The records of the Church of God in Michigan consist primarily of correspondence, administrative records, collected historical files, and photographs and audio-tapes, covering the period of 1880 to 1988. The bulk of the records date from 1920, the year of the founding of the Michigan Ministerial Assembly. In large part, the collection was collected and maintained by church historian and executive secretary, Gale Hetrick.
The collection divides into eleven series: Michigan Ministerial Assembly; Administrative Records; Congregational Records; Congregation Historical Materials; Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Gale Hetrick, Correspondence Files; Correspondence with Clergy and Church Officers; Church Organizational Files; Printed Material; Collected Historical Materials; Audio-tapes; and Photographs. The final two series, Audio-tapes and Photographs are unprocessed.
According to church historian Gale Hetrick, the first congregation of the Church of God reformation movement in Michigan met in the small community of Carson City in 1881. Participating in this meeting were Joseph C. Fisher, his wife Allie, and Daniel S. Warner (1842-1895), the individual acknowledged as the founder of what became the Church of God in Michigan.
Warner, a native of Marshallville, Ohio, was licensed in October 1867 by the Churches of God West Ohio Eldership, the religious communion established by Joseph Winebrenner in 1830. Sometime during the late 1870s, Warner became involved in the holiness movement, claiming the experience of sanctification in 1877. His preaching of holiness soon became intolerable to the Churches of God Eldership. As a result of charges brought against him, Warner's license to preach was withheld in January 1878. In October 1878, Warner joined the Northern Indiana Eldership of the Church of God, a splinter group of the Churches of God of North America. Warner's association with this group was an uneasy one and in 1881, first in Beaver Dam, Indiana, and then in Carson City, he established congregations of individuals who shared his belief in the theology of holiness and the doctrine of the oneness of Christians.
The history of the Church of God in Michigan has been chronicled in Gale Hetrick's book, Laughter Among the Trumpets (1980). The researcher should consult that volume for detailed discussion of the church's development. An important part of Warner's reformation and the means used to link the various individual congregations was the newspaper Gospel Trumpet (first published under that name in 1879). The significance of singing to the movement was underscored with the publication of the Songs of Victory songbook in 1885.
In the first decades of its existence, the Church of God of Michigan sought to meet the needs of its people for fellowship, indoctrination, inspiration, and cohesion through grove and camp meetings, and variously scheduled assemblies. After twenty years of flourishing, the camp meeting began a period of stagnation and decline. The leaders of the movement thereafter looked to the local congregation as the single most important grouping of believers.
As a movement, the Church of God was largely opposed to organization on a denominational level. In the early years, there were no elections, boards or committees. The result was extremely powerful, local, informal bishops. In 1920, believing the need for a special meeting of local ministers, apart from the General Assembly in Anderson, Indiana, the Michigan Ministerial Association was formed. Its purpose was to regulate and sanction clergy pastoring Church of God congregations, and also to resolve differences between congregations and pastors.
Further organizational change came in 1943 with the establishment of the Christian Service Board of the Church of God in Michigan, which was renamed in 1967 as the Board of Directors of the General Assembly of the Church of God in Michigan. The board was established to coordinate church activities within the state. In 1967, the church built an office facility for the purpose of housing and implementing the church's statewide programs.