By: Alexis Faubel
This was the question that a girl I was mentoring brought to me during my sophomore year of college. She told me that while she had grown up in church, she had never heard the book of Acts taught or preached on, and while she knew about the Trinity, she had never heard her pastors or church mention the Holy Spirit.
This seemed very strange to me, a person who had grown up in a thick Spirit-empowered, Pentecostalism culture, but I came to learn that my friend was one of many people who had never really had the chance to stop and think about the Holy Spirit before college. Now that I’m on staff, I want to name a couple of things that might be helpful for someone entering into a community that is empowered by the Holy Spirit, when they may not have heard of it before.
For starters, we believe that the Holy Spirit is an equal and powerful part of the Trinity (The Godhead, 3-in-1). There is God the Father, Jesus His Son, and His Spirit is the third part, often depicted as a dove or as wind in the Bible. And while I think the name “Forgotten God” (Francis Chan), is a perfect description of how the Holy Spirit is often treated in the American Church, here in Chi Alpha we believe that the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential to everything we do. In fact, Jesus said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper who will be with you forever. That helper is the Spirit of Truth… You know him because he lives with you and will be in you. (John 14:16-17)”. Jesus literally left Earth so that the Holy Spirit could be with us, and IN us, instead of Christ’s physical body. That’s a pretty important gift!
And with the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the scene, we believe that it is the same Spirit that lived in Christ, that now lives in us if we ask Him to come into our lives. We believe in a separate baptism of the Spirit for this reason, and we can see many times in scripture that the evidence of this baptism is the gift of speaking in other tongues or languages. We also believe that the Holy Spirit gives the gift of interpreting those languages/ tongues, along with giving gifts words of wisdom and knowledge, faith and healing, miracles, prophecy, healing, or even discernment between spirits (1 Corinthians 12:8-10). We believe these are all part of the Spirit’s power manifesting in our lives, and in our community for good.
This is what it means to be Pentecostal. To believe that the same power that lived in Jesus, that comes from God, now is inside of us if we want the gift of His Spirit and the gifts that come with it. And if you are stepping into a community that believes these things that you may have never heard of before, I hope you feel encouraged, excited, and curious about the joy and goodness that come from this Loving Spirit of God.
