Charles Harrison Mason

Home Articles Study Library History Heresy Blogs

Charles Harrison Mason (1866-1961)

One of the most significant figures in the rise and spread of the modern Pentecostal movement, Charles Harrison Mason was born September 8, 1866, on Prior Farm just outside of Memphis, Tennessee. His parents, Jerry and Eliza Mason, former slaves, were members of a Missionary Baptist Church, which served as a source of strength for them in the distressing times that followed the Civil War.

When Mason was twelve years old, a Yellow Fever epidemic forced his family to leave the Memphis area for Plumerville, Arkansas, where they lived on John Watson’s plantation as tenant farmers. The epidemic claimed his father’s life in 1879. During those fearful and difficult days, the young Mason worked hard, having little chance for schooling.

In 1880 just before his fourteenth birthday, Mason fell ill with chills and fever. His mother was afraid he would not survive. However, in a surprising turn of events on the first Sunday in September 1880, he was miraculously healed. Along with his mother he attended the Mt. Olive Baptist Church near Plumerville where the pastor, Mason’s half-brother, the Reverend I.S. Nelson, baptized him in an atmosphere of praise and thankgiving. From that point in his life, Mason went throughout the area of southern Arkansas as a lay preacher, giving his testimony and working with souls on the mourners’ bench, especially during the summer camp meetings.

Mason was licensed and ordained in 1891 at Preston, Arkansas, but held back from full-time ministry to marry Alice Saxton, the beautiful daughter of his mother’s closest friend. To his greatest disappointment and distress, his wife bitterly opposed his ministerial plans. She divorced him after two years of marriage and later remarried. However, Mason refused to marry as long as Mrs. Alice Saxton-Mason lived.

Mason’s determination to get an education was a crucial turning point after his divorce. On November 1, 1893, Mason entered Arkansas Baptist College, founded by Dr. E.C. Morris, pastor of Centennial Baptist Church at Helena, Arkansas, and president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. Mason was deeply disturbed by the criticism that Dr. C.L. Fisher, a top graduate of Morgan Park Seminary (now the University of Chicago Divinity School) had brought to Arkansas Baptist College. Mason had both hermeneutical and cultural suspicions of the methods, philosophy, and curriculum set forth at the college. Thus, Mason left the school in January 1894.

In 1895 Mason met with Charles Price Jones, the newly elected pastor of the Mt. Helms Baptist Church at Jackson, Mississippi. They became close friends. Jones was a graduate of Arkansas Baptist College. Like Mason, Jones had come under the influence of the Holiness movement and in 1894 claimed the experience of sanctification while pasturing Tabernacle Baptist Church at Selma, Arkansas. By preaching sanctification, the second definite work of grace subsequent to conversion, Mason and Jones caused small stir amongst black Baptists. From 1896-99, the Holiness conventions, revivals, and periodicals inspired by Mason and Jones split the Baptists and, in a few cases, the Methodist churches, birthing the development of independent “sanctified” or “holiness” congregations and associations. Mason, Jones, and their colleagues were vehemently opposed and eventually expelled from Baptist churches via the National Baptist Convention.

After much praying and studying of Scripture in search of future direction for these independent “sanctified” congregations, Mason, while walking along a street in Little Rock, Arkansas, received the revelation of the name, Church Of God In Christ (COGIC) (1 Thess 2:14; 2 Thess 1:1). Thus in 1897, a major new black denomination was born. From the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, most blacks had encountered Christianity under the aegis of Baptist or Methodist churches. Mason and Jones, however, emphatically changed the religious landscape in the black community as well as broadened the black religious experience. Through the dynamic preaching of Mason and the prolific writings and hymnology of Jones, Sanctified or Holiness churches sprang up throughout the South and Southwest.

As the new work progressed, Mason continued to seek a more complete consecration of his life. During the latter half of 1906, he received reports of the Pentecostal revival in Los Angeles. He traveled to California, and under the ministry of W.J. Seymour, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. After some five weeks in Los Angeles, Mason returned to municipalities of Memphis and Jackson, eager to share his additional experience of the Lord with his brethren. However, when he presented his Pentecostal message to the local churches, he and his message were rejected. After days and nights of intensive debating over the Baptism of the Holy Ghost with initial evidence of speaking in tongues, Mason and Jones separated, and the church split. Those who agreed with Mason met in September 1907 to legally organize the COGIC. They elected C.H. Mason as general overseer and appointed D.J. Young, Mason’s constant companion, as editor of the new periodical, The Whole Truth.

By ordaining ministers of all races, Mason performed an unusually important service to the early twentieth-century Pentecostal movement. He appears to have been the only early convert who came from a legally incorporated church body and who could thus ordain persons whose status as clergymen was recognized by civil authorities. This recognition allowed clergy to perform marriages, to carry out other ministerial functions having legal consequences, and thus entitling them to certain economic advantages such as the right to obtain reduced clergy rates on railroads. As a result, scores of white ministers’ south ordination at the hand of Mason. Large numbers obtained credentials carrying the name COGIC. In the years 1909-14, there were as many white Church Of God In Christ ministers as there were black ministers, all carrying Mason’s credentials and incorporation. Ironically, Mason, who viewed his lifelong task as one of the simple preserving the “spiritual essence” and the “prayer tradition” of the black religious experience, found himself in a unique and pivotal historical position.

By 1913 it had become increasingly clear that as Pentecostals moved toward denominationalism, they would follow the segregating practices of American culture. The color lien that had been washed away in the blood of Jesus at the Azusa Street revival reappeared.

On December 20, 1913, elders E.N. Bell and H.A. Goss issued a call to convene a general council of “all Pentecostal saints and Church Of God In Christ followers,” to meet the following April at Hot Springs, Arkansas. This invitation went only to the white saints. On the first week of April 1914, Mason traveled to the Hot Springs convention to invoke God’s blessings on the newly formed General Council of the Assemblies of god. He preached to more than four hundred white Pentecostal preachers.

Despite this new racial separation, Mason maintained a warm fellowship with the white Pentecostals. He preached in their conventions and maintained a strong fellowship with two prominent white Pentecostal leaders: A.J. Thomlinson of the Church of God (CG, Cleveland, Tennessee) and J.H. King of the Pentecostal Holiness Church (PHC, Franklin Springs, Georgia). In 1952, Mason was the elder statesman attending the Pentecostal world Conference at London, England.