With his drive, vision, and organizational skills, he was elected the first general overseer of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) in 1903.

[4][5] Milton Tomlinson, together with his brother Noah, was a successful businessman in a variety of ventures spanning farming, road-building, saw-mills, and bridge building.

His first year at Union, during the winter of 1882–1883, the Quaker evangelist William Wooton held an extended meeting at a local church, during which some 100 of Tomlinson's classmates were converted.

As a teenager Tomlinson also belonged to a local literary society, and performed briefly in a drama troupe, besides continuing to work on the family farm.

Again Tomlinson recounts the episode in his autobiography, Answering The Call of God: The first year of my married life I was one day engaged in hauling hay from one of those large Indiana meadows.

I saw the flash of lightning as it crashed down the chimney, out through the cook stove, and burst out through the ceiling and weatherboarding of the house only a few feet from where I was sitting.

Tomlinson became active in the local Quaker church, the Chester Preparative Meeting of the Society of Friends, that had been founded by his grandfather Robert.

The area was frequented by many prominent holiness Quaker evangelists (such as Seth Cook Rees) and biblical scholars (such as Dougan Clark, Jr.).

The area also welcomed fiery revivalists (such as Charles Stalker), and Quakers in Chester Preparative openly associated with Methodists (such as Esther G. Frame).

Tomlinson's earliest religious influences followed the evangelical Quaker holiness teachings of Joseph John Gurney.

In particular, holiness Quakers embraced emotional preaching, religious ecstasy, entire sanctification, aggressive evangelism, and the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian Perfection.

[20] Nearby Indianapolis, Indiana was home to several other noted holiness evangelists at the time, most importantly Thomas Nelson before he moved to Pennsylvania and came out of the Free Methodist Church.

A convert of the Presbyterian revivalist Charles Finney, Mitchell tutored Tomlinson and took him on trips to distribute religious literature (provided by the American Bible Society) to impoverished areas of southern Appalachia beginning in the summer of 1894.

[22] On December 3, 1896, Tomlinson received official authorization from the Quaker Westfield Monthly Meeting to engage in an extended missionary trip.

During the summer and fall of 1897, he visited a variety of missionary and biblical training grounds across eighteen different states.

Most importantly, he visited Frank Sandford's "Holy Ghost and Us" Bible School in Durham, Maine, where he was baptized in the Androscoggin River on October 30, 1897—a significant departure from Quaker teachings.

[23] During this period many prominent holiness evangelists, including Martin Wells Knapp and Frank Rees, began to leave their denomination in favor of independent ministries.

Sandford's Bible school would at first serve unofficially as an umbrella organization to Tomlinson and Mitchell's Christian school and orphanage in Culberson, North Carolina, but moreover it served as its model, in terms of holiness teachings, communal living arrangements, unquestioned top-down hierarchical leadership, and reliance on "faith" for finances, material provisions, and healing.

[26] Following a series of holiness revivals in and around Westfield, Indiana between 1891 and 1892, in which the doctrine of entire sanctification was preached by evangelists including Jacob Baker, John Pennington, Emma Coffin and Esther G. Frame, Tomlinson prayed through to his own sanctification experience,[27] which he relayed in his autobiography Answering The Call of God about twenty years after the experience: It was about twelve o'clock in the day.

There we were at that altitude when all of a sudden there came from above, like a thunderbolt from the skies, a sensational power that ended the conflict, and there lay the "old man" dead at my feet, and I was free from his grasp.

[29][30] Although never officially ordained as a preacher by any body of the Society of Friends, during this period Tomlinson had his first opportunity to preach, in a revival meeting at the school.

In the absence of any older official ministers' willingness to lead, Tomlinson spontaneously stood to his feet and "after a few, stammering, broken utterances, the people would fall into the altar and get converted.

"[31][32] In July 1899 Tomlinson and Mitchell, after visiting the area intermittently for five years, arrived in Culberson, North Carolina to establish a permanent mission.

In June 1901, Tomlinson and Mitchell began publishing a periodical, "Samson's Foxes" to inform the wider holiness community of their progress and needs.

Tomlinson is also significant, along with contemporaries including Charles Parham and William J. Seymour, as one of the central religious figures in the beginning of the Pentecostal movement in the United States.

However, his role as General Overseer with a lifetime appointment engendered some jealousy at the time, which contributed to the controversy over his impeachment.