The members and clergy of the churches are predominantly African-American, though it includes people from many backgrounds.
In the 1890s a group of African American Baptist ministers, led by Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, were dismissed by the Baptist Church for preaching entire sanctification.
After a number of unaffiliated revivals, a church was formed in Jackson, Mississippi, by Jones, Mason, and others.
[2] The Church of God in Christ split in 1907 over the issue of Pentecostalism, with both the Holiness faction and the Holiness Pentecostal faction continuing to use the name "Church of God in Christ" until 1915 when the Holiness Pentecostal faction, led by Mason, incorporated under that name, Church of God in Christ.
The new board approved the ordination of women, which Gray opposed,[3] and in that same year Gray and a group of members broke away to form a new body, the "Original Church of God or Sanctified Church.