Carlton Pearson was one of the most celebrated Black Pentecostal preachers of the 1990s. In the mid nineties he began teaching what he called the gospel of inclusion, a form of universalism, and many of his peers declared him a heretic. By the time CJ Rhodes visited him in 2007, his Tulsa congregation had fallen from about 5,000 people to around 200. Two things went wrong. Pearson’s theology moved outside historic Christian teaching. And his church mostly answered him from podiums and broadcasts instead of in private, which made him harder to reach.
Rhodes, now a Baptist pastor in Jackson, Mississippi, was a student at Duke Divinity School when he asked Pearson for an interview. Pearson told him to come out, and Rhodes spent two or three days with him in Tulsa in 2007. That visit is the closest thing to a firsthand record in this account, and it allows the story to be told in order. It is also one man’s report of what another man told him, a limit taken up near the end.
The rise, early to mid nineties
Rhodes places Pearson’s greatest popularity in the early to mid nineties. Every year Pearson hosted the Azusa Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rhodes credits it with launching many of the best-known gospel artists and televangelists from the African American tradition, T. D. Jakes among them. Lisa Fields first heard Pearson preach as a girl, when he visited the church where her father served on staff. She remembers him as one of the most popular Black Pentecostal preachers of that era.
His influence came from style as much as doctrine. Rhodes describes it this way: “he basically talked about making Pentecostalism beautiful and pretty.” Pearson took classical Pentecostal worship, the faith of his Church of God in Christ upbringing, and brought it to a big stage with lights, color and polished sound. He helped build the public face of the movement that would later reject him.
The turn, from the mid nineties
The source gives no single date for Pearson’s change of mind. Rhodes says Pearson started preaching inclusion in the mid nineties. By the time Rhodes reached seminary, the transition was public and Pearson spoke about it openly.
The usual explanation is that Pearson could not accept the doctrine of hell. Rhodes treats that as one root. The other, in his reading, was the word of faith teaching that dominated Tulsa in those years. Rhodes calls the city ground zero for that movement in the nineties. Pearson told him that when he first wrestled with these questions, he went to Oral Roberts and others in Tulsa to work through them.
Word of faith preaching taught believers to confess by faith what God had already done, whatever their present circumstances. Don’t say you are sick, say you are healed. Don’t say you are poor, say you are rich. Pearson pushed the pattern one step further. As Rhodes recounts it, “the logical conclusion to that is don’t say that you are unsaved, say that you’re saved.” If the cross had already secured healing and prosperity for anyone who claimed them, why would it stop short of salvation, which matters far more than either?
Some of Pearson’s colleagues told him he was taking the teaching out of context. The objection failed because they could not explain the difference. In Rhodes’s words, “he couldn’t really defend why salvation was distinct from healing and prosperity.” The method they shared had no brake built into it, so the argument kept moving.
This is the most useful finding in the account. The heresy grew from a way of reading promises that many people around Pearson already accepted. Rhodes is careful about whom this indicts. He separates classical Pentecostalism from neo-Pentecostalism and from word of faith teaching, and he notes that classical Pentecostals in the Church of God in Christ long rejected word of faith doctrine. The fault lies with one particular theology that spread through many pulpits.
What the gospel of inclusion taught
Rhodes puts it plainly: “the gospel of inclusion is universalism.” More precisely, he calls it a Christ-centered universalism. In his summary of Pearson’s teaching, Christ’s work on the cross has already saved all of humanity. Confession and repentance are therefore unnecessary, and hell either does not exist or stands empty. Reading from Pearson’s book The Gospel of Inclusion, Rhodes reports Pearson’s claim that the world is already saved and simply does not know it. Over time Pearson borrowed language from the New Thought movement and began speaking of all people being reunited with a cosmic intelligence.
Pearson grounded part of this in 1 Timothy 4:10, which the KJV renders: “For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.” The verse does call God “the Saviour of all men.” It then singles out believers with the word “specially.” The most widely held Christian reading takes that distinction seriously: God’s saving care extends toward everyone, while salvation in the full sense belongs to those who believe. Interpreters phrase the relationship in different ways. A verse that marks believers out from everyone else still makes a weak foundation for erasing the difference.
Rhodes sets Pearson’s view against the call to confess and believe in Romans 10. He traces repentance through the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus, the apostles’ sermons in Acts, and the letters to the churches in Revelation. He also points to Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” For Rhodes, someone has to open the door. A gospel that forces everyone through it ignores the person who refuses Christ.
Rhodes makes that argument from a non-Reformed view of human freedom, and he says so. Christians in the Reformed tradition explain the same texts differently and reject universalism on other grounds. Rhodes even suggests that Pearson’s universalism was partly a revolt against a harsh version of Reformed teaching, taking the idea of irresistible grace and extending it to everyone. Christians who disagree about election still share what Jude 3 teaches as essential: salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Pearson’s teaching removed faith from that sentence.
The denunciation
The source fixes no date for the moment Pearson was branded a heretic. Rhodes says only that once Pearson’s views became public, people denounced him openly, including on a Word Network broadcast where Pearson was brought on stage to be argued down. Rhodes’s diagnosis: “you didn’t have other brilliant people who could really wrestle with him about where he was.”
Public combat confirmed Pearson in his course. Friends he had helped raise to national prominence, some of whom he had covered for through their own scandals, turned on him. People his old circles had written off as bound for hell welcomed him. Pearson read that contrast as proof he was right. As Rhodes describes it, “he kind of had a martyr’s syndrome by that time.” Fields draws the lesson bluntly: Pearson was pushed further away “because the people that had his number were in relationship with him, went to the press before they went to him.”
Jude’s short letter speaks directly to this. Jude 1:22-23 reads in the KJV: “And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” Jude is severe about false teaching; most of his letter is a warning against it. In the same breath he tells believers to show mercy and to rescue. Fields frames the choice as pulling doubters out of the fire or pushing them further in. Pearson’s critics kept the warning and dropped the rescue.
Tulsa in 2007
When Rhodes arrived, Pearson had lost his church. He was leading an evening service at a local Episcopal church for the remnant of his former congregation, and he preached the gospel of inclusion boldly. He also still sounded like the Pentecostal preacher he had always been. On the phone weeks earlier he had prophesied over Rhodes, and he still spoke in tongues and laid hands on people. Rhodes found this hard to square, since Pearson’s classical Pentecostal roots stood in clear conflict with what he now taught.
That detail carries a lesson both Rhodes and Fields draw. Spiritual power cannot certify doctrine. Fields notes that Mormons describe a burning confirmation of their faith that sounds much like a revival service. Rhodes agrees that “tongues alone can’t be the proof,” and he points to 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul teaches the church to tell the Spirit of God from false spirits by what is confessed about Jesus. Experience can corroborate truth, Rhodes says, but “the scriptures are our test and seal.”
Later that evening, in Pearson’s office, came the account of betrayal. Pearson also said some pastors and bishops agreed with him privately but attacked him publicly because they feared losing their churches. To Pearson, that looked like cowardice dressed as conviction. Rhodes notes that Pearson, despite it all, kept a loving disposition toward his critics and said he would talk with any of them.
Rhodes was struck by how down to earth Pearson was, welcoming him into his home and driving him around the city. His judgment: “I do not agree with where he landed, but there’s something about his hospitality, his neighbor love, that really puts a lot of us to shame.” He connects that warmth to Pearson’s appeal. A preacher surrounded by armor bearers, too guarded to shake a hand, makes Pearson look attractive by comparison. Rhodes keeps the doctrine and asks the church to close the gap between belief and conduct: “We can’t do it with our lips only. We’ve gotta do it with our lives.”
After Tulsa
Pearson started a new ministry after the collapse. Rhodes says he was once expected to lead a New Thought congregation in Chicago and was turned down for being too Pentecostal. He then built a following through YouTube and Facebook livestreams. When Rhodes and Fields spoke, on the day a Netflix film about Pearson’s life was released, Rhodes observed that “Pearson has been preaching this about 20 years now.” The public denunciation had ended his Tulsa church and left his message intact.
Could it have gone differently?
The strongest objection is that nothing would have worked. Fields reports that some bishops who were there at the time say “his mind was already made up. It wasn’t anything we could do.” Rhodes allows for this too. Pearson told him that earlier closed-door meetings and prayer might have led him elsewhere, and Rhodes concedes he may already have been too far down the road to turn back.
The evidence has limits as well. The betrayals, the private agreement and the money Pearson says he gave struggling friends all come from Pearson’s own account, as he told it to Rhodes. Rhodes flags this himself: “of course, they’re different sides to every story.” A wounded man’s memory of how he was treated is real testimony, and it is also partial. What can be said with confidence is narrower. Pearson’s critics offered no convincing answer to his argument from word of faith logic, and the public condemnation he received produced no repentance.
Fields keeps the story in proportion: “Carlton Pearson’s Doctrine of Inclusion is not new.” She notes that Origen, the African church father, also moved toward universalism, and the church’s historic faith survived him. Pearson’s questions were old ones too. How can a loving God condemn people who never heard the gospel? What separates salvation from the blessings preachers promised by faith? He worked out his doubts in public, before anyone around him had a better answer ready. Rhodes’s account suggests the outcome turned less on whether the church had the truth than on whether anyone was willing to sit with Pearson early and argue it with him patiently.