Protestant baptisms in detail.

The Lord's Supper

COGIC observes the Lord's Supper as a memorial of Christ's death, obeying his command to do this in remembrance of him (1 Corinthians 11:23 to 26), with self-examination beforehand as Paul requires in the same chapter. The bread and the cup are signs that call the death of Christ to mind and unite the congregation in confessing it. The service is typically held monthly or quarterly and is often joined to the washing of feet.

The Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that the whole Christ is present under each species, and that the Mass makes present the one sacrifice of Calvary. That is the largest single doctrinal distance between the two bodies, and it is set out in our guide to the Eucharist and the real presence.

Foot Washing

Foot washing is kept as an ordinance because Christ commanded it in plain words. In John 13:14 to 15 Jesus washes the disciples' feet and tells them that they ought to wash one another's feet, having given them an example. The Holiness tradition read that as a standing command, and COGIC practises it, usually in connection with the Lord's Supper, with men and women in separate groups.

Catholic practice keeps the same rite in the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, where the priest washes the feet of members of the congregation, and Catholic teaching classes it as a liturgical rite of great antiquity rather than one of the seven sacraments. Both bodies do the thing Christ told them to do, and they differ over what kind of act it is.

7. Scripture, Healing and the Last Things

Beyond the three works and the three ordinances, COGIC's doctrinal statement covers the standard ground of conservative American Protestantism, with a Pentecostal accent. The Bible is confessed as the inspired and infallible word of God and the sole rule of faith and practice. God is one in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Jesus Christ is true God and true man, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified for sinners, bodily raised, ascended and coming again.

Scripture and Authority

COGIC holds Scripture alone as the rule of doctrine, with the Official Manual functioning as the denomination's summary rather than as an independent authority. A COGIC sermon will move directly from a text to its application, and the tradition prizes preachers who can carry a congregation through a passage without an intermediary. Catholic teaching holds Scripture and Sacred Tradition together as one deposit of the word of God entrusted to the Church, a difference our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture works through, and which is also the root of the disagreement covered in Catholic and Protestant differences.

Divine Healing

Divine healing holds a settled place in COGIC teaching and practice. The doctrine rests on the healing ministry of Christ in the Gospels, on the instruction in James 5:14 to 15 that the sick call for the elders to pray over them and anoint them with oil, and on the gifts of healing in 1 Corinthians 12. Anointing services, prayer cloths and public testimony of healing are ordinary. Catholic teaching also anoints the sick, and treats it as a sacrament instituted by Christ that gives grace, strength and, when God wills it, bodily recovery. Both bodies pray for healing; Catholic doctrine locates the anointing of the sick among the seven sacraments and COGIC does not.

The Second Coming and Judgment

COGIC teaches the personal, visible return of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and eternal reward and punishment. The denomination's eschatology is premillennial in the broad sense common to American Pentecostalism, expecting a period of tribulation and a millennial reign, and COGIC's doctrinal statement stops short of a detailed prophetic timetable. Catholic teaching holds the same core: Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, as the Creed says, and the Church interprets the millennium of Revelation 20 without a literal thousand-year earthly reign. Our guide to the Second Coming and our guide to the millennium set out the Catholic reading. On the timing of the end, both bodies stand under the same word of Christ, that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32).

8. Holiness Standards and Daily Life

COGIC's holiness code is the visible daily consequence of its doctrine of sanctification. The historic standards call for abstinence from alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs, sexual purity confined to marriage between a man and a woman, honesty in business, modest dress, restraint in speech, faithful giving, and avoidance of amusements the tradition classes as worldly, which historically included dancing, card playing, cinema and secular popular music. Sunday is kept for worship. The standards are taught as the natural expression of a cleansed heart rather than as the means of obtaining one.

How Strictly They Are Kept

Observance varies widely across jurisdictions, generations and congregations, and COGIC members will say so themselves. Older members in many congregations still keep dress conventions that younger ones have set aside, and preaching on the standards is more prominent in some jurisdictions than in others. Sociologists of Black Pentecostalism describe a general softening of the entertainment prohibitions across the second half of the twentieth century, alongside a firm continuity on sobriety and sexual ethics.

The Catholic View of Holiness Rules

Catholic moral teaching agrees with COGIC on the substance of the sexual ethic, on sobriety, on honesty, and on the duty of every baptized person to aim at holiness, which the Second Vatican Council called the universal call to holiness in Lumen Gentium chapter 5. Catholic tradition also keeps its own bodily disciplines, including fasting, abstinence from meat on the Fridays of Lent, and the older custom of Friday penance year round. Where Catholic teaching parts company is over treating things good in themselves as forbidden, since the Church holds that creation is good and that wine, music and dancing are not sinful in their nature. The Catholic instinct is to order and moderate such things rather than to renounce them, while honouring the choice of those who renounce them freely.

9. Why COGIC Has Bishops

COGIC is governed by bishops, which sets it apart from nearly every other large Pentecostal body in the United States. Authority begins with the General Assembly, the denomination's legislative and judicial body, which enacts denominational law and elects leadership. From it comes a General Board of twelve bishops, and from among the General Board the presiding bishop, who serves as chief executive of the denomination. Bishops of jurisdictions oversee territories, district superintendents oversee districts within them, and elders pastor local congregations.

Where the Episcopate Came From

The COGIC episcopate grew out of practical necessity and out of the Black church's inherited familiarity with episcopal government. Mason exercised personal oversight over the whole body for decades, appointing state overseers to act for him as the church spread. As the number of congregations grew, the overseers became bishops in title as well as function, and the 1968 constitution turned a personal system into a constitutional one. The African Methodist Episcopal Church had already given Black American Christianity a working model of an episcopate governing an independent denomination, and COGIC's structure sits in that lineage as much as in any Pentecostal one.

What COGIC Bishops Claim and Do Not Claim

A COGIC bishop is an overseer with real authority over ministers and congregations, elected and appointed under denominational law, and understood to hold the biblical office described in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. COGIC does not claim that its bishops stand in an unbroken chain of sacramental ordination reaching back to the apostles, and it does not teach that ordination confers an indelible character. The office is scriptural and governmental in COGIC's account of it.

Catholic teaching holds that the bishop receives the fullness of the sacrament of holy orders, that the episcopate is transmitted by the laying on of hands in a succession from the apostles, and that this succession is what makes valid ordination and a valid Eucharist possible. That difference is doctrinal and it is real. It also means the two bodies use the word bishop for genuinely different things, so the visual resemblance between a COGIC consecration and a Catholic one should not be read as agreement. Our guide to holy orders and the Catholic priesthood sets out the Catholic doctrine, and our guide to how Christian denominations relate to each other maps the wider field.

The Holy Convocation and the Departments

COGIC's national life runs through its Holy Convocation and its departments. The Convocation has met since 1907, for most of its history in Memphis, drawing members from across the denomination for days of preaching, worship, business and ordination. Departments organize the work between convocations: the Women's Department, the Sunday School Department, the Young People Willing Workers, evangelism, missions and music. The Charles Harrison Mason Theological Seminary in Atlanta, part of the Interdenominational Theological Center, trains clergy at graduate level, and COGIC has also kept a strong tradition of preachers formed by apprenticeship rather than by degree.

10. The Women's Department and Ordination

COGIC does not ordain women as elders, pastors or bishops, and it has given women a parallel structure of authority that has shaped the denomination since its earliest years. The Women's Department was organized under Mother Lizzie Woods Robinson, whom Mason appointed as the first General Supervisor of Women around 1911. The department runs its own conventions, its own missionary work, its own training of young women, and its own line of authority from the General Supervisor through state supervisors to local church mothers.

How the Line Is Drawn

Women in COGIC serve as evangelists and missionaries, teach, lead prayer, run departments, direct music, plant and sustain congregations abroad, and hold the title of Mother, which carries substantial informal authority in a local church. The older formulation in the tradition distinguished teaching, which women may do, from the office of the preaching elder, which is reserved to men, and the distinction has always been finer in practice than on paper. Successive generations of COGIC women have pressed at the boundary, and the denomination has kept the ordination line where it is.

The Catholic Comparison

The Catholic Church reserves priestly and episcopal ordination to men, a teaching John Paul II restated in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and the reasoning differs from COGIC's. Catholic doctrine grounds the reservation in Christ's own choice of the Twelve and the constant practice of the Church, understanding the priest to act in the person of Christ the head, and it does not rest the case on any claim about the capacity or standing of women. Catholic tradition has also given women forms of authority with no COGIC parallel, including abbesses governing monasteries, founders directing international religious orders, and four women named Doctors of the Church. Catholic and COGIC women both operate substantial institutions without ordination, and the theology behind each arrangement is not the same.

11. Worship, Music and the Convocation

COGIC worship is participatory, musically driven, and long by the standards of most American churches. A service moves through devotion led by deacons, congregational singing, testimony, choir music, the offering, and preaching that is expected to build and to be answered aloud by the congregation. Call and response between preacher and people is normal. Physical response, including standing, raising hands, weeping, dancing in the Spirit and the rhythmic culmination sometimes called the praise break, is understood as the natural effect of the Spirit's presence rather than as disorder.

The Music

COGIC congregations have been one of the formative training grounds of American gospel music. Congregations trained singers, organists, drummers and choir directors for generations, and a long list of gospel artists learned their craft in COGIC churches, among them the Clark Sisters, whose mother Mattie Moss Clark directed the denomination's music department for decades. The Hammond organ style associated with Black gospel worship developed substantially in this tradition. Catholic readers who find the sound unfamiliar might note that the Church's own liturgical tradition assumes music is integral to worship rather than decorative, and that the sung Mass is the norm from which the spoken one is a reduction.

The Holy Convocation

The Holy Convocation is COGIC's central annual gathering, held every year since 1907 and for most of that history in Memphis. It combines worship on a large scale with the business of the denomination: the General Assembly meets, ordinations are conducted, departments report, and the presiding bishop delivers an address. For many members the Convocation is the point at which a local congregation experiences itself as part of an international body, and the pattern is recognisable to any Catholic who has been in Rome for a canonization or a Holy Year.

The Sermon

Preaching carries more weight in a COGIC service than any other element, and the tradition has a highly developed craft of it. A COGIC sermon typically works a single text, builds through repetition and rhythmic intensification, moves into a chanted or sung close, and ends with an altar call. Members expect a preacher to be prepared, to be under the Spirit's direction, and to say something that costs. Catholic homiletics has its own standards and a shorter form, and a Catholic who has sat under COGIC preaching will usually come away with a higher expectation of what a sermon can do.

12. Mason Temple and the Civil Rights Era

Mason Temple in Memphis, the international headquarters of COGIC, is one of the significant buildings of the American civil rights movement. Constructed in the early 1940s and dedicated in 1945, it gave Black Memphis a large auditorium under Black ownership and control at a time when segregated venues across the region were closed to civil rights mass meetings. Its place in that history belongs in any account of what the denomination is.

3 April 1968

Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final public address at Mason Temple on the evening of 3 April 1968, during the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. The speech, remembered by the line about having been to the mountaintop, was given to a storm-thinned crowd in the COGIC headquarters building. King was killed the following day at the Lorraine Motel. Mason Temple had hosted strike meetings through that spring, and the building's role in the campaign was continuous rather than incidental.

Mason and the First World War

Charles Harrison Mason preached against war and counselled young Black men against enlistment during the First World War, and historians of Pentecostalism record that federal investigators pursued him for it, that he was detained in Mississippi in 1918, and that no conviction followed. The episode belongs to the wider record of official surveillance of Black churches in that period. Mason's pacifism also sat within a strand of early Pentecostalism that read the Sermon on the Mount as ruling out participation in war, a position most Pentecostal bodies later softened.

Why This Matters for a Catholic Reader

Catholic social teaching and COGIC's history meet on the ground of human dignity. The Church teaches that every person bears the image of God and that racism contradicts the Gospel, a point the American bishops made in their 1979 pastoral letter Brothers and Sisters to Us and again in Open Wide Our Hearts in 2018. A Catholic reading COGIC's doctrine without its history will miss half of what the denomination is, since the body was formed by Black Christians excluded from white institutions and it built its own. Our guide to Catholic social teaching covers the Church's own commitments here.

13. Where Catholics and COGIC Agree

Catholics and COGIC believers hold a substantial body of Christian doctrine in common, and the agreement is worth stating in full before the differences. Both confess one God in three persons. Both confess Jesus Christ as true God and true man, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, risen bodily, ascended, and returning to judge the living and the dead. Both confess the Holy Spirit as truly God and truly at work in the Church now. Both hold Scripture to be the inspired word of God.

The Agreements That Go Further Than Expected

Four points of agreement run deeper than a Catholic might assume. First, grace really changes people: COGIC's insistence that a Christian is inwardly transformed and not merely pardoned matches the Council of Trent against a purely forensic account of justification. Second, holiness is required of everyone: COGIC's holiness code and the Catholic universal call to holiness make the same demand of the ordinary believer. Third, the supernatural is present: both bodies believe God heals, that miracles occur, and that the age of divine action did not close with the apostles, a conviction our guide to miracles works through from the Catholic side. Fourth, there is real authority in the Church: COGIC's bishops and denominational law show a body that rejects the idea that a Christian answers to no one, which is closer to Catholic instinct than the congregational alternative.

The Baptism Both Bodies Recognize

A COGIC baptism performed with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is a valid Christian baptism in Catholic doctrine, and the Catholic Church does not repeat it if such a believer is received into full communion. Baptism is the sacramental bond of unity among all Christians, which is why the Church calls other baptized believers brothers and sisters in Christ rather than outsiders. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism sets out how that recognition works.

14. Where Catholics and COGIC Differ

The differences between Catholic teaching and COGIC doctrine fall into five areas: the sacraments, the second work of grace, the evidence of Spirit baptism, authority in the Church, and the place of Mary and the saints. Each is a real disagreement about what is true, and stating them plainly serves both sides better than blurring them.

The COGIC column follows the doctrinal articles set out in the Official Manual of the Church of God in Christ and standard reference accounts of the denomination's teaching. Local practice varies across jurisdictions and congregations. The Catholic column follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the documents named in the text above.

The Difference That Carries the Others

Authority is the difference underneath the rest. COGIC holds Scripture as the sole rule of faith, so a doctrine must be shown from a text, and the three works of grace are defended by reading Acts and the epistles that way. Catholic teaching holds that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures gave the Church a teaching office to interpret them and a sacramental order to convey grace, so the question of what Acts 2 establishes is settled within the Church's living tradition rather than by exegesis alone. Every item in the table above follows from that difference in some way. Our guide to what the Church means by no salvation outside the Church addresses the question a COGIC reader is likely to ask next, which is what Catholic teaching says about the standing of Christians outside its communion.

What Catholic Teaching Says About COGIC Believers

The Second Vatican Council taught that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are in a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, and that the Spirit uses these communities as means of salvation. On that teaching a COGIC believer is a Christian brother or sister, joined to Catholics by baptism and by faith in Christ, and separated by the doctrines listed above. Catholic teaching also holds that the fullness of the means of salvation is found in the Catholic Church, and it makes that claim about the Church rather than a judgement about any individual soul.

15. What a Catholic Should Do With This

A Catholic who has read this far should be able to describe COGIC accurately from memory and to say where the Church disagrees without caricature. Say three works of grace, not two. Say Trinitarian, since COGIC has never been an Oneness body. Say three ordinances including foot washing. Say bishops, since COGIC's episcopal government is easy to miss in short summaries of Pentecostalism. Those four points carry the substance of what COGIC teaches about itself.

If You Have COGIC Family or Neighbours

Ask what sanctification meant in their life rather than debating its mechanism first. Accept an invitation to a service and stay for the whole thing. Do not present yourself for the Lord's Supper in a COGIC church if you are Catholic, and understand why a COGIC believer does not receive at Mass, since both bodies treat their table as an expression of a unity that does not yet exist. Say what the Catholic Church actually teaches when you are asked, including the parts that will be unwelcome, and say it once.

What to Take From Them

Three habits in COGIC life deserve Catholic attention. The expectation that God acts now, which the Church affirms in its own doctrine of miracles and healing and which many Catholic parishes have quietly stopped expecting. The seriousness about personal conduct, which the Catholic ascetical tradition once assumed. The insistence that every believer aims at holiness rather than at respectability, which the Second Vatican Council taught in Lumen Gentium chapter 5 as the universal call to holiness.

If You Are COGIC and Reading This

The Catholic Church recognizes your baptism, calls you a brother or sister in Christ, and holds the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the bodily resurrection and the authority of Scripture alongside you. Where it differs, it differs about the sacraments, the second work of grace, the sign of Spirit baptism, and where teaching authority sits, and the fairest way to weigh those is to read what the Church says in its own documents rather than in summaries of them. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is public and searchable, and this site's guide to Catholic and Protestant differences lays the questions out side by side.

16. Related Topics