Acts of the Spirit

Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

Acts is the only book in the New Testament that tells us what happened next. The Gospels end with a risen Jesus and a small, frightened group in an upstairs room, and roughly thirty years later that same movement is preaching openly in the capital of the empire. We usually read Acts in fragments—Pentecost one Sunday and the shipwreck another—and we miss the story Luke is actually telling.

In this series, we are going to read it the way he wrote it: as one story with one main character, and it is not the apostles. The Spirit falls at Pentecost, sends Philip down a desert road with no explanation, interrupts Peter's theology on a rooftop, shuts a door to Asia and opens one to Europe. Nearly every time the Spirit moves, the church gets pushed across a boundary it never would have crossed on its own. The people in Acts held their possessions loosely, prayed first instead of last, ate with the wrong people, and told the truth about Jesus in front of officials who could jail them for it.

Here is a question that is hard to shake: If the Spirit stopped moving among us as a community tomorrow, how long would it take us to notice? Join us as we go through this series and together, let us see how the Lord moves among us.