Speaking and listening

It's Pentecost. We celebrate this as the birthday of the church, the coming of the Holy Spirit and rightly so.

Yet at its heart, the Acts 2 account is about God speaking to the world. The commotion of the early verses drew a crowd which is the focus for most of the chapter, the audience for Peter's explanation of what's going on and what it means.

God propelled his people out of their comfort zone - at some stage the disciples left the upper room where they felt safe and ended up in the temple where the opponents to Jesus had their base - so that people from all over the world could hear God's story in their own language (with Galilean accents!)

I wonder what would happen if God visited us in our churches in such a way that we had to take our singing and speaking out of our buildings and into the street - not because it appeared to be a good strategy and we'd got the PA organised, sought permission from the council to hold an open-air meeting, but simply because our buildings couldn't contain us in our excitement at encountering God.

Well, Joel did say 'you old men will dream dreams...'