Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, the founder of the Church of God In Christ, was born September 8, 1866, near Memphis, Tennessee. His parents, Jerry and Eliza Mason, were ex-slaves. When Charles was twelve years old, his family moved to Plumerville, Arkansas, due to a yellow fever epidemic that struck the Memphis area. While in Arkansas, the Masons lived and worked as tenant farmers on the John Watson Plantation. Jerry, incapacitated with yellow fever, passed in 1879. The following year, Charles, at the age of fourteen, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He recovered from the disease some months later.
In November of 1878, Charles Mason was baptized; however, he did not begin to minister until after his illness. Charles relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, to attend Arkansas Baptist College, a historically black college. Later, he left the institution to begin preaching. Mason was ordained, receiving his license to preach in Preston, Arkansas, in 1893.
Studying sanctification, Mason crossed paths with another minister (Charles Price Jones) while in Jackson, Mississippi, who believed in and preached holiness. Because Jones was already a pastor, he became a mentor to Charles. The two, along with a few others, traveled together, running religious revivals. Mason was sent to Asis Baptist Church in Lexington, Mississippi, to settle a conflict between Jones’ doctrine and the views of Baptist church officials. Upon his arrival, however, he discovered that because Jones had taught him, he was forbidden from preaching in any of the local Baptist churches. Mason began preaching instead on the streets of Lexington, Mississippi, and surrounding towns. He held revival services in an abandoned cotton-gin house. When many were healed, saved, and sanctified during his revivals, his reputation spread quickly throughout the South.
Receiving word of a great Pentecostal Revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, California, Mason visited Rev. William J. Seymour’s church. Hearing Seymour’s powerful sermons, he had a life-changing experience and traveled back to the South to share his knowledge of this new church and its leaders. Baptist leaders, however, rejected his teachings, and he was completely banished from the Baptist Church at its national convention in 1907. Later in the same year, Mason and Charles Price Jones parted ways due to Mason’s embracement of the beliefs he heard in Los Angeles.
While walking down the street in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1907, Mason had a revelation from God instructing him to name his church organization the Church of God In Christ. According to Bishop Mason, this name was given to him by God as a way to distinguish the true believer from those who had left the true doctrine of the church received by the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost (book of Acts). Rev. Mason relocated his new church to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1940. By that point, Elder Mason was elected general overseer, meaning the Bishop of the Church of God in Christ.
Bishop Charles Mason passed away on November 17, 1961, at the age of ninety-five, in Detroit, Michigan. Today, the Church of God in Christ, which he founded, is one of the most prominent African American religious denominations in the United States. It has over eight million members in over 1,500 churches in the United States and various locations in Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe.
