January 26, 2017
Church of God First General Assembly

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Acts 2:1-4

On this date, January 26, 1906, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), a Pentecostal denomination, convenes its first General Assembly.

“The Church of God began on August 19, 1886, in Monroe County, Tennessee, near the North Carolina border. Former Baptist Richard Green Spurling preached in a millhouse along Barney Creek and eight persons formed a Christian Union for the purpose of following the New Testament as their rule for faith and practice, giving each other equal rights and privilege to interpret Scripture, and sitting together as the church of God. Twenty-one years later the growing movement formally adopted the name Church of God. Under the leadership of…first General Overseer, A. J. Tomlinson, the Church of God adopted a centralized form of Church government with an inclusive International General Assembly (1906). (churchofgod.org, “A Brief History of the Church of God”)

“This first Assembly of the “Churches of East Tennessee, North Georgia and Western North Carolina” met January 26-27, 1906. Twenty-one people braved the winter weather to gather in the home of J. C. Murphy, a deacon of the Camp Creek congregation. There they prayed, studied the scriptures and sought answers to important questions that had emerged. The printed minutes of that meeting reflected their restorationism with the preface:

We hope and trust that no person or body of people will ever use these minutes, or any part of them, as articles of faith upon which to establish a sect or denomination. The subjects were discussed merely to obtain light and understanding. Our articles of faith are inspired and given us by the Holy Apostles and written in the New Testament which is our only rule of faith and practice.” (Restorationism and a Vision for World Harvest: A Brief History of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), David G. Roebuck)

The norm of the Lutheran Church for doctrine and worship, as stated in The Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord, is:

1. we receive and embrace with our whole heart the Prophetic and Apostolic Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the pure, clear fountain of Israel, which is the only true standard by which all teachers and doctrines are to be judged.
2. And since of old the true Christian doctrine, in a pure, sound sense, was collected from God’s Word into brief articles or chapters against the corruption of heretics, we confess, in the second place, the three Ecumenical Creeds, namely, the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian, as glorious confessions of the faith, brief, devout, and founded upon God’s Word, in which all the heresies which at that time had arisen in the Christian Church are clearly and unanswerably refuted.

The Formula of Concord (1577) is an authoritative Lutheran statement of faith that, in its two parts (Epitome and Solid Declaration), makes up the final section of the Lutheran Book of Concord.

Each denomination, whether Lutheran, or Church of G-d, or Methodist, will most likely make a similar proclamation – that scripture is the basis and the norm for their articles of faith. Though we do not always agree in doctrine, we do agree that scripture is the inspired and G-d given Word that forms our preaching, our worship and our teachings.

Pastor Dave