Being a Pentecostal Christian

Acts 2:1-21

Introduction

I am the pastor of Queen Street Baptist Church. But I am not a lifelong Baptist. In fact I have been baptized twice in my life and neither time was in a Baptist church. I was raised in the Anglican church for a long time that’s all I knew about church. I assumed every pastor wore a robe and every church used a common cup with wine for communion. That’s what normal was for me.

But in my early twenties, I left my Anglican church and switched to a Pentecostal church. It was a radical culture shock. It was more than just the congregation was more than ten times the size of my old church or that they had padded pews. The pastors wore suits and when they prayed, they didn’t read set prayers but just prayed what came to mind. The strangest thing was communion. I didn’t know that some churches don’t have communion every Sunday. And instead of us going up to share a common cup of wine, they handed out little shot glasses of grape juice. It would take me a while to get used to this new normal.

While I was in seminary, I made the jump to the Baptist church. Some of my fellow students teased me that I only changed because they paid me. While I was happy to be paid, I quickly felt at home in the Baptist church and was able to draw on elements of my Anglican and Pentecostal heritage.

Why do I share this? Because although I self-describe as a Baptist pastor, I would also argue that every Christian is a Pentecostal Christian. Do I mean that you have to do everything or believe everything as a church that belongs to a Pentecostal tradition? Not at all. 

But the church began at Pentecost and it was defined by what took place at Pentecost. When the church begins to drift, we need to look back at Pentecost. That is what we are going to look at today.

Pentecost in Acts

When we start in Acts 2, we find a relatively small group of disciples. If you had asked them, they probably would have thought of themselves as a pretty diverse group. Everyone from a tax collector to fishermen. There probably was even some tension at times because of their differences. But when we look back at them now, they look like a pretty uniform lot. The Apostles were all Jewish Galilean men. There were some female disciples as well, but many of them were alike, with most of them named Mary. God was about to blow up this standard uniformity.

We are told that the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them. We may want to dwell on the miracle of that event, but I want to look at few things that easy to pass over. Our first hint is the description of the Jews who were there to witness this event. This table of nations previews the diversity that was coming to the church. These were not Gentiles, that is non-Jewish natives of these nations. Rather they were Jews who had emigrated to other lands and had returned to Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost. The conversion of these people would seed the church all across that area of the world.

If the table of nations was a hint of what was to come, Peter makes it explicit. After explaining that the ability to hear the speaking miraculously in different languages was not them being drunk, Peter launches into his sermon. Like a good preacher, he draws on the Scriptures. There were a number of Old Testament passages that speak of the Holy Spirit that he could have used. But he chose, presumably led by God, to preach from Joel. He quoted Joel’s prophecy about the coming of the Spirit. 

I would like to share with you how I often heard this passage. “In the last days the Spirit is poured out. Blah, blah. Dreams and visions. Blah, blah.” I saw this only as saying that the Spirit was promised and that the promise had been fulfilled. But there is so much more to this passage. Instead of focusing on what was happening, let’s look at who it was happening to.

The Spirit was being poured out on all flesh. But people could define “all flesh” in different ways. Then we see that the Spirit is given to sons and daughters. Men and women. Gender differences are broken down. Young men and old men. Age differences are broken down. Even upon slaves. Economic and social differences are broken down. 

It was not just the Spirit was coming it was that God was pouring out the Spirit on people without regard to any of the distinctions that were so important to the people.

It could be argued that the rest of Acts is a tup of war between God and people about how diverse the church could really be. Similar events to Pentecost are repeated when the Samaritans, the followers of John the Baptist and the Gentiles are brought into the church. You get the impression that the first Christians were saying that we really don’t want these people in the church but God keeps giving them his Spirit, overruling our preferences.

Pentecost Today

Thankfully it was the early Christians who made all the mistakes and struggled with prejudice. Since that time it has been smooth sailing as we welcome all people, no matter how different. Or maybe not.

Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr once said that Sundays at 11 am is the most segregated hour in America. The church even now, and yes in Canada, continues to struggle.

I mentioned my time in the Pentecostal church. I studied the origins of the Pentecostal movement. One of the key figures in the early Pentecostal revivals at the beginning of the 20th century was a poor, one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour. People of all backgrounds, black and white, rich and poor, came out to these revivals. Women were given opportunities for ministry that were forbidden in other churches. Whatever else you thought of the movement, it was definitely a time of breaking down barriers. But then they organized and institutionalized. Denominations split along racial lines. Rich and poor worshiped separately. Men and women were given different ministry roles. It was as if the Spirit hadn’t been poured out on all flesh.

But this is not a problem of just one movement. Every Christian tradition has struggled with this. In fact the church sometimes has not just struggled with it, they have celebrated it. The church growth movement of a few decades back argued that to grow a church, you need to gather people who are like each other and build a homogenous community. It is true that this method filled pews but it did not fulfill our biblical mandate.

I have been at churches that thought we were diverse. We had Canadians who were from England, Scotland and Ireland. If we were radical, we even had people from Wales.

I hadn’t realized what diversity could really look like until I came to Queen Street. On any given Sunday, you might find people in our praise team who were born in Japan, Philippines, Zimbabwe and Mexico. But it is not just ethnicity. We try to include people of all ages in our services and we have a long history of embracing women in ministry.

One area that I am passionate about is not just the welcome and inclusion of people with disabilities. Some people ask me what we do for disability ministry and I tell them we call it “church.” We don’t have a separate program, we include people with disabilities on our staff, deacons board and choir. Don’t get the mistaken idea that Queen Street is perfect. We have our struggles but we have seen enough of what Paul calls “the fellowship of the Spirit” to want more and more.

Conclusion

Are you a Pentecostal Christian? I hope you are. I don’t care if you speak in tongues or raise your hands in worship. Are you Pentecostal in the sense of being defined by the Holy Spirit that blows up barriers that we have worked so hard to erect. Peter could have said anything during his Pentecost sermon. I believe God wanted him to quote Joel. The Spirit on all flesh. On men and women, young and old, slave and free. The Spirit on every other distinction we might make. A diverse church can be a messy church. There is the danger of miscommunications and frustrations. But a diverse church is exactly what we have been designed to be. The good news is that it is not based on our preferences but the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.