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My thoughts on improving the article

Hey, I'm reading through the article and just making some improvements as well as noting areas where I think there needs to be improvement.

1) I have done a little clean up to the "Holiness origins" section, simply making sure that everything written is cited. The third paragraph is slightly confusing me, however. The COGIC Discipleship Bible is cited as a source for this paragraph, but it is unclear whether the quote attributed to Mason that comes after the citation is from that source or not. This needs to be resolved. If everything in that paragraph is coming from the Discipleship Bible, then the easiest thing to do would be to place the citation at the end of the paragraph.

2) I've noticed that the Discipleship Bible is cited in the article several times. However, it is cited once as the "Centennial Edition" and the rest of the time it is not. Can anyone clear this up for us?

3) In the second paragraph of the "C.H. Mason era 1907–1961" section, there is a citation given for the Official Manual. However, no page number is given. Can anyone help us out and find a page number please? Thanks.

4) In the last paragraph of "C.H. Mason era 1907–1961", there is a book by Vinson Synan used as a source. No page numbers are given, however. Can anyone give us the page number?

5) In the second paragraph of "A "Dark Period", 1962–1968", a book by Robert Owens is cited but no page numbers are given.

6)There are several lists in the article that list every member of several governing bodies. Are all these lists really necessary?

That's all for now. I'm still reading through the article, and as I do, I'll point out other issues I see! Ltwin ( talk) 09:38, 6 December 2012 (UTC) reply

Membership Estimates

The membership estimates are enormously exagerated. If there are five million members in the United States in twelve thousand churches, that makes the average membership of COGIC churches to be around 400 members--larger than the average church membership of any other protestant organization. Based on several sources, the average church size regardless of denominational stripe in America is only around 100. This is not very honest of this organization. Rdaenot ( talk) 08:04, 24 February 2013 (UTC) reply

Not all churches are going to have memberships of 100. There are churches in the COGIC with thousands of members. It does not follow that if there are 5 million members that every church will be the same size of 400. Ltwin ( talk) 06:18, 22 April 2015 (UTC) reply
The Pew Forum http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations a few years back found .6% listed Church of God (this denomination, Church of God (Cleveland) has about .4%) which would give about 1.9 million members (given a US population of nearly 320 million). -- Erp ( talk) 06:15, 21 April 2015 (UTC) reply

Style

this is an important article, and needs to be written in an encyclopedic manner. There are some problems, including the use of promotional adjectives and phrases, such as most influential the excessive repetitive use of individual names, the repetition of the name of the church (most of the time it should be "the church" in lower case -- or "it", the use of meaningless phrases, such as "to name a few" and "as well", and the use of tiles such as "Mother" and "Bishop" except for the first mention of each individual. There's also some question about excessive detail about the activities of small individual groups within the church.

Considering the earlier problems about copyright, it seems as there is an attempt being made trying to conform the article to a prebuilt text, possibly as a Close paraphrase. Besides such consideration, please see WP:OWN.

I started fixing it, but have been reverted. I'm changing it back again, and intend to finish. . It's essential to have good articles about major religious groups, especially ones like this, so important in American life and history. DGG ( talk ) 02:43, 20 May 2013 (UTC) reply

I intend furthermore to remove the We do not use them. (by the way, I came here to restore the article on J. O. Patterson, Sr. which I expect to do some time this week.) DGG ( talk ) 02:43, 20 May 2013 (UTC) reply

CfD nomination of Category:Pentecostal pastors

Category:Pentecostal pastors and related categories have been nominated for renaming. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page. Ltwin ( talk) 17:05, 4 January 2015 (UTC) reply

unique tradition?

The church has a tradition of prayer, fasting, praise, and consecration that was once unique to Holiness or Pentecostal groups. Many mainline denominations and countless nondenominational churches that once rejected these beliefs and practices have adopted these distinctions in their worship liturgy and lifestyle practices.

I see two problems with this statement. First, if it's true that Holiness/Pentecostal groups were once unique in their tradition of "tradition of prayer, fasting, praise, and consecration" but that many mainline churches have since adopted that tradition, that fact would seem to be more relevant to the article on Holiness/Pentecostal churches than to an article specifically on COGIC. Second, the general practice of prayer, fasting, praise, and consecration were never unique to the Pentecostal movement--all Christian groups have always practiced prayer, many (hello, Catholicism!) have been fasting since forever, and both praise and consecration likewise go back to the earliest days of Christianity. So in the general sense the claim above is clearly inaccurate. If it's meant to be more narrowly construed as meaning that it was the Pentecostal's particular approach to prayer, fasting, etc. that was unique but that has been adopted by other Christian groups, including "many mainline denominations," I think that claim needs to be supported by a more neutral source than COGIC. 206.208.105.129 ( talk) 15:22, 7 January 2015 (UTC) reply

"prohibitions against profanity, alcohol, substance abuse and immoral behavior."

Wow - quite different than most religious bodies, which encourage immoral behavior 71.177.145.2 ( talk) 01:22, 28 June 2015 (UTC) reply

The statement by User talk:71.177.145.2 is irrelevant to the talk on COGIC. The statement lacks intellectual knowledge concerning religious bodies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.25.211.33 ( talk) 22:45, 16 September 2016 (UTC) reply

External links modified

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Ministers

Wikipedia is not a indiscriminate collection of information. The section listing a collection of names of members is encyclopedic, unsourced, and serves no useful purpose. I've removed it. -- RexxS ( talk) 21:07, 19 May 2018 (UTC) reply

I support this action. Indeed, the article is referenced almost entirely to materials published by the organization or people closely associated with it. I see minimal - at best - evidence of notability. It is also so prolix that only a devoted supporter is likely to read it, and more or less entirely unsuitable for an encyclopedia. It needs much more pruning than RexxS's removal. Sylvia de Jonge ( talk) 17:01, 23 May 2018 (UTC) reply
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