With Signs Following

The Life and Ministry of Charles Harrison Mason

Raynard D. Smith

• Publisher: CBP
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780827243200
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Born to ex-slaves in Reconstruction-era Tennessee, Bishop Charles Harrison Mason had a vision for the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) that thrives today in an international Pentecostal church with more than five million members. With Signs Following: The Life and Ministry of Charles Harrison Mason examines the social, cultural, and religious aspects of Bishop Mason's leadership and creative genius in establishing COGIC as a distinct Black Church tradition. With Signs Following shares four decades of research from leading scholars that addresses the sociological, theological, psychological, social-ethical, and historical perspectives of COGIC and Mason's ministry.

Contributors:
Christopher Brennan
Ithiel Clemmons
David D. Daniels III
Glenda Williams Goodson
Robert R. Owens
Craig Scandrett-Leatherman
Raynard D. Smith
Frederick L. Ware

1

TRUE KOINONIA

Pentecostal Hopes and Historical Realities

ITHIEL C. CLEMMONS¹

Beloved colleagues, brothers and sisters, it has been a great privilege for me to serve this year as President of so distinguished an association of scholars as the Society for Pentecostal Studies. I am doubly honored to have been called upon to serve during the 75th Anniversary of the Azusa Revival—a revival that has come to be viewed as a major American contribution to Christianity.²

The Society for Pentecostal Studies traces its beginning to that 20th Century Awakening. Pentecostalism’s phenomenal spread in this century, with its claims to valid primitive Christianity, its challenges to traditional Christian Faith, and its contribution to Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Church renewal accounts for an estimated 35—50 million adherents around the world. This is indeed one of the fascinating aspects of recent Church history.

I assumed the mantle of presidency of this august body with some trepidation.³ But, not being one who succumbs to fear and trembling or backs away from ideological encounter, the year has provided me an opportunity to search for previously undisclosed primary source material, to reassess some commonly held views that have proven inadequate in light of these new source materials, and to press for a closing of the conscious and unconscious gaps that exist in our knowledge about the founders of this revolutionary Christian Movement.⁴

This evening, I want to lift up the contribution of just one of the founders of the 20th Century Pentecostal Movement who has been shamefully neglected in Pentecostal historiography in general. I wish to do this for two reasons: First, the most obvious, is that Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ, is the focus of my own doctoral studies and it makes practical sense for me to hold to my area of deepest preoccupations. Second, the shameful neglect of such Pentecostal giants as C.H. Mason, W.J. Seymour, and G.T. Haywood is reflective of a mind-set that has informed Pentecostal historiography from its very beginning that we must deal with honestly, in the love of Christ, before the veracity of Pentecostal origins can be adequately established and before the Pentecostal bodies that have emerged over these 75 years can fulfill their raison d’être.

The original vision has been lost largely because the Black pioneers of the Pentecostal Movement have been shamefully neglected. Modern church history needs to close this gap created by historical racism.

Before summarizing and looking at the basic contributions of Charles Harrison Mason, I want to call attention to three literary works that have attended the diamond jubilee of the Azusa Revival. Two of these works relate directly to the central point that I seek to make in this address. These works are: (1) Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street, foreword by Vinson Synan (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1980), a republication of How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles, a personal diary published by Bartleman in 1925, three years after Seymour’s death; (2) Dr. Douglas J. Nelson, “For Such a Time as This: The Story of Bishop William J. Seymour, A Search for Pentecostal/Charismatic Roots,” a doctoral dissertation completed for the Theology Department (University of Birmingham at Birmingham, England, May 1981); and (3) Kilian McDonnell, OSB, STD, ed., Presence, Power, Praise: Documents on the Charismatic Renewal, 3 vols., (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1980). This is Father McDonnell’s Magnum Opus of the Charismatic Movement.

My distinguished colleague, Dr. Vinson Synan, is to be commended for his enlightening introduction to Frank Bartleman’s diary. It is extremely helpful, especially to those who have not read Frank Bartleman’s story in From Plow to Pulpit. It helps us to get a portrait of the man. Bartleman, in 1925, two decades following the watershed revival, seeks to recall those early days in an effort to answer the question, the deep sigh of many of the old timers, “What happened to the glory?” Bartleman’s attempt to answer the question has bequeathed to us a valuable account of the religious milieu that formed the social and religious context of the revival. With the new research tools (e.g., Erikson’s psychohistory) that we have available for historical interpretation today, we are able to better understand Bartleman as a man of his times and to more accurately evaluate the reliability of his duty. His life seemed overbeset by poverty and misfortune. Times were hard for him and he was given to bouts of deep depression. The sainted Ruth Fisher perceived him as a man who walked with his head in a cloud. I suppose it is not difficult to belittle such an impractical person. Yet, he was a deeply sensitive spirit whose attachment to a hidden world of the spirit was overwhelming, whose sense of the transcendent sustained his soul and thrust him beyond the immediate purposes of livelihood. He received brilliant flashes of historical and spiritual insight. The following is but one such gestalt observation:

We had been called to bless and serve the whole body of Christ, everywhere Christ is one, and his “body” can be but “one.” We were all baptized into one body. (I Cor. 12:12). The church is an organism not a human organization.⁵

In brilliant flashes of insight, he could perceive the moments when the divine-human encounter transcended the entrapment of social categories of class and caste. Yet, alas, like his brethren from B.F. Lawrence^{6 to Robert Mapes Anderson,7} with few exceptions (Hollenweger, Lovett, Tinney, Synan, Menzies, Nelson), he was so bound to the social a priori of White culture that the tremendous contributions of people of color to the Movement was at best peripheral. Even when these spiritual and ecclesiastical giants were perceived as “eleventh hour comers to the movement,” their genius was seen as derived from White culture rather than from divine revelation. This is not a chauvinistic or cavalier put-down of my colleagues in the fields of Pentecostal theology and history. This is rather a conclusion drawn from a careful reading of the literature. How else does one interpret Bartleman’s insight that “the color line was washed away in the blood” (p. 54) and yet, be so blind to W.H. Durham’s divisive activities? How else could Bartleman so completely gloss over Clara Lum’s stealing of the Apostolic Faith Newspaper, an event that marked the beginning of the end of the revival? Bartleman is indeed a valuable source for understanding the readiness of Los Angeles for the revolutionary spiritual movement, but save for brief flashes of exceptional insight, he is, for the most part, unreliable as a historian of the movement because of his obvious entrapment in social a priori White categories, despite his spiritual sensitivity.

The social a priori of White culture that informed and continues to inform particular White theologians and historians of the Pentecostal Movement is especially revealed in the intensified and renewed drive since the 1950s to hail Charles Fox Parham as the Father of the contemporary Pentecostal Movement at the expense of William J. Seymour, the man whom God truly used. This is due not so much to devious intention of particular theologians and historians as it is to the social context in which their thinking occurs. It is an expression of two centuries of English Protestant theology that, as Peter Gay has so perceptively observed, “gives God His glory, assigns men their places, gives events their meaning-and Anglo-Saxon superiority its due.”⁸ It is unfortunate that, in telling this marvelous story of Pentecostal origins in America, these brilliant chroniclers have become so enclosed within their own social contexts that they are lured to treat their distorted visions of reality as the whole truth. And they feel they must destroy other stories that bear witness that the history of the movement can be seen from another perspective.

Fortunately, this 75th Anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival has called forth a study that is destined to be one of the most significant works on Modern Pentecostal origins ever produced. Historians inside and outside the Movement have had little interest in an accurate account of Bishop W.J. Seymour, notwithstanding his crucial significance. Walter Hollenweger, in a personal communication to me this past summer, wrote of Dr. Douglas J. Nelson’s doctoral dissertation:

…Doug Nelson has convincingly shown that without William J. Seymour, there would have undoubtedly been some form of revival as America has had many, but nothing compared to what the Pentecostal revival is about.⁹

Nelson has convincingly argued that William J. Seymour’s Azusa Mission represented the restoration of human equality in the body of Christ for the first time since the first Christian Pentecost and early Christianity. Seymour’s leadership gave something to Western European civilization, something that was missing—and since has been rejected and remains lost. Seymour brought together the apostolic vision of “beloved community” of human equality. Seymour championed one doctrine above all others: There must be no color line or any other division in the Church of Jesus Christ because God is no respecter of persons. This inclusive fellowship is not a human construct but a divine glossolalia community of human equality. Spiritual power sprang more from interracial equality than from glossolalia.¹⁰ “As long as the practice of glossolalia remains alienated from its roots in Christian oneness beyond the color line, it must be at best socially irrelevant. To be genuinely Christian, it requires expression within the larger social vision of its historic roots.”¹¹

Nelson is a White American clergyman of the United Methodist Church, a retired Chaplain (LTC) U.S. Army, who since 1975 has been an interested participant in the Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement. Nelson’s study is significant because for the first time in the twentieth century, we are presented with a full, detailed, accurate portrait of the leader of the Azusa Revival. Moreover, for the first time, we are able to see fully what that revival was about from Seymour’s perspective. Other writers, such as Brumback,¹² have indeed devoted considerable attention to Seymour and Azusa Mission, along with a thorough analysis of the Pentecostal Movement. Nelson is not the first to hold up the interracial element. He is the first, however, to grasp the connection between glossolalia and the inclusive, interracial, egalitarian fellowship as being all-important and the source of that revival’s powerful attention. Nelson’s evidence is so overwhelming as to prompt Professor James Cone to say to me after reading his study: “The histories are going to have to be rewritten.”¹³ Here is the story of a people in a situation of dialectic encounter with an Other wherein they are grasped by the One who is other than self. Truth in this sense was not derived from human consciousness. Truth in this context was an event that occurred to people often against the human will, bringing about a true koinonia.¹⁴ Faith for these people was not simply a feeling of inwardness separated from the historical struggle. Faith became an event that transcended, challenged, and transformed the social context.

If Nelson is true (and his evidence, drawn from heretofore overlooked primary materials, is overwhelming), past conclusions must be called into account as inadequate. We are now able to correct those caricatures of this morally impeccable Christian leader whom historical racism has caused to be shamefully portrayed.¹⁵

Nelson’s finding corroborates my own research based on other primary source materials heretofore overlooked. Even more than Seymour, Charles Harrison Mason has been heretofore shamefully neglected and underestimated, despite his importance in the origin, rise, and spread of the Pentecostal Movement. It was C.H. Mason, not C.F. Parham, who grasped and stood with Seymour in the revival that united glossolalia with Pauline vision of an all-inclusive egalitarian fellowship in which there is “…neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free…male nor female…”(Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11). Early twentieth-century America did not have the social fabric that could bind a fellowship that transcended race and class. The dream was certainly in accord with the American dream. But its radical, racial, egalitarian praxis challenged the racist presupposition of American society. Mason and Seymour stood together in this Pauline vision overlooked by White America, but created and nurtured in American slavery’s “Invisible Institution” like diamond deep in the earth where enormous pressure bears on black anthracite coal.

Primary source material reveals that C.H. Mason and C.P.Jones influenced W.J. Seymour before he met Charles Fox Parham at Houston in August, 1905,¹⁶ and that Mason’s seminal supportive influence was a continual source of strength for him until his death in September 1922. Mason’s significance went far beyond giving legal ecclesiastical status to independent clergy so that they could perform ministerial functions and receive reduced clergy rates on the nation’s railroads (as historians have pointed out). Mason brought to the movement a combination of charismatic gifts and ecclesiastical churchmanship that gave the fledgling movement strength to endure despite efforts by insiders (Parham) and outsiders (L. A. Times) to crush it. While leaders A.J. Tomlinson and J.H. King, fast friends of Mason’s, refused to attend the organizing meeting of the Assemblies of God in 1914 because of doctrinal differences, Mason, although overlooked by those who sent out letters announcing the meeting, chose to attend anyway, prayed for the brethren, and bade them God’s speed. He was committed to Pentecostalism’s primary vision of healing divisions. Yet he was wise enough to know that Blacks would always be constricted with Whites in leadership. Whites would allow doctrinal differences to break fellowship. Mason recognized doctrinal differences, retained their significance, but would not allow these differences to stand in the way of fellowship.

Seymour and Haywood both died at age 52, in 1922 and 1932, respectively. Evidence is that they both died of broken hearts brought on by resurgent racial attitudes in America. When White leaders tragically locked the Pentecostal Movement behind walls of race and class, Mason endured and upheld the radical spiritual and social vision of the Azusa Revival. He refused to divorce glossolalia and koinonia. He lived as a leader, an apostle, and ecclesiastical statesman.

One of the earliest White holiness-pentecostal converts wrote of the tremendous influence of C.H. Mason on his life and thinking, as well as on the lives of thousands of others Whites, as well as Blacks.¹⁷ He wrote:

I first met…Mason and C.P. Jones…at Conway, Arkansas, on the 19th day of November, 1904. I had only been preaching a little over a year. I was walking down the street at Conway, and I heard someone preaching. I was several blocks away and something said to me, “There is a public sale on and the auctioneer is speaking pretty loud.” As I walked on towards the gathering, I was soon convinced that it was not a public sale; that it was preaching by a colored man. When I arrived, I found two or three thousand people standing around a cotton wagon in which Brother Mason stood preaching. At the conclusion of the sermon, Brother C.P. Jones, who was also in the wagon, sang two songs; one entitled, “Take Your Burdens to the Lord and Leave Them Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: True Koinonia: Pentecostal Hopes and Historical Realities
• CHAPTER 2: When in the Course of Human Events? Conflicting Indirect Evidence for the Birth and Paternity of Charles Harrison Mason
• CHAPTER 3: African Roots and Multicultural Mission of Afropentecostalism: Bishop Mason’s Desk of Roots
• CHAPTER 4: Charles Harrison Mason as Sign Reader and Interpreter
• CHAPTER 5: Bishop Charles Harrison Mason: The Apostle of Reconciliation
• CHAPTER 6: The Church of God in Christ Transforms Women’s Ministries Through the Positive Influence of Chief Apostle Bishop C.H. Mason
• CHAPTER 7: Seeking the Just Society: Charles Harrison Mason’s Quest for Social Equality
• CHAPTER 8: A More Excellent Way”: The Theological Journey of Bishop Charles Harrison Mason in the Theological Formation of the Church of God in Christ
• Selected Bibliography and References
• Notes