Abstract

This article examines the recurring use of prophetic remnant interpretation within the Tomlinson stream of Church of God history, with special attention to the “third part” pattern drawn from Zechariah 13:8–9. The clearest documentary evidence appears in Homer A. Tomlinson’s Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, Volume Two, where the 1923 division is interpreted as the first cutting off, another separation is anticipated, and the eventual emergence of the “third part” is identified as “the real Church of God.” Homer then presents the 1943 division in those terms, as the fulfillment of that prophetic pattern and as the preservation of “The Church of God in all her glorious vision.”¹

This study argues that the same underlying logic of apostasy, remnant survival, prophetic refinement, and exclusive continuity reappeared in later Tomlinson-derived movements. Publicly available material tied to the 1993 reorganization of The Church of God explicitly identifies that body as the “third part” after the divisions of 1923 and 1993. Public histories from the Jerusalem Acres and Ephesus stream likewise connect Grady R. Kent to Zechariah’s “third part” and interpret his 1957 separation in those terms, though these sources are internal and retrospective and must therefore be handled critically.² Zion Assembly Church of God does not appear in the sources examined here to use the exact “third part” formula, but it clearly reproduces the same larger restorationist remnant structure by declaring a “falling away” in its former fellowship, claiming reorganization as the recovery of the true church, and presenting itself as a visible embodiment of “the church of the Bible.”³

Introduction

One of the most enduring habits of thought within the Tomlinson tradition has been the tendency to interpret church division not merely as historical rupture, but as prophecy. Division is repeatedly reframed as purification, selection, restoration, or the uncovering of the true remnant. In this way, fragmentation does not necessarily weaken a group’s claim to continuity. It may actually strengthen it. A smaller body can present itself not as diminished, but as refined; not as separated, but as preserved; not as new, but as the authentic continuation of the Church of God.

This pattern is deeply bound up with the restorationist doctrine of the church that has long marked the Tomlinson world. If the church is understood not as one denomination among many, nor as an invisible collection of believers alone, but as a visible, covenanted, divinely ordered body in history, then division creates an immediate theological crisis. Which body, after a division, still constitutes the true church? Rather than admitting division as a tragic contradiction of restorationist claims, successive groups within this tradition often resolved the tension by narrating division itself as part of God’s providential and prophetic design. In that setting, separation becomes not the negation of continuity, but the means by which continuity is supposedly disclosed.

Among the biblical passages used to sustain this logic, Zechariah 13:8–9 proved especially influential. Its imagery of two parts being cut off and a third part passing through refining fire supplied a powerful theological grammar for explaining division without surrendering exclusivist identity. In the documentary record, Homer A. Tomlinson provides the clearest and earliest explicit use of this scheme. Later bodies, however, did not merely echo its spirit indirectly. In some cases they revived it openly and self-consciously, applying the same prophetic framework to their own separations and thereby locating themselves within a sacred history of remnant succession.⁴

This study draws on published diaries, assembly minutes, organizational guides, and public historical materials, while distinguishing where possible between contemporaneous documentation and later retrospective self-interpretation. Its argument is that the “third part” should not be treated as an isolated interpretation within one eccentric branch of the tradition. Rather, it is an especially revealing expression of a broader cult-like grammar within the Tomlinson world. That grammar repeatedly performs four related moves: it identifies apostasy in a parent body, defines a separating remnant as faithful, interprets the division as prophetically meaningful, and then assigns exclusive continuity to the surviving or reorganized church. Homer A. Tomlinson articulated this logic most explicitly. Grady R. Kent, The Church of God that emerged from the 1993 reorganization, and Zion Assembly Church of God each reactivated the same underlying pattern in distinct but recognizable ways.

Homer A. Tomlinson and the Explicit “Third Part” Doctrine

The clearest and most theologically consequential statement of the “third part” doctrine in this stream of Church of God history appears in the Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, Volume Two, edited by Homer A. Tomlinson. What makes this source so important is that Homer does not merely wrap prophetic language over conflict after the fact. He presents A. J. Tomlinson as having already discerned the prophetic structure by which later divisions were to be understood. According to Homer’s account, A. J. Tomlinson stated in 1929 that the departure of the “Elders church” in 1923 fulfilled Zechariah 13:8–9 as one part being cut off, that “somewhere up the road another part will be cut off,” and that the “third part” would then come forth, adding that “that would be the real Church of God.” Homer then seals the interpretation with a reflective claim of fulfillment: “This came to pass just twenty years later.”⁵

This passage has unusual force because it does not merely comfort a wounded body after division. It rewrites division itself as sacred history. The 1923 division is no longer an embarrassing institutional fracture. It becomes the first stage in a providential sifting. A second division is then anticipated, not as an accident of history, but as part of the same prophetic sequence. The body that survives the later crisis is declared to be “the real Church of God.” In theological terms, this is more than reflective consolation. It is a doctrine of remnant succession through judgment. The church does not simply endure division; it is disclosed by division. The true body is made manifest only after rival parts have been cut away.

Homer’s language is therefore about the nature and identity of the Church in the strongest possible sense. Zechariah 13:8–9 is not being read as a general principle about suffering believers. It is being read as a prophecy of visible church history. The “third part” is not an invisible remnant known only to God. It is a concrete, historically embodied church body that emerges after successive purgations and claims sole right to the identity of the genuine Church of God. The true church is not hidden in the broad mass of Christianity. It is disclosed through separation, reduced through judgment, and manifested after competing bodies have been cut off.

The same text makes plain that this prophetic structure was inseparable from Homer’s own post-1943 claim to continuity. Immediately after recounting the “third part” saying, Homer presents the later division in providential terms and declares that what others “meant for evil,” God “meant for good,” and that God had sent him ahead “to save The Church of God in all her glorious vision.”⁶ The issue is no longer who controls property, who occupies an office, or who possesses legal advantage. The decisive question becomes: through whom has the church’s true vision survived? Homer’s answer is unmistakable. The surviving remnant is the elected vessel of preservation, and he himself stands within that providential line as the one through whom the church’s authentic future has been carried forward.

Seen in this light, the “third part” doctrine solved one of the deepest contradictions in Tomlinsonian restorationism. If the Church of God had already arisen in 1903 as the restored New Testament church, then subsequent rupture posed a devastating theological problem. How can the restored visible church split and still claim to be restored? Homer’s answer was to make division part of the restoration itself. Division no longer stands outside the sacred narrative as an embarrassment. It becomes one of the appointed means by which the true object of restoration is distinguished from all pretenders. The split is not the failure of the restoration. It is the unveiling of the restoration’s final and proper bearer.

At a deeper level, Homer’s reading of Zechariah participates in an older biblical grammar of remnant, judgment, fire, and covenant renewal. The prophetic text speaks of cutting off, passing through fire, and a people finally able to say, “The Lord is my God.” Homer seizes that grammar and grafts it directly onto modern church history. Those cut off are the bodies that departed from divine order. The remnant that survives is the people brought through fire. The church becomes, in effect, the apocalyptic remnant of the last days, prophetically sifted and historically embodied. For that reason, Homer’s “third part” doctrine should be understood as one of the clearest examples of cult-like remnant theology in the modern Church of God tradition. It offered a total interpretive framework by which the surviving body could understand itself as prophetically foreseen, historically necessary, and exclusively legitimate.

That insight prepares the way for the next question. If Homer’s “third part” doctrine did not remain confined to one crisis, how did it function as a reusable theological grammar for later claimants?

The Logic of the “Third Part”

The “third part” pattern functioned as far more than an isolated biblical prooftext or a striking prophetic slogan. Within the Tomlinsonian world, it supplied an entire theological framework by which loss, division, marginalization, and institutional reduction could be reinterpreted as signs of divine election rather than of collapse. Read through Zechariah 13:8–9, numerical diminishment no longer had to be taken as evidence of failure, error, or fragmentation. Instead, it could be construed as refinement. The smaller body was not the weaker body but the purer body. The suffering body was not the defeated body but the tested body. The rejected body was not the schismatic body but the preserved remnant through whom God was continuing His purpose. In that logic, the painful reality of separation was transfigured into the very means by which authenticity was disclosed. Historical reduction became church validation.

This interpretive move is significant because it reveals how cult-like restorationism protects itself from historical contradiction. A movement that claims to be the restored New Testament church immediately faces a serious theological problem when it undergoes division. If it is truly the restored church, why does it divide? Why does the supposedly recovered visible body fragment into rival claimants? Under ordinary historical analysis, repeated rupture would appear to weaken restorationist claims. The “third part” doctrine, however, does the opposite. It converts the crisis into confirmation. Division no longer disproves restoration; it becomes the necessary unveiling of those for whom the restoration was truly intended. The split is no longer an embarrassment to be explained away but a prophecy to be interpreted.⁷

At a deeper theological level, this pattern draws strength from the biblical grammar of remnant, judgment, and purification. The language of a surviving people after cutting off, a people brought through fire, and a people finally able to say “The Lord is my God,” resonates powerfully with longstanding biblical themes. Israel’s history, prophetic judgment, exile, return, and purification furnish categories that can be reapplied to the church. Once that typological habit is established, contemporary institutional conflict can be narrated in redemptive-historical terms. The parent body becomes analogous to Israel in decline, or to a people corrupted by mixture and departure. The separating minority becomes analogous to the purified remnant preserved by God for His own name. The new or reorganized body then appears not as a novelty but as the continuation of the covenant people after divine sifting. Thus the “third part” does not merely answer an organizational question. It offers a whole ecclesiology of judgment and survival.

That ecclesiology is especially potent in traditions that reject a merely invisible understanding of the church. If the church is viewed not simply as the spiritual totality of all believers, but as a visible, covenanted, disciplined, and divinely ordered body in history, then the question of which body truly continues the church becomes urgent. In such settings, the “third part” formula functions as a principle of visible succession through purification. The true church is not identified by uninterrupted institutional breadth, public recognition, or numerical superiority, but by fidelity under trial and preservation through separation. This gives the doctrine enormous explanatory power. It allows a small and embattled body to claim not only theological legitimacy but historical necessity. The remnant is not simply one option among others; it is the body left after God has judged and refined the larger whole.

For that reason, the “third part” pattern proved highly reusable in later Tomlinson-derived conflicts. Once the logic had been established, it could be transferred from one crisis to another with remarkable ease. Any later body that judged a parent organization to have departed from doctrine, government, covenant, or divine order could take up the same pattern. The ingredients were already available: apostasy in the larger body, suffering and exclusion in the smaller body, prophetic interpretation of the division, and remnant continuity after refinement. What made the pattern so durable was not merely its biblical language, but its theological utility. It reconciled exclusivism with fragmentation, continuity with division, and minority status with triumphalist self-understanding.

In this sense, the “third part” should be understood as a doctrine of cult-like self-legitimation. It allowed a movement to interpret its own narrowing not as the shrinking of its claims but as their intensification. The less it possessed in ordinary historical terms, the more it could claim in theological terms. Weakness became chosenness. Separation became preservation. Marginality became proof. That is why the pattern had such long life. It did not simply comfort communities in crisis; it gave them a coherent theological explanation for why crisis itself authenticated them.

The durability of that grammar becomes even clearer when one turns from Homer’s explicit formulation to later claimants who adopted the same pattern in different forms.

Grady R. Kent and the Prophetic-Symbolic Intensification of Church Identity

The historical record already shows that Grady R. Kent stood deeply within a prophetic-symbolic ecclesiology. In 1945 he preached a demonstrated message titled “Writing the Vision and Revealing the Last Days Church and Its Identity by the Law and the Prophets,” where the Church’s reappearance in 1903 was tied to the fulfillment of prophecy and to Habakkuk’s command to “write the vision.” Other printed materials portray Kent as central to the Church of Prophecy Marker Association, to the memorializing of Fields of the Wood, to the prophetic interpretation of sacred space, and to the broader effort of expressing Church identity through visible signs, monuments, and scriptural correspondences.⁸

Publicly available material from the Jerusalem Acres and Ephesus Church of God stream makes the connection to the “third part” even more explicit. A history page from the Ephesus Church states that after Kent’s 1957 separation, and later in 1960, he “revealed from Zechariah 13:8–9 regarding the ‘cutting off’ of two-parts: (the ‘Elder’ Church of God and the Church of God of Prophecy).” The same history says that Kent “knew he must separate himself from the Church of God of Prophecy” and that his 1957 declaration began what became “The Church of God-Jerusalem Acres.”⁹

A second historical account from that same stream makes the point even more directly. It states that when Kent came under pressure in 1957, he was “not fully aware of all that God was then doing to bring about the fulfillment of Zechariah 13:8 (Zechariah’s third part).” The same narrative interprets the 1923 reformation under A. J. Tomlinson as an earlier fulfillment of Zechariah 13:8 and then presents Kent’s later role as a further development in that same prophetic sequence.¹⁰

These sources are not neutral academic witnesses. They are internal, retrospective accounts from the Jerusalem Acres and Ephesus stream itself. Precisely for that reason, however, they matter for this study. They are powerful evidence of how that stream understood Kent and his separation. Whatever one concludes about their reliability in every detail, they show that Kent’s successors explicitly linked him to Zechariah’s “third part” and treated his separation as prophetically mandated. Kent should therefore no longer be described merely as sharing a similar remnant imagination. Public material from within his own lineage explicitly places him inside the same framework.

If Homer gave the pattern one of its clearest early expressions, the 1993 reorganization made its reappearance even more explicit in a new institutional setting.

The 1993 Reorganization of The Church of God and the Explicit Return of the “Third Part”

The 1993 reorganization should be identified specifically as the emergence of The Church of God, the body that began under Robert J. Pruitt as General Overseer, was later led by Stephen E. Smith, and is now led by Oscar Pimentel. Although the group is still commonly identified as the “Charleston, Tennessee” Church of God, that designation is best understood as a historical and mailing reference rather than a description of its present institutional center. Its long-standing official mailing address has remained in Charleston, Tennessee, a detail already visible in its 1993 and 2003 materials and still retained on its current public site, but its present ministry life, assemblies, offices, and recent property development are centered in Cleveland, Tennessee.¹¹

Under Pruitt’s leadership, this body should not be understood as merely another administrative split from the Church of God of Prophecy. Its foundational documents present the movement as the divinely mandated recovery of the true church after apostasy in the parent body. The Solemn Assembly Minutes declare that those who accepted the departures from theocracy were “no longer the true church,” while those who held to the older doctrines and principles “are the true Church.” The document then calls them to stand together under the official name The Church of God, describes the reorganized body as “unique and exclusive,” and frames covenant renewal as “the beginning of the reorganization of the true Church under God and theocracy.”¹²

The Business Guide of 2003 now updated extends the same logic by stating that the name The Church of God was “mandated by the Holy Ghost,” and that because of changes within the Church of God of Prophecy, God called for the “re-organization and re-positioning of the Church back onto the ‘old paths’ and Theocracy,” making this necessary for the “continuation” of The Church of God.¹³ The significance of this language lies in its claim to exclusive continuity. The reorganization is not described as one possible response among several. It is described as the divinely ordered continuation of the one true church.

What makes this case especially important is that the “third part” idea was not merely implicit. In a public reprint of Robert J. Pruitt’s 92nd Annual Address from 1997, he explicitly states that “after the Solemn Assembly of 1993, we are the ‘third part’ mentioned in Zechariah 13:8, 9.” He goes on to explain that Zechariah was speaking of the disruptions of 1923 and 1993, “when in both cases there was a departure from government and doctrine, cutting off the apostate elements and leaving only a remnant to continue in the old paths of divine revelation.” He further adds, “We, as The Church of God… accept the distinction of being the ‘third part.’”¹⁴

This is historically decisive. It shows that The Church of God under Pruitt did not merely resemble Homer A. Tomlinson’s remnant logic in a vague way. It explicitly adopted the same Zechariah 13:8–9 framework and applied it to its own history. The two divisions were 1923 and 1993. The surviving body after 1993 was the “third part.” The remnant was therefore not merely continuing the church; it was fulfilling prophecy as the purified body left after apostate elements had been cut off. In that respect, the movement did not introduce a fundamentally new idea. It revived and reapplied a much older Tomlinsonian cult-like pattern.

That irony deserves to be stated plainly. In the polemical self-understanding of this church, Homer A. Tomlinson has often functioned as a negative example, a figure associated with rebellion, deviation, and going against theocracy. Yet the remnant hermeneutic publicly articulated by Robert J. Pruitt in 1997 was, in substance, a retrieval of the very same “third part” logic that Homer had already used to interpret earlier divisions. The historical point is not that the two churches were identical in all doctrine or practice. They were not. The point is that the Charleston and Cleveland body denounced one stream of Tomlinsonian separatism while reproducing one of its most important interpretive patterns.¹⁵

This helps explain the movement’s practical character. Its rhetoric is not merely restorationist. It is intensely exclusivist and high-control. It divides the religious landscape into the true church and the apostate church, locates divine legitimacy in one visible body, treats dissent as departure from theocracy, and binds identity to covenantal submission under a uniquely authorized government. These are not merely cult-like features in the loose sense of the term. They are authoritarian and high-demand patterns commonly associated with cultic forms of religion, even if the term itself is best used carefully and analytically in scholarly writing.

The same exclusivism continues in the movement’s public self-description today. Its official website still presents the body as the continuation of the Spirit-filled church of Acts and traces its present identity through restored apostolic continuity, current General Overseer leadership, and a living theocratic structure.¹¹ The result is a body that continues to speak in the language of restoration, remnant, and prophetic continuity under Oscar Pimentel, while still bearing the historical imprint of the 1993 reorganization under Robert J. Pruitt and the later oversight of Stephen E. Smith.

The persistence of the same grammar becomes even more revealing when one turns to a body that does not openly use the “third part” formula, yet still reproduces its logic in strikingly similar ways.

Zion Assembly Church of God and the Persistence of Restorationist Remnant Logic

Zion Assembly Church of God, organized in 2004 under Wade H. Phillips as Presiding Bishop, should be included in this discussion because, even though the movement does not appear in the sources examined here to explicitly call itself “the third part,” it clearly reproduces the same underlying logic that had already been used by Homer A. Tomlinson, later by Grady R. Kent, and still later by The Church of God associated with Robert J. Pruitt. Its foundational narrative states that a remnant of ministers and members reorganized only after their former fellowship, the Church of God of Prophecy, had undergone a “falling away,” had “broken its solemn covenant,” and had thereby “disqualified itself as the espoused bride of Christ.” The new body then presented its own action as part of the work “to restore the fullness of the Gospel of the Kingdom and to rebuild the New Testament church,” even identifying itself as an instrument in “the fulfillment of this prophetic restoration.”¹⁶

That is, in substance, the same argument made by the other separatist churches. The wording shifts, but the structure remains constant. A parent body is said to have departed from divine order. A faithful remnant is said to remain. That remnant reorganizes under a new government. The reorganized body then claims to stand in authentic continuity with the true church. Homer expressed this through the explicit language of the “third part.” The Charleston body under Pruitt later did the same by explicitly identifying itself as the “third part” after 1993. Zion Assembly, while not using the same phrase, still advances the same cult-like grammar: apostasy in the former body, remnant faithfulness in the present body, and restoration through reorganization.

This is what makes Zion Assembly especially important in the comparison. In its own retrospective writing, the movement criticizes the older Tomlinsonian pattern of exalted church government. One Zion Assembly text explicitly argues that the office of General Overseer became a major source of controversy and contributed to the divisions of 1923, 1943, 1957, 1993, and 2004, and it goes on to treat Homer Tomlinson, Kent, and the 1993 Charleston body as examples of movements built around “an exalted office at the top of a pyramid of administrative authority.”¹⁷ In that sense, Zion Assembly plainly wishes to distance itself from those earlier bodies and from what it sees as Tomlinsonian excess.

That is why the movement’s choice of title matters, though not as the main point. By preferring the title Presiding Bishop instead of General Overseer, Zion Assembly tried to signal distance from the older Tomlinsonian understanding of exalted centralized leadership. Yet the more important issue is that, despite this change in terminology, the body still operates with the same deeper remnant-restoration framework. It still narrates the former body as having fallen away, still interprets reorganization as divine restoration, and still understands the present fellowship as the concrete continuation of the church of God in history. In other words, it rejects the older Tomlinsonian system at the level of office-language while retaining much of its logic at the level of ecclesial self-understanding.

Later Zion Assembly materials make this even clearer. In one of its more revealing statements, the movement says God will use Zion Assembly to “show the house” to those serious about “the church of the Bible.” It rejects any merely mystical or invisible conception of the church and instead describes the church as “a real concrete city,” “a concrete organization,” and “a visible, universal body with government and divine order.”¹⁷ That is not modest denominational language. It is the language of a visible, exclusive, divinely ordered church body. Even when Zion Assembly avoids the blunt “third part” formula, it still advances the same practical conclusion: the true church is not simply scattered among believers everywhere, but concretely embodied in one reorganized and identifiable body.

This is where Zion Assembly may be seen as especially revealing. Earlier bodies often expressed their exclusivist claims more openly and directly in public. Zion Assembly, by contrast, often presents itself publicly in softer and less confrontational language as a “Spirit-filled body of believers,” even while its founding and doctrinal materials articulate a much sharper remnant ecclesiology built on apostasy, covenant-breaking, restoration, and visible exclusivity.¹⁸ The contrast between public moderation and internal exclusivism is significant. The movement publicly avoids stating as bluntly what Homer’s body, Kent’s stream, and the Charleston body were willing to say, while functionally preserving the same claim in another form.

That is why Zion Assembly belongs in the same historical line. It may reject Homer Tomlinson as a rebel against theocracy. It may criticize Kent and the Charleston body for reproducing exalted and cult-like structures. Yet in its own founding narrative and doctrinal rhetoric, it still teaches the same basic thing they taught: the former body fell, the faithful remnant remained, God restored the church through reorganization, and the present body now stands as the visible embodiment of the church of the Bible. The language is more careful, but the underlying claim is strikingly similar. In that sense, Zion Assembly does not escape the old Tomlinsonian remnant logic. It refines it, repackages it, and presents it in a form that is less explicit publicly yet no less exclusivist in substance.

Historical and Theological Assessment

Taken together, these materials reveal not a series of isolated disagreements, but a recurring and recognizable pattern within the Tomlinson tradition. At the heart of that pattern lies a distinctive restorationist ecclesiology. The church is not understood as one Christian communion among many, nor as merely a branch of the broader body of Christ. It is understood in visible, historical, and exclusive terms as the restored Church of God in the earth. That starting point is decisive, because once the church is defined in such singular and absolute categories, any serious internal conflict immediately becomes more than an institutional dispute. It becomes a crisis of legitimacy, identity, and continuity.

In that context, division cannot easily be admitted as a mutual tragedy or as a sorrowful fracture within a shared religious inheritance. To do so would weaken the very restorationist claim on which the movement rests. Instead, conflict is repeatedly interpreted as evidence that one party has departed from divine order while another has remained faithful. Apostasy is thus located in the parent body, while fidelity is concentrated in the separating remnant. This interpretive move is one of the most important features of the tradition, because it converts division from a problem into a proof. Separation no longer signals instability within the restorationist project. It becomes the means by which the true heirs of that project are identified.¹⁹

This is why prophecy becomes so central. The separating body does not merely appeal to grievance, principle, or conscience. It appeals to prophecy, theocracy, restoration, covenant, or direct divine mandate. In other words, it seeks not simply to justify its existence historically, but to sacralize it theologically. Its separation is not presented as an unfortunate necessity but as a providential act. Its smaller size is not treated as weakness but as refinement. Its marginal position is not regarded as evidence of failure but as proof of election. The remnant survives not despite division, but through it. In that sense, the logic is profoundly apocalyptic: judgment falls, parts are cut off, and what remains is interpreted as the purified people of God.

Homer A. Tomlinson’s “third part” doctrine is the clearest early formulation of this pattern because it gives the process an explicit prophetic sequence. The 1923 rupture becomes the first cutting off, another separation is expected, and the surviving body is declared to be “the real Church of God.” In Homer’s hands, division itself becomes revelatory. The church is not merely preserved through conflict; it is disclosed by conflict. The parent body does not simply err. It is judged. The remnant does not merely continue. It emerges from the fire as the prophetically designated bearer of the true church.

The Charleston body later revived this same pattern with striking clarity. Under Robert J. Pruitt, the reorganization of The Church of God was not presented as a pragmatic restructuring after church disagreement. It was presented as the recovery of the true church after apostasy in the Church of God of Prophecy, and Pruitt publicly identified the reorganized body as “the third part” after the disruptions of 1923 and 1993. Here the logic is unmistakable: the former body departed from government and doctrine, apostate elements were cut off, and only the remnant remained to continue in the old paths.¹⁴

The Kent tradition likewise fits this same interpretive world. Even where the historical record is preserved most clearly in later internal histories, the pattern remains recognizable. Kent’s separation is read through Zechariah’s remnant language, the earlier disruptions are folded into a prophetic sequence, and the emerging body is treated not as a new cult but as a further stage in the unfolding of divine judgment and ecclesial refinement.⁹ ¹⁰

Zion Assembly presents a particularly revealing case because it shows that the exact phrase “third part” is not necessary for the logic to continue. In the sources considered here, Zion Assembly does not explicitly identify itself with that phrase. Yet it clearly reproduces the same structure: the former body is said to have fallen away, to have broken covenant, and to have disqualified itself as the espoused bride of Christ; a faithful remnant reorganizes; and the reorganized body presents itself as participating in prophetic restoration and as embodying the visible church of the Bible. The wording is more restrained, but the pattern is recognizably the same.¹⁶

The historical significance of all this is substantial. Once division has been reinterpreted as prophetic refinement, later divisions can be absorbed into the same sacred grammar with remarkable ease. What one generation constructs to justify separation from a parent body becomes available as a theological tool for a later generation to use again. Thus discontinuity is repeatedly re-described as continuity. Division becomes succession. Separation becomes preservation. The doctrine of continuity is maintained precisely by means of a repeated theology of discontinuity. This is one of the central paradoxes of the Tomlinson tradition: the stronger its claim to exclusive visible continuity becomes, the more often that continuity is reasserted through division.

For that reason, the pattern should be understood as more than a denominational peculiarity. It is a form of remnant ecclesiology with strong sectarian and, at points, cultic implications. By “cultic” here one need not mean bizarre or fringe in a superficial sense. Rather, the term points to a recognizable religious grammar marked by exclusivist self-understanding, sharp boundary construction, the sacralization of leadership and structure, the reinterpretation of opposition as proof of election, and the concentration of divine legitimacy within one visible body over against all rivals. In this sense, the “third part” is not merely an interpretation of Zechariah. It is one of the clearest windows into the inner theological mechanics of sectarian self-legitimation in the Tomlinson world.

Conclusion

The evidence now available makes the pattern unusually clear. Homer A. Tomlinson explicitly interpreted modern church history through Zechariah 13:8–9 and identified the surviving remnant as the “real Church of God.”⁵ Robert J. Pruitt publicly identified the post-1993 The Church of God as “the third part” after the disruptions of 1923 and 1993.¹⁴ Public histories from the Jerusalem Acres and Ephesus stream explicitly connect Grady R. Kent to that same remnant framework.⁹ ¹⁰ Zion Assembly Church of God, though not shown here to use the exact phrase, nevertheless reproduces the same wider logic through its language of falling away, covenantal rupture, prophetic restoration, and visible Bible-church identity.¹⁶

The significance of this pattern is not merely historical but theological. The “third part” is more than one leader’s interpretation of Zechariah. It is a theological technology of continuity. It allows a body to explain division without surrendering exclusivity, to absorb rupture without admitting failure, and to present reduction as refinement rather than loss. In this framework, the true church is never the body that simply survives history. It is the body that emerges from judgment claiming to have been singled out by God through history.

That is why the “third part” should be understood as an especially transparent expression of a broader sectarian and cultic grammar within the Tomlinson tradition. Again and again, the same sequence reappears: apostasy is located in the parent body, prophetic meaning is assigned to the separation, and exclusive continuity is claimed by the surviving remnant. What changes from one movement to another is often the rhetoric, the title, or the historical setting. What remains constant is the deeper logic. Once that logic is in place, every future rupture can be reread not as a contradiction of the restoration claim, but as its vindication.

Footnotes

1. Homer A. Tomlinson, ed., Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 2 (Queens Village, NY: The Church of God, 1953), 99–100; Robert J. Pruitt, “The ‘Third Part’ Must Get It Right,” The Church of God Northeast Region, accessed April 24, 2026, https://tcog-ne.org/articles/the-third-part-must-get-it-right/; “Our History,” The Ephesus Church of God, accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.thevisionofall.org/our-history; The Ephesus Church of God, I. History, accessed April 24, 2026, https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cafa41f6-e47a-47f0-8af5-462c827d3093/downloads/5224f6b2-863c-41a3-8d40-0a8897d29df1/I%20-%20History.pdf; Zion Assembly Church of God Minutes, 2004–2021 (Cleveland, TN: Zion Assembly Church of God).
2. Pruitt, “The ‘Third Part’ Must Get It Right”; “Our History,” The Ephesus Church of God; The Ephesus Church of God, I. History.
3. Zion Assembly Church of God Minutes, 2004–2021 (Cleveland, TN: Zion Assembly Church of God), especially the introductory history to the 2004 minutes.
4. Homer A. Tomlinson, ed., Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 2 (Queens Village, NY: The Church of God, 1953), 99–100; Pruitt, “The ‘Third Part’ Must Get It Right.”
5. Tomlinson, Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, 99–100.
6. Ibid., 99.
7. This section synthesizes the theological logic displayed in Homer’s account and the later uses of the same remnant pattern.
8. Minutes of the Church of God of Prophecy, 1936–1945 (Cleveland, TN: White Wing Publishing House); Minutes of the Church of God of Prophecy, 1946–1955 (Cleveland, TN: White Wing Publishing House).
9. “Our History,” The Ephesus Church of God.
10. The Ephesus Church of God, I. History.
11. “About,” The Church of God, accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.thechurchofgod.org/about/; “A Brief History of The Church of God,” The Church of God, accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.thechurchofgod.org/resource/our-history/.
12. Solemn Assembly Minutes (Chattanooga, TN, July 23–25, 1993).
13. The Church of God Business Guide (Charleston, TN: The Church of God, 2003).
14. Pruitt, “The ‘Third Part’ Must Get It Right.”
15. Compare Pruitt’s explicit “third part” rhetoric with Homer’s earlier use in Tomlinson, Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, 99–100.
16. Zion Assembly Church of God Minutes, 2004–2021.
17. Wade H. Phillips, God, the Church, and Revelation, vol. 1 (Cleveland, TN: Zion Assembly Publishing House, 2024).
18. “Zion Assembly Church of God – Home,” accessed April 24, 2026, https://www.zacog.org/.
19. This section synthesizes the broader theological implications of the evidence assembled above.

Bibliography

Diary of A. J. Tomlinson. Vol. 2. Edited by Homer A. Tomlinson. Queens Village, NY: The Church of God, 1953.

Minutes of the Church of God of Prophecy, 1936–1945. Cleveland, TN: White Wing Publishing House.

Minutes of the Church of God of Prophecy, 1946–1955. Cleveland, TN: White Wing Publishing House.

Phillips, Wade H. God, the Church, and Revelation. Vol. 1. Cleveland, TN: Zion Assembly Publishing House, 2024.

Pruitt, Robert J. “The ‘Third Part’ Must Get It Right.” The Church of God Northeast Region. Accessed April 24, 2026. https://tcog-ne.org/articles/the-third-part-must-get-it-right/.

Solemn Assembly Minutes. Chattanooga, TN, July 23–25, 1993.

The Church of God Business Guide. Charleston, TN: The Church of God, 2003.

“The Church of God.” “A Brief History of The Church of God.” Accessed April 24, 2026. https://www.thechurchofgod.org/resource/our-history/.

“The Church of God.” “About.” Accessed April 24, 2026. https://www.thechurchofgod.org/about/.

“The Ephesus Church of God.” I. History. Accessed April 24, 2026. https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cafa41f6-e47a-47f0-8af5-462c827d3093/downloads/5224f6b2-863c-41a3-8d40-0a8897d29df1/I%20-%20History.pdf.

“The Ephesus Church of God.” “Our History.” Accessed April 24, 2026. https://www.thevisionofall.org/our-history.

“Zion Assembly Church of God – Home.” Accessed April 24, 2026. https://www.zacog.org/.

Zion Assembly Church of God Minutes, 2004–2021. Cleveland, TN: Zion Assembly Church of God.