My dean of the theology school at my seminary in Louisville when I studied there in the early 1980s tells the story of sitting on a bench one day overlooking the greens, what we sardonically called the “Josephus Bowl,” when he spotted me making my way across the vast lawn for class. I had on cut-off jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, had long, shaggy hair, and was puffing on a cigarette perched jauntily in the corner of my mouth. He turned to a friend sitting with him and said, “Would you look at Johnson? Just look at him. Why, there goes the future of the Southern Baptist Convention!”
As we celebrate Pentecost, we might imagine the angels looking at Peter that fateful day long ago and saying incredulously, “There goes the future of the Church of Jesus Christ.” Peter is anything but the “Rock” that Jesus nicknames him. He is the least likely candidate to lead anybody’s movement, much less the incipient church. But, that is exactly whom Jesus taps as the one to launch this new organization of love.
Impatient Peter, who jumped out of the boat only to find himself sinking when he took his eyes off the prize. Intemperate Peter, who brandished his sword in a split second in the Garden of Gethsemane, forgetting everything his Lord taught him about non-violent resistance. Insecure Peter, who lost his nerve when confronted by the young girl on the streets of Jerusalem, betraying Jesus three times more than Judas ever did, and the third time so emphatically that he used an obscenity to underscore his denial. Hell didn’t have to endeavor to shake Peter. A peasant girl did the trick nicely.
But, amazingly, Peter does make good on the name Jesus gave him, and part of what this season of Pentecost is all about is the way Peter finds his true identity. At Pentecost, Peter stands up bravely in the town square he wouldn’t be caught dead in at Passover. His eyes stay clearly focused on the One who knows him best and loves him most, enabling him finally to understand that the Jesus movement isn’t just for those in the club, for those who fit the bill, for those who know the secret code, but for everyone who dares to call upon the name of the Lord. Because Peter got the core inclusiveness of the Gospel, we are in the Jesus movement today. So, when Jesus names Peter “Rock,” he sees more in Peter than Peter sees in himself. Jesus is good at that kind of thing.
So, the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost provides us at least two grace gifts that do not come naturally to humans, equality and community. What the Holy Spirit taught Peter during those formative Pentecostal days of his initial ministry, is what we are learning and experiencing in our own ministries today. Pentecost 2026 finds us challenged anew to accept God’s gifts of human equality and community, and to affirm and apply these gifts in practical ways in our own preaching and leading. The future dynamism and relevance of the Jesus movement is dependent on us trusting the Holy Spirit to receive these gifts and make them a living reality.
The human condition confines us to an egocentric predicament. We are deceived into thinking ourselves better than others. Nowhere is this distortion more virulently rooted than in our systems of patriarchy.
Over against this human disease, the Holy Spirit affirmed through Peter and the apostles that the new Pentecostal movement would be led by women, just as the Hebrew Scriptures foretold and Jesus taught.
Now, blessedly, this is a more settled matter in some faith traditions than in others. Readers of this journal know instinctively which churches are more open to the female voice in the sacrament of preaching and which still keep those female voices silent. I represent a Baptist tradition, even a “progressive” one, that sill has a long, long way to go before women are accorded equal access to the pulpit of God with men. I imagine even those of you from more egalitarian traditions see patterns of patriarchy that are hard to break.
A quick theological survey of biblical feminine is instructive. The first thing we learn about God in the creation story is that the image of God is both male and female. In Genesis 1.27 the Scripture reports that God made the human in God’s image and likeness. What is that image? The rest of the verse answers that question: “male and female, God created them.” This is a remarkable thing for that Yahwist to write. But the Elohist, writing in a completely different temporal and cultural context, also picks up on this theme in the second chapter of Genesis, where we find that the concept of mutuality and partnership between the genders is at the core of God’s Will for humanity. The human is isolated and alone—an egocentric predicament. God ingeniously and colorfully creates another human, an equal creature. The two enjoy a side by side—not under/over—relationship with each other.
The early Bible stories in Torah recapitulate this mutuality over and over again, even in the male-dominant culture out of which it came. Sarah is a faithful matriarch, every bit as much as Abraham is a patriarch. It is Sarah who allows God to fertilize her post-menopausal womb, thus making good on God’s promise that God’s people would be more numerous than the stars. It is Hagar’s faithfulness, over against Abraham’s cowardice, that ensures a great people of God would come from him as well as from Isaac. It is Rebecca’s cleverness—not Isaac’s—that guards that lineage of blessing. Leah and Rachel stories are as compelling, and as critical to the conveyance of blessing, as Jacob stories. It is those brave Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who disobey Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew baby boys, a civil disobedience that forms the foundation of the coming nation of Israel. In a stunning neutralization of the powers and principalities by the loving Providence of God, it is Pharaoh’s daughter herself who intervenes and saves the life of Moses. Even in the male-controlled day of ancient antiquity, women are key to God’s salvation story in the world.
Fast forwarding to the Christian movement, women are at the center of our Lord’s ministry. Mary and Martha provide the home base of Jesus’s operations. Mary the Mother of Jesus is, next to our Lord himself, the hero of the Christian faith. Jesus frequently told stories about women and related to women as equals. God is like a woman, Jesus says, in Luke 15, who searches her entire house until she finds the one lost coin. Jesus forms an open, public relationship with the woman at the well of Samaria, something unheard of for a self-respecting Jewish man of Jesus’s day to do, and that very woman becomes the first evangelist in the Gospel of John. These faithful women among the disciples of Jesus were the last ones at the Cross, well after the twelve had forsaken Jesus and fled for their lives. All four gospels report that the very first witnesses to the resurrection of Christ are women.
It is the assertive leadership of Lydia that saves Paul’s Macedonian mission to carry the radical and universal message of Jesus beyond the narrow cultural confines of Hebrew faith to the Gentiles peoples of the entire known world. God raised up this competent Greek woman to underwrite and resource the missionary movement of Paul. Lydia’s prominence and wealth as an educated community leader and businesswoman in the vibrant cities of Philippi and Thyatira were huge assets for Paul. Acts 16.14 says that she listened to Paul as he preached that fateful Sabbath day, meaning that she was educated and understood clearly the religious claims that Paul was making. She was a merchant in fine cloth, material only purchased and utilized by the affluent of Thyatira, which meant that she was very well-connected in that Macedonian culture. When she heard the gospel, she and her entire household were baptized, meaning that she asserted headship and leadership in her family. It was common in that day for the religion of the entire family system—a broad network of extended family and economic relationships—to adopt the religious convictions of the head of that household. That is exactly what happened that day when Lydia and her entire household were baptized. At her generous invitation, Paul and Silas set up their base of operations in her home, and the second missionary movement of Paul was successful because of Lydia’s leadership. Furthermore, when Paul and Silas are jailed and released several days later, they make a beeline to Lydia’s house so that they can receive her advocacy, solidarity, and support once more.
The gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost sets the stage for Lydia’s critical role. Peter announces that the Holy Spirit has now fulfilled the Hebrew prophetic vision: “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy … and whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2.17-18).
So, tough questions still remain for some congregations of God: Will we submit to the pastoral leadership of women in sacrament of word and table? Will we repent of our disobedience before God in refusing to entrust our pulpits to the women God has called to announce the Good News? Do we trust the Holy Spirit enough to call as our pastors the very women we have trained in our seminaries to prepare for the preaching ministry? Are we willing to adjust our notions of local church autonomy so that we will actively recommend and advocate women to the churches as prospective pastors?
Progressive churches may shrug this off as old news, but I suspect the categorial equality of women in the church remains the pivotal issue in the long march toward full human flourishing.
I pray for the day soon when the church will make good on the Pentecostal promise that young women as well as young men will preach the Good News in partnership one with another, will repent of its cultural confinement, and will open itself to the leadership of God’s Spirit in calling women as well as men to serve as Shepherds of the flock.
This Pentecost, let us proclaim this justice for women and men as partners in the life of the church. Let’s provide a place for the empowerment of little girls as well as little boys to grow in the grace and nurture of God, and to become all God means for them to be. Let’s be a truly Pentecostal church that raises up a new generation of Lydias to liberate the Gospel from its cultural captivity so that the Good News can spread to the whole world.
Community is at the heart of the Christian experience. If Pentecost means anything, it means we cannot properly belong to Christ until and unless we are rightly related to the community of Christ.
The word itself—community—means “unity with.” It implies the integration and joining of oneself to a web of relationships outside of the self. To commune with Christ is to enjoy a unity with him, an intersubjectivity with the Risen Lord through which you can no longer discern where you end and Christ begins. It is this oneness, this communing, that is the goal of any authentic Christian pilgrimage.
God and humans alike need this communing one with another. The foundational biblical understanding of the human is that she and he is made in the very image of God, in God’s very likeness, so that the human can have relationship with God and God with the human. The poet James Weldon Johnson put it memorably in his famous poem when he has God saying, “I’m lonely. I’ll make me a world.” Being Itself decided graciously to call creation to the joy of being too.
Descartes didn’t quite get it when he asserted cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore, I am.” Long before we are rational beings, we are relational beings. I relate, therefore, I am. To be is to be with.
According to the wonderful story of creation, the first man and the first woman are made of the selfsame substance—literally one of the other—so that they can commune with each other. Only “bone of bone and flesh of flesh” has a natural and instinctive way of being with each other. Because all creation proceeds from one unifying and creative Source, we have a primal relation with each other. Properly understood, everyone on the planet is an integral part of one vast human global family. In Dr. King’s words, we are all “bound together in a single strand of destiny.” We are all kin.
New Testament Christianity is about a community of persons convened by the Holy Spirit around the confession of Jesus as our crucified and risen Lord and Christ. The Gospels are accounts of the central figure of Jesus, but are also remarkably focused on the persons encountered by Jesus. They are comprised not only of the teachings of Jesus, but also of the reactions, testimonies, and responses of those who came into contact with Jesus and dared to follow him. The very first thing Jesus did when he began his ministry was to convene a ragtag group of followers called disciples, and make a merry band of friends out of this unlikely group. The respective Gospel accounts treat Jesus’s life from the particular standpoint of the respective and diverse Christian communities. Indeed, these communities wrote their biographies of Jesus to reflect their own precise communal situation. It is interesting to note that, with the exception of Mary, who is the first witness and evangelist of the resurrection, Christ’s post-resurrection appearances are always to the disciples as a group. Jesus rises again for the church.
Two-thirds of the New Testament is made up of letters by key pastoral figures to seminal communities seeking to live together in prayer and worship and service around the vision of Christ. These letters address in remarkably honest and practical ways how frail human beings can live together with each other in families of faith that go by the name and story of Jesus. Paul is especially brilliant in explicating these matters of community. He uses a clear metaphor called the Body of Christ in defining and describing the community. We are interlocking and interrelated parts of the same body, functioning naturally and interdependently one with another. Issues such as conflict resolution, reconciliation, peacemaking, authority, and unity are treated in frequent and precise detail. It is of major importance that the majority of the New Testament writings center on the construction and preservation of communal—not individual—faith.
From the standpoint of the Bible, community is necessity if you want to know God and cultivate a rich and vital relationship with that God. To be is to be with. We are placed by Christ in a new family, the new community of God, not defined by biology or by nationality or by ethnicity, but by love. We are placed in relationship with each other because we are in relationship with God.
As a white, privileged Southerner, I was taught my family lineage and history going back many generations. I grew up with a great cloud of Johnson forebears. My father carefully told stories about my grandmothers and grandfathers, and I know that family heritage like the back of my hand. Some nights of my childhood, it was as if my grandfathers were all sitting at our very supper table. My own father was named after my great grandfather’s great grandfather, a young lieutenant in the Revolutionary Army who was killed in a battle with the British in South Carolina. Our ancestral home still stands in Alabama. Checkered and deeply stained, I have spent much of my own life coming to terms with my enslaver family history and heritage. I say often, when asked why I do public education advocacy, that my granddaddies owned slaves, and I have a lot of making up to do.
But my biological family doesn’t ultimately define, identify, order, or shape me. Because of the Holy Spirit convening and connecting us, I have another family, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a New Community. I have another set of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, siblings. I’ve been adopted into this family. It’s like I’ve been born all over again. The home of this family is “not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5.1). This family goes by another name, a “name which is above every name” (Phil 2.9).
In the 1950s, the Baptist prophet Clarence Jordan was preaching at Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly in North Carolina on the biblical imperative of racial harmony, integration, and reconciliation. It was quite a radical word for that day, or our day for that matter. He spoke of the great community of Christ across every race, and how we are born into this family only by faith, how this new community makes kinspersons of folks from vastly different backgrounds. He spoke of the imperative of the church to be an interracial community. After the benediction, the congregation was astir. It was obvious that the sermon was not particularly well-received by the all white, southern congregation. A matronly woman, coiffured within an inch of her life, approached Clarence afterwards, wagged her bejeweled finger in his face and said, “I’ll have you know, Dr. Jordan, I wasn’t born to associate with those people!” Clarence thought for a moment before replying, breathed for the Holy Spirit to come over him, and then gently said with a smile, “Well, Madam, I suggest you just need to be born again.”
We’ve accepted the invitation of the Holy Spirit to a great new community. The Spirit has convened us here from all our respective individual places and backgrounds, races and classes, denominations and regions, genders and generations, and gathered us all together, both good and bad, to celebrate a center rather than a circumference. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that we are included. We don’t deserve this wonderful family of faith. It is only by the unconditional acceptance and grace and good favor of God that we get to show up in this congregational life and be accorded a place of love and growth. The Holy Spirit comes to us while we are “yet at a distance” and invites us to join our lives together. We are all here because we accept God’s gracious invitation to leave our autonomous individualism and join the community. And, we have to learn to live with each other and love each other. We come as strangers to become brothers and sisters one to another. Family. A priesthood of believers who joyously submit to God and to each other.
Community is necessity. To be is to be with. You can’t see a thing in that outer darkness and weeping sadness of your own isolated individualism. Come to the party. Come home.
Our job as preachers is the make the announcement of the essential equality and compelling community that we find in Jesus the Christ. That is the witness of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, then and now.
Karl Barth witnessed how complicit the German church had become with the corruption and oppression of the German government. The church of his day had lost its nerve. Barth concluded that the Christian churches had become so sophisticated and culturally accommodated that they no longer had the courage to speak truth to power. He sought throughout his entire life and ministry to correct this distortion by placing Jesus the Christ at the center, as the revelation of God.
Shortly before his death, a group of young ministers visited Basel where Barth taught. They were fortunate enough to get a visit with the great theologian. They asked him, “Professor, give us a bit of counsel as we begin our ministries. What would you encourage us to do?” As the story is told, the teacher puffed on his pipe a few seconds, disappeared like Moses behind a cloud of smoke, reappeared and said, “Pastors, step forward and announce that God has met all humanity in Jesus Christ, then step back, and see what the Holy Spirit can do with that.”
There goes the future of the Church of Jesus Christ.
Preachers like us.
Let’s see what the Holy Spirit can do with that.
