Creating the Office of General Overseer in the Church of God
Not until near the end of the fourth General Assembly, on Saturday, January 9, 1909, did the Church of God create the office of general overseer. With our congregational polity and the small number of churches there had been no general office up to that time. Rather, each of the first four General Assemblies had chosen a person to serve as moderator and clerk for the duration of the Assembly.
But God was blessing the work of these holiness people, and there was a growing need for coordination among the churches between Assemblies. Such coordination was especially needed when supplying pastors. According to reports at the fourth Assembly, the Church of God had either a church, a Sunday school or a preaching station in twelve different locations. But because there were only a few ministers, several ministers had served in more than one place: M. S. Lemons at Steer Creek, Chattanooga and Drygo, Tennessee; R. G. Spurling at Camp Creek, North Carolina and Jones, Georgia; and A. J. Tomlinson at Union Grove, Oakland and Cleveland, Tennessee.
The need to supply pastors motivated the fourth Assembly to adopt a new method. On Thursday afternoon the Assembly agreed to supply as many requests as possible while the Assembly was in session. If filling a particular request proved impossible during the Assembly, the Assembly moderator would later confer with the local church in an attempt to fill the vacancy.
Although this plan might necessitate work between Assemblies, the need to create a year-round office was not considered on Thursday. The next afternoon, they discussed the possibility of creating an office of general overseer to serve “over all the churches for mutual help and general instructions.” Yet at that point “no action was taken nor advice given” by the Assembly.
When the Assembly reconvened at 11:30 on Saturday morning, the delegates first turned their attention to other matters including local church reporting, ministerial credentials, and the location of the next Assembly. However, later in the day they returned to the topic of a general office and agreed to create the office of “general moderator.”
The duties of the office of general moderator were “to issue credentials to the ministers, to keep a record of all the preachers and evangelists within the bounds of the Assembly, to look after the general interests of the churches, to fill the vacancies either in person or by sending someone [who] in his best judgment would be beneficial to the edifying of the body of Christ, and to act as Moderator and Clerk of the General Assembly.” Additionally, the Assembly agreed to a term of one year from the close of one Assembly to the close of the next Assembly. The delegates then chose A. J. Tomlinson as the first general moderator of the Church of God.
Among the topics of discussion in 1909 was the title of this new office. What should this general officer “over all the churches” be called? Tomlinson’s hand-written minutes read “General Moderator or Overseer or Clerk.” The words “or Clerk” were inserted above the main line of text as if a last minute suggestion from the Assembly. After being recorded in the ledger of minutes, the words “or Overseer or Clerk” were crossed through.
It is likely that the title of the office was not settled by the close of the Assembly. When Tomlinson recorded the day’s events in his journal that evening, he used even different language: “I was selected as general superintendent of all ministers and churches by the Assembly, and moderator for the Assembly for another year.” Although the minutes of the 1909 Assembly use “general moderator,” delegates to the fifth Assembly in 1910 changed the title to the currently used “general overseer.” Ninety years later, delegates to the 68th General Assembly in 2000 authorized the office of general overseer to use the title “presiding bishop.”
The fourth Assembly’s choice of Tomlinson as general moderator was not surprising. He had been the principal pastor from the time he took the right hand of fellowship with the Church of God in 1903, known then as the Holiness Church at Camp Creek. This Quaker-turned-holiness mountain missionary proved to be the most visionary and dynamic of early Church of God leaders. Although he had joined the church at Camp Creek, his vision reached beyond the Unicoi Mountains along the Tennessee and North Carolina borders. Soon there were new congregations in Tennessee and Georgia. In 1904 Tomlinson moved the roughly fifty miles from his home in Culberson, North Carolina, to Cleveland, Tennessee, where he immediately began efforts to establish a church there. Because of his position as pastor of the host congregations, each of the first four Assemblies (meeting at Camp Creek in North Carolina and Union Grove and Cleveland in Tennessee) had selected Tomlinson as moderator and clerk.
Although the new office of general moderator was a year-round position, it was not immediately a full-time position. One week from the day Tomlinson was selected as general moderator in 1909, the Cleveland congregation once again chose him to continue to serve as its pastor. According to Tomlinson’s journal, the following Sunday he taught Sunday school and preached in an afternoon and evening service. He recorded, “The Lord gave me wonderful messages. House crowded, altar packed. I preached with great victory. Cried during altar service. Numbers of old men seeking the baptism of the Holy Ghost.” Neither was Monday a day off for the new general moderator. He wrote, “Went to look after the poor and supply them today, to pray for the sick at night, and a prayer meeting at a cottage.”
Yet according to Dr. Charles W. Conn in Like a Mighty Army, excellent help in the Cleveland church did free Tomlinson to travel more than he had been able to travel previously. The new general moderator conducted extensive evangelistic work in Alabama, Florida and Georgia in 1909. His ministry in Florida resulted in numerous ministers coming into the Church of God including future missionaries Rebecca Barr, R. M. Evans, and Ida Evans, along with future state overseers, Edmond Barr, Sam C. Perry, E. E. Simmons, and H. B. Simmons.
From the time of Tomlinson’s selection in 1909, the office of general overseer has remained the most significant general office in the Church of God.
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This article was written by Church of God Historian David G. Roebuck, Ph.D., who is director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Lee University. This “Church of God Chronicles” was first published in the January 1999 Church of God Evangel.
