first senior bishop

This Week in Black Faith History – Bishop Charles Harrison Mason

Bishop Charles Harrison Mason was the founder and first senior bishop of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest African-American Pentecostal church in the United States. Born to former slaves Jerry and Eliza Mason in Shelby County, Tenn., on Sept. 8, 1864, Mason worked with his family as a sharecropper and did not receive a formal education as a child. But at an early age, he was influenced by his parents’ religion. Mason joined the African American Missionary Baptist Church when he was an adolescent and later received his license to preach from the Mount Gale Missionary Baptist