The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) began as a protest not against a particular church's discrimination or doctrine, but against denominational organization itself. Daniel Sidney Warner (1842-1895), an ordained minister of the Church of God (General Eldership), a body descended from the German Reformed evangelist John Winebrenner, had embraced the Holiness movement's teaching of entire sanctification, a second, post-conversion work of grace that cleanses the believer's heart. In October 1881, when the Northern Indiana Eldership rejected reforms Warner proposed, he and five companions withdrew at its meeting in Beaver Dam, Indiana.
Warner did not intend to found another denomination. Drawing on Holiness-movement suspicion of church hierarchy, he taught that denominational structures divided Christians who should instead recognize their unity simply as believers in Christ, a stance the movement described as coming out of Babylon, an allusion to Revelation's call to leave a corrupt religious system. He carried this message through his periodical, the Gospel Trumpet, and through camp-meeting revivalism across the Midwest, and though the movement he began has functioned, in practice, as a denomination ever since, it has never adopted a formal creed or membership roll, holding that living faith in Christ, not enrollment on a church register, is what makes someone part of the church.