What Pentecost taught me about my identity in Christ

As a Black British Pentecostal Christian, Joe Aldred has never been in doubt about the power of the Holy Spirit to transform us from the inside out. It’s what allows us to be more than conquerors, he says

Growing up, the relationship between my Christian Pentecostal faith and the Christian festival of Pentecost often struck me as quite strange.

It was almost never celebrated.

I do not have space here to fully explore why a Pentecostal church would not celebrate Pentecost; it is sufficient to highlight the anomaly.

Coming 50 days after Easter, according to Christian tradition, Pentecost marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit as a gift from God the Father (and, some say, God the Son) to the Church. Maybe my Pentecostal tradition did not know what to make of such a puzzle. An indivisibly one God, sending a part of ‘himself’ to empower the Church that Jesus had just set up, yet remaining indivisibly one - and having been so before time began!