For seven years after its 1907 reorganization, the Church of God in Christ held a distinction no other Pentecostal body in America could claim: it was the only one with a state charter. Early Pentecostal ministers of every race needed legal standing to perform weddings, claim clergy tax status and found congregations, and Charles Harrison Mason's charter was the only one available. Mason ordained hundreds of white ministers under it alongside Black ones, an arrangement that held only a few years before the country's racial climate made it untenable. In 1914, some three hundred white ministers he had ordained met in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and organized their own body, which became the Assemblies of God. The church that remained under Mason continued as the denomination it is today, overwhelmingly Black and Black led.
Its government today is episcopal rather than congregational, built around a Presiding Bishop elected every four years, a General Assembly meeting twice yearly, and jurisdictional bishops overseeing geographic districts beneath the Presiding Bishop's national authority. Women hold no place in that ordained structure; the church does not ordain women as elders, pastors or bishops. What it does have, and has had since early in its history, is the Women's Department, the denomination's largest department, led by a General Supervisor of Women appointed for life with real spiritual authority over its international women's ministry, organized into the Deaconess Missionary and Evangelist Missionary categories. Headquartered in Memphis at Mason Temple, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech in 1968, the church is today the fifth largest Christian denomination in the United States by the National Council of Churches' own count.