Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)
Holiness Pentecostal denomination founded in 1886 in Cleveland, Tennessee
The Church of God, with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, United States, is an international Holiness-Pentecostal Christian denomination. The Church of God's publishing house is Pathway Press.
Name
The precise legal name of this body is "Church of God". After a protracted court case involving donations intended for the use of its orphanages being received by other groups using the same name, the Supreme Court of Tennessee determined that it alone was entitled to use the simple name Church of God in 1953.
History
Origins (1886–1902)
R. G. Spurling (1857–1935), a Missionary Baptist minister, and his father Richard Spurling (1810–91), an ordained elder, rejected some of the views of the Baptists in his area as not being in accord with New Testament Christianity. R. G. Spurling disagreed with Landmarkism, an ecclesiology which held that only churches descending from churches with Baptist doctrine were part of the true Church, and that they should not associate with Christians of other traditions. Spurling felt that there needed to be another reformation of the Church that went beyond the Protestant Reformation so that Christians would be united together by love and not by creeds, which he believed were divisive. As long as something was not contrary to the New Testament, believers should be able to practice their faith in the form they chose.
Even though not intending to form a new church or denomination, their rejection of Landmarkist values placed them in conflict with traditional churches in that area. Within a short period of time, it became clear that they would not be allowed to remain as members of their churches.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)” is holiness Pentecostal denomination founded in 1886 in Cleveland, Tennessee. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Church, Cleveland and Tennessee, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “holiness Pentecostal denomination founded in 1886 in Cleveland, Tennessee” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q700743. VIAF identifies the subject as 133125151. The Library of Congress control number is n50055776. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1886, 1902 and 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.