Embassy of the Kingdom
Embassy of the Kingdom
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Pentecostal denomination with some 36,000 congregations in 178 nations, and a church locator.
Facts confirmed against their own official pages on 13 August 2026. No one paid for a place here, and we earn nothing if you click.
It began on 19 August 1886 in a millhouse along Barney Creek, in Monroe County, Tennessee. Richard Green Spurling, a former Baptist, preached and eight people formed a Christian Union — agreeing to take the New Testament as their rule, to give one another equal right to interpret Scripture, and to sit together as the church of God. The name Church of God was adopted formally twenty-one years later.
Ten years after that first meeting, a revival at the Shearer Schoolhouse in Camp Creek, North Carolina brought the doctrine of sanctification to the community. The opposition was severe, but the revival held, and believers there experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues and divine healing — several years before the Pentecostal movement broke out across the world.
If you are looking for a congregation, the Church Locator on their site is the plainest way in. The Declaration of Faith is published in full, so you can read what a congregation stands on before you walk through the door.
Under its first General Overseer, A. J. Tomlinson, it held its first International General Assembly in 1906, began sending workers abroad in 1909 starting with the Bahamas, launched the Church of God Evangel in 1910, and opened training for ministers in 1918 — the school that later became Lee University, also listed here.
Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) does not sponsor or endorse Embassy of the Kingdom, and we are not affiliated with them. We list them because we checked them and would put them in a friend’s hands. If you lead a ministry and would like to be considered, or believe something here should be corrected, write to us — we read every message ourselves.