April 23, 2026 is the eightieth anniversary of Bishop J.H. King’s homegoing. At the age of seventy-six, he went to Heaven in 1946 at Anderson County Hospital in Anderson, South Carolina after twenty-three days of hospitalization.

For almost three decades following his election as General Superintendent of the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1917, Bishop King was the most important leader of the denomination. Church historian Douglas Jacobsen, in his highly praised book, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement, ranks King as one of the major Classical Pentecostal theologians in the United States during the period 1900-1925, and as “the most articulate early spokesperson” for Pentecostalism’s Wesleyan-Holiness wing and theological subtradition.i In the words of IPHC Bishop Joseph Synan in 1960: “By all means, we should keep alive in our midst the memory of this great and good man and the things for which he stood.”ii

Life Overview

Joseph Hillery King was born on August 11, 1869 near Anderson, South Carolina. This was in the post-Civil War, economically devastated South. He was the second of eleven children. The family was poor. His father was a sharecropper and tenant farmer. When Joseph was born, the family lived in a one-room log cabin. His first exposure to organized Christianity was in a rural Baptist church near home.

During Joseph’s thirteenth year, the family moved across the Savannah River to Franklin County, Georgia, just a few miles north of Carnesville. The teenager was soon regularly involved in a rural Christian congregation, Allens Methodist Episcopal Church South (MECS). On his sixteenth birthday, he was converted to the Christian faith in Wesleyan-revivalistic fashion at a camp meeting sponsored by Allens Church. Joseph’s first self-claimed experience of Wesleyan entire sanctification occurred two months later at a Carnesville MECS holiness convention.

The young man left home at twenty years of age. After a four-month enlistment in the United States Army, he made what he later described as “a tragic choice” when he wedded Miss Willie Irene King in Augusta. (There was no blood relation between them.) Sadly, they separated after three months because, according to King, she opposed his involvement in Christian ministry. The divorce happened about ten years later. The Reverend did not remarry until 1920, and only after his first wife had died. King’s second wife was Blanche Moore. They had four children: Easter Lily, Joseph, Jr., Virginia, and Mary Ann.

When Joseph King was fifteen, while plowing a cotton field, he received God’s call to preach. He had not yet been saved! Reverend King began credentialled ministry in the MECS with an exhorter’s liccnse in 1890. The next year, he transferred his membership to the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) and was upgraded to a preaching license. Until 1898, he served MEC congregational circuits in middle and north Georgia. During that time span, he also earned a certificate from the U.S. Grant University School of Theology in Chattanooga, a MEC seminary. In 1898, King left the MEC and joined B.H. Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association of America (FBHAA) as an “ordained evangelist.”

King succeeded Irwin as General Overseer of the FBHAA in 1900. For some six years, he led the leadership in removing from the organization what they viewed as doctrinal, mystical, experiential, and public worship extremism. This is when he began to build his reputation as a stickler for relative “order” in public worship and as an opponent of “brainless fanaticism” and “religious extravagance.” At the 1902 General Council meeting, the denomination’s name was changed to the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. The group joined the Pentecostal movement in 1906-1907, and merged with the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1911. King was elected as General Superintendent of the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1917. He served in that post for twenty years, and then from 1937 until his decease he served as one of multiple General Superintendents, for five of those years as Chair of the organization’s General Board. At the 1937 General Conference, Reverend King, Reverend Dan Muse, and all future General Superintendents were bestowed the honorary title of “Bishop.”

Legacy

Bishop J.H. King’s influence was primarily in the Fire-Baptized Holiness and Pentecostal Holiness denominations, not the Pentecostal movement as a whole. His legacy for the IPHC may be summarized in terms of three major contributions to its history, development, and culture. They are some of the reasons why he has been dubbed “the Pentecostal aristocrat” since at least the 1940s.

One, he had a strong vision for and actively pursued quality general and higher education “under Pentecostal Holiness influences” for the organization’s constituency. For example and overall, he was probably the major influencer for the founding and development of Franklin Springs Institute during its early decades (renamed Emmanuel College in 1939).

Two, Bishop King worked persistently for adequate Bible and ministry training for the denomination’s clergy. For instance, his Bible conferences became a veritable Pentecostal Holiness Church institution in the 1920s-1940s. Their primary purpose was to train ministers in Scripture and biblical theology.

Three, Bishop King labored frequently over the decades for a balanced approach to Pentecostal spirituality and Spirit-inspired public worship. Along with other leaders like G.F. Taylor and G.H. Montgomery, he worked to discourage and sweep from the ranks the emotional, mystical, experiential, demonstrative and doctrinal excesses of early Fire-Baptized Holiness “Irwinism” and the early Pentecostal Holiness Church. These extremes included disruptive overemotionalism and over-demonstrativeness in public worship assemblies, doctrinal error, a sectarian condemnation of other Christian denominations as simply unsaved, and spiritually arrogant and judgmental legalism with respect to dress code and dietary restrictions. For example, one of the most infamous doctrinal errors of early Fire-Baptized Holiness “Irwinism” rejected by King was the teaching of multiple and normative post-conversion, post-entire sanctification experiences of Spirit empowerment labeled the baptisms of dynamite, lyddite, selenite, and oxydite! The following is a vintage 1917 King quotation in that connection: “Happifying ignorance has reigned long enough, and it is time that sound wisdom and sobriety were enthroned in its place.”iii

Conclusion

There is no better way of gaining a concrete sense of early IPHC culture than by reading about and studying the life of Bishop J.H. King. For a detailed account of the life and ministry of this great IPHC pioneer leader, see Tony G. Moon, From Plowboy to Pentecostal Bishop: The Life of J.H. King (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2017). One purpose of this book is to inspire readers to pursue the same level of dedication to the Lord Jesus and the church that Bishop King exemplified for some six decades of productive Christian life and ministry.

*For thirty-eight years, Dr. Tony Moon taught Bible, ministry, and Pentecostal history courses at Emmanuel University in Franklin Springs, Georgia. Since retirement from Emmanuel, he has enjoyed a ministry of research, writing, teaching, preaching, and pastoring.

Douglas Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 2003), ix-xiii, 14, 136, 164.

J.A. Synan, Christian Life in Depth (Franklin Springs, GA: Advocate Press, 1964), 7.

J.H. King, “From the General Superintendent,” The Pentecostal Holiness Advocate 1.19 (6 Sept. 1917): 10.