Location: NC 308 (350 Governors Road) northwest of Windsor
County: Bertie
Original Date Cast: 2018
The Church of God in Christ, today headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, and composed of over five million members, primarily African Americans, is deeply rooted in the Pentecostal Holiness tradition. The first meeting took place in 1897 in Mississippi. The broader Pentecostal movement received a boost from the Azusa Street revival held in Los Angeles in 1906. The following year the COGIC denomination was organized.
Aaron Bazemore, a Bertie County native born in 1881, founded what was initially known as St. John Church of God in Christ in 1911, with the initial meetings in the home of his father, John Bazemore. Its establishment came just four years after the formation of the COGIC organizational structure. In time Bazemore led others across eastern North Carolina, in Edenton, Greenville, and Washington, to found COGIC churches. Today there are over 150 in North Carolina. Bazemore navigated the racial divisions (black, white, and Indian) during the Jim Crow era, welcoming all comers to the church. Suspicious neighbors asked Francis D. Winston of Windsor, former lieutenant elected on a white supremacy platform, to check out Bazemore. Winston attended a service and endorsed Bazemore’s work in spreading the Gospel.
After initially leasing the land church members in 1918 acquired from W.S. Outlaw the tract upon which the church was built. In 1942 they renamed the church Cedar Fork and in 1980 Bazemore Temple COGIC for their founder. He died at the age of 111 in 1992 and is buried in the church cemetery.
References:
Arwin D. Smallwood, Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History (2002)
LeRae Umfleet and Benjamin F. Speller, Jr., eds., Historic African American Churches, St. Luke’s Guide to African American History in Bertie County (series) (1997)
Estrelda Y. Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (2011)
Randall J. Stephens, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (2008)
(Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, April 14, 1992 (obituary)
Church of God in Christ, Official Manual
Bertie County Deed Books