Flames and Light bulbs

Pentecost this year blew my socks off. One of the things about leading a church is you get the pressure of year after year doing something special with the church calendar, making it fresh and meaningful, whilst also capturing the essence, and bringing in enough of the right elements to give people the feels and the reminiscences they are after. Some of that is more important than others, but I feel the pressure of all of them. For Pentecost particularly, I want to actually EXPERIENCE the power and presence of the Spirit, overwhelming us, not just talk about it. I don’t want a form of godliness and not the power. But so often it falls a bit flat.

This year it felt like light bulb moments were happening all over the place for people, it was all clicking into place. We did prayer church, as we periodically do – a variation on café church, we sit around tables, eat, chat, get full on interactive and it’s all very lovely. At the start of the meeting, Xander read through the story, and explained how the disciples gathered in the temple (right, the place where they usually met, 120 of them… funny how I always imagined it in someone’s house), waiting for the Spirit to be poured out, as Jesus had promised, and then all the fun stuff happens.

Someone leaned across the table to me, so excited and said, ‘No way! This is amazing! I mean, Christmas is nice and all, we get to celebrate that Jesus came. I guess Easter is quite important, that’s how we receive forgiveness and freedom. But this, THIS means we can be as full of the Holy Spirit as Jesus was, everyday, here, now! This is amazing! Why have you never told us this before? We should celebrate this every year!’ I had to tell her, ‘we do.’ Funny what we don't hear until we're ready to listen.

I couldn’t sum it up better myself. I think it’s probably a good thing Pentecost isn’t as commercialised as Christmas and Easter. I love that it’s that much more unadulterated.

God has been talking to me so much this year about that – that same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to you. Greater things shall you do also than these (that’s Jesus talking!), the miracles the apostles were doing in the book of Acts, they’re still happening, they’re happening now, around the world, and even HERE. That’s hard to get my head around. And yet it’s true, and God is graciously increasing my faith to believe it, to see it, and to be part of it happening.

In cell group that week we were studying Acts 2 further, chatting through the story, and yet more things started to click into place. We were reading Acts 2:42-48, looking at what life looked like for the early church. It’s beautiful. And our people suddenly got a glimpse of what our programme, our church life could look like after the Sabbath year. I hadn’t really been thinking about that, hadn’t made that connection, but they started pulling it together – if we start back coffee morning, it needs to look like this. Our people are getting it, they have caught the vision of what God is wanting to do in and through us.

It’s definitely a by-product of our Sabbath year. We were not in that place a year ago. God is deepening and enriching our experience and our expectations. Whatever happens come September, we are not the people we were this time last year.

This is our prayer, over and over and over.

Holy Spirit come.