Question 1

What does “sanctified” mean?

Accepted Answer

Of a person or a church: Holiness, Spirit-filled, and unashamed about it. The Sanctified Church started in Mississippi in the 1890s, a decade before Azusa Street.

Question 2

Where does “sanctified” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black Holiness and Pentecostal churches of the South, from the 1890s. Sanctified is not a Black coinage — it is Wesleyan theological vocabulary, English and white in origin, describing entire sanctification as a second work of grace. What is Black is the reclaiming: Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason were expelled from their Black Baptist association for preaching it, and Mason organized his first Holiness congregation out of a revival in Lexington, Mississippi in 1897, meeting in a house and then in an abandoned cotton gin house. Traveling to Little Rock later that year he took the name Church of God in Christ. In 1907 Mason went to the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, received the baptism of the Spirit, split with Jones over whether tongues were its evidence, and reorganized COGIC as a Pentecostal body out of Memphis. It is now the oldest and largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the country. The Sanctified Church as a named category is an umbrella — COGIC and its kin, not one denomination — and it entered the scholarly record largely through Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote about it in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology in 1934 and whose posthumous 1981 collection took the phrase for its title. Note that Hurston's framing, Sanctified worship as a protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as Negroes gained education and wealth, is an argument and should be attributed to her, not stated as neutral fact. Some date the Jones and Mason work to 1895; COGIC's own history uses 1897.