Charles Harrison Mason was born on September 8, 1864, near Bartlett, in Shelby County, Tennessee, the son of Jerry and Eliza Mason, who had been enslaved until shortly before his birth. He grew up as a sharecropper in the cotton fields, without regular schooling, in an American South still marked by the fresh scars of slavery.
At fourteen he nearly died of tuberculosis, in the same epidemic that struck his family and killed his father. The healing he attributed to his church’s prayer convinced him that God had spared him for a specific calling, and he devoted himself to Baptist ministry.
Licensed to preach in 1893 by Mount Gale Missionary Baptist Church, in Preston, Arkansas, Mason soon became involved with the holiness movement, which preached a life of consecration after conversion. The emphasis caused friction, and in 1896 he was expelled from Baptist associations for preaching sanctification as an experience distinct from conversion.
Together with preacher Charles Price Jones, he founded the Church of God in Christ in 1897, in an old cotton gin building in Lexington, Mississippi. The name, as he told it, came to him as a revelation while he was walking down a street in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In 1907 he traveled to Los Angeles to investigate the Azusa Street Revival, led by William Seymour. There he experienced what he described as the baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues he did not know. The experience drove a wedge between him and Jones, who did not accept tongues as necessary evidence of that baptism, and the partnership of more than ten years broke apart; Jones went so far as to expel him from the holiness association they had led together.
Back in Memphis, he reorganized his branch of the church on Pentecostal lines. Between 1907 and 1914 he ordained hundreds of white ministers, in a segregated South, because the Church of God in Christ was then one of the few Pentecostal denominations legally chartered in the United States. When some of these ministers formed their own denomination in 1914, he preached at its founding meeting.
The dispute with Jones over the name and property of the church ended up in court, and only in 1915 did Mason secure for his branch the legal right to the name and charter of the Church of God in Christ. Historians also point out that Mason’s insistence on making glossolalia mandatory evidence of Spirit baptism, rather than merely a possible gift, was a central factor in the split and a point of criticism from parts of the holiness movement itself and from traditional Protestantism, which viewed the practice as emotionalism.
His pacifist opposition to World War I, driven by the contradiction of asking Black soldiers to fight for a freedom they did not enjoy at home, drew the surveillance of the American government; in 1918 he was even arrested in Mississippi on suspicion of sedition. His first marriage, to Alice Saxton, ended in divorce in 1892; Mason married twice more, to Lelia Washington and, after her death, to Elsie Washington.
A bishop until his death in 1961, in Detroit, he saw the church he had founded in a cotton gin building grow into thousands of congregations across dozens of countries. The Church of God in Christ became the largest African American Pentecostal denomination in the United States, and his example of bringing Black and white believers together at the altar, in the height of the Jim Crow era, still challenges churches to cross the boundaries that history itself raised.
