About COGIC
About COGIC
The Church of God in Christ, Inc. (COGIC) is a Christian organization in the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition. It is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. Its membership is predominantly African American, with over 6.5 million members. The church has congregations in 105 countries worldwide.
What We Believe
- We believe the Bible is the inspired and unique written Word of God.
- We believe that there is only one God, eternally existing in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
- We believe in the blessed hope, which is the rapture of the Church of God, which is in Christ, at his return.
- We believe that the only way to be cleansed from sin is through repentance and faith in the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
- We believe that regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential for personal salvation.
- We believe that the redemptive work of Christ on the Cross provides healing to the human body in response to believing prayer.
- We believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit, according to Acts 2:4, is given to believers who ask for it.
- We believe in the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, which enables the Christian to live a holy and separate life in today’s world.
Our Founder
Bishop Charles Harrison Mason was the founder and first chief bishop of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), currently the largest African-American Pentecostal church in the United States. Born on September 8, 1864, to Jerby and Eliza Mason, two former slaves in Shelby County, Tennessee, Mason worked with his family as a sharecropper and received no formal education during his childhood. But from an early age, he was influenced by his parents’ religion. Mason joined the African-American Baptist Church as a teenager and later received his license to preach from the Mount Gale Missionary Baptist Church in Preston, Arkansas. In November 1893, Mason enrolled at Arkansas Baptist College, but withdrew after three months, transferring to the college’s ministerial institute; he graduated from the institute in 1895.
In 1895, Mason met Charles Price Jones, a popular Baptist preacher from Mississippi. Mason and Jones soon began preaching the doctrine of holiness and sanctification in local Baptist churches, which led to their expulsion from the Baptist Convention. Mason and Jones decided to form a new church community. Mason suggested the name Church of God in Christ, after what he described as a vision of Little Rock, Arkansas, to distinguish the church from several “Church of God” groups that were forming at the time. Due to disagreements over new Pentecostal teachings, the two men separated in 1907.
Mason obtained the legal rights to the Church of God in the Name and Charter of Christ and established his work in Memphis. After moving the COGIC headquarters to Memphis, Mason created new departments and auxiliaries, established dioceses, and appointed overseers throughout the country. In 1945, Mason dedicated the Mason Temple in Memphis as the church’s national meetinghouse and international headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. By the time of Mason’s death on November 17, 1961, COGIC had over 400,000 members and over 4,000 churches in the United States, as well as congregations in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia. Today, it has approximately 6.5 million members. The church is found in every state in the United States and in more than 105 countries around the world.
Our Story
The Church of God in Christ is a church of the Lord Jesus Christ in which the word of God is preached, ordinances are administered, and the doctrine of sanctification or holiness is emphasized, considered essential to the salvation of mankind. Our church is commonly referred to as holiness or Pentecostal because of the emphasis placed on the events that occurred on the day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Passover, or Easter as necessary for all believers in Christ Jesus to experience.
On the day of Pentecost, the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, supernatural manifestations descended with marvelous power and might. The gift of the Spirit in fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to clothe those who would wait in Jerusalem with power from on high, was accompanied by three extraordinary supernatural manifestations. The sudden appearance of the Holy Spirit first caught the ear. The disciples heard a “sound” from heaven rushing into the house with mighty force and filling it—even while a thunderstorm is rushing—but there was no wind. It was the sound that filled the house, not a wind, an invisible cause producing audible effects. Then the eye was arrested by the appearance of tongues of fire that rested upon each of the assembled societies. Finally, there was the impartation of a strange new power to speak in languages they had never learned “as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Our church is also considered a member of the greater Protestant body, although it did not directly evolve from the European or English Reformation, but had its origin in the General Association to the Baptist Church. Charles Harrison Mason, who later became the founder and organizer of the Church of God in Christ, was born on September 8, 1864, on the Prior Farm near Memphis, Tennessee. His father and mother, Jerry and Eliza Mason, were members of a Missionary Baptist church, having converted during the dark crisis of American slavery.
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