Church of God
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or CHURCHES OF GOD, a Christian sect which originated in 1830, in a movement in which John Winebrenner, previously a minister in the German Reformed Church, was most prominent. A new society was organized by him, and others who accepted his views, which took the name of the Church of God. It exists principally in Pennsylvania and the Western States. The government of the Church of God is congregational, with a supervising church council, composed of the preachers in charge, the elders, and deacons. Associations, or conferences of churches, called elderships, meet annually, and a general eldership meets every three years. The Church of God holds the doctrines of the Evangelical churches, with baptism by immersion ; only, subsequent to faith; feet-washing the administration of the Lord's Supper instrumentalities in the evening; all the of revivals; and protests against the traffic in intoxicating drinks. The denomination supports several educational institutions, a publishing house at Harof missionrisburg, Pa., and a number counaries in India and in other foreign tries. It has some 500 ministers, about 600 churches, and about 40,000 communicants. CHURCH, STATES OF THE, or territory that PAPAL STATES, a stretched from the Po to near Naples, and in 1859 had an area of 15,774 square miles and a pop. of 3,000,000. It was divided for administrative purposes into 20 districts, including the Comarca of Rome; six legations, among them those of Bologna and Ravenna; and 13 delegations, including Ancona and Perugia. More general divisions were the Romagna, Umbria, and the March of Ancona. The war of 1859 and the popular vote of 1860 left the Pope only the comarca of Rome, the legation of Velletri, and the delegations of Civita Vecchia, Frosinone, and Viterbo, 4,493 square miles in extent, with a pop. of about 700,000, the rest being united with Italy. The temin poral power of the Popes originated of Ravenna by a gift of the exarchate Pepin to Pope Stephen II., and it reached Innocent III. its greatest extent under . The withdrawal of the (1198-1216) French garrison of Rome in 1870 led to temporal the final downfall of the Pope's power, and the restriction of the Pope's jurisdiction within the limits of the Vatican.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 treated "Church of God" as essentially one body " the movement John Winebrenner began in 1830, with some 600 churches and 40,000 communicants centred on Pennsylvania and its publishing house at Harrisburg. That group survives as the Churches of God, General Conference, renamed in the 1970s and now headquartered in Findlay, Ohio, where it still sponsors the school that grew into the University of Findlay; it remains small, on the order of 30,000 members. What Collier's could not foresee is that the name would be captured by the Pentecostal revival that began at Azusa Street in 1906: the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) and the Church of God in Christ together now count many millions of adherents worldwide, so that a reader searching "Church of God" today almost never lands on Winebrenner. The stray paragraph on the Papal States that follows in the scanned column was itself overtaken in 1929, when the Lateran Treaty created the sovereign Vatican City State.
Written for this edition, 2026.