Pentecost and the Color Line

In my lifetime, Pentecost has been defined by moments.

A spiritual experience. A burst of power. An ecstatic prayer language. A personal encounter with God.

All great things, by the way!

But in the New Testament, Pentecost is not primarily about private spiritual empowerment. It is about the reuniting of humanity.

The miracle of Acts 2 is not merely that the disciples spoke in tongues. It is that the nations heard the mighty works of God in their own languages: Parthians, Medes, Egyptians, Arabs, Romans; Luke deliberately piles up the list. Pentecost is Babel reversed. The dividing walls between people are being torn down. God is forming a new humanity from the wreckage of the old one he dispersed in Genesis 11.

How often do Charismatic traditions highlight this? I’m convicted, wondering if the Pentecostal tradition has often embraced the power of Pentecost while rejecting its purpose.

No story reveals this tragedy more clearly than the story of William J. Seymour. But I’d never heard of him. I grew up hearing of the Azusa Street revival only as a Joel 2 fulfillment for the 20th century. Seymour was largely scrubbed from it.

Seymour was born in 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, in the aftermath of slavery and in the shadow of Ku Klux Klan violence. He grew up in poverty, largely self-educated, drinking deeply from the wells of Black Christian spirituality and the songs of enslaved people.

From the beginning, Seymour was searching for freedom through civil reconciliation.

When he moved north to Indianapolis, he intentionally joined an interracial Methodist Episcopal congregation rather than a closer African Methodist Episcopal church. That alone is an incredible decision. Seymour believed the gospel had implications for what people called “the color line.” He believed the Holy Spirit was forming a family that would break the bonds of racism in a manner as radical as the multi-ethnic outpouring in Acts 2.

Later, in Houston, Seymour studied under Charles F. Parham, one of the early teachers of glossolalia (tongues) and Spirit baptism. But even there, Seymour encountered the contradictions of American Christianity. Because he was Black, Parham would not allow him inside the classroom. Seymour had to sit outside the door while lectures were given. They preached together in Black neighborhoods during the day, but segregation rules were enforced at night services. White and Black believers were prohibited from praying together at the altar.

This contradiction sits at the heart of the American church story. Some Christians wanted spiritual gifts without social transformation. They wanted revival without reconciliation.

And yet God chose Seymour anyway.

In 1906, Seymour arrived in Los Angeles after being invited to pastor a small holiness prayer group. Within months, the meetings exploded into what became known as the Azusa Street Revival.

The details are astonishing.

People prayed for hours. Healings were reported. Glossolalia erupted spontaneously. Men and women worshiped together across racial and social lines in a crumbling old building on Azusa Street, furnished with wooden planks and nail kegs. Meetings ran morning, afternoon, and evening, often blending into one continuous act of worship for days at a time.

But the true miracle was not tongues.

The true miracle was the community.

Black and white believers worshiped together in the middle of Jim Crow America. Rich and poor knelt beside one another. Women preached and led. Seymour threw open leadership to anyone gifted by the Spirit regardless of race, education, gender, or social class.

Frank Bartleman, one of the chroniclers of Azusa, famously declared:

The color line was washed away in the blood.

That sentence may be one of the clearest explanations of Pentecost ever written.

Seymour understood something many modern Christians still miss: the gift of the Spirit was given to create one new family.

Again and again, Seymour connected Acts 2 to racial reconciliation. In The Apostolic Faith newspaper, he wrote:

“God makes no difference in nationality.”

Later, he declared: “There is no Jew or Gentile, bond or free, in the Azusa Street Mission.”

This was not peripheral to Seymour’s theology. It was his theology.

He believed Pentecost was the arrival of a new creation community in the middle of the old world. What sounds more Acts 2 than that?

And this is where the church began to fracture.

Seymour’s emphasis was never merely on tongues. It was love.

He repeatedly taught that glossolalia without love was counterfeit spirituality. He pointed constantly to 1 Corinthians 13 as the true evidence of the Spirit’s work.

That should confront many of us.

Charismatic culture has the potential to slip into treating spiritual gifts as the primary evidence of maturity, while Paul insists the opposite. The Spirit is not given to inflate spiritual ego. The Spirit is given “for the common good.” The gifts exist to build a unified body.

Pentecost was never about spiritual elitism. It was about tearing down systems of separation.

This is why Seymour’s ministry became so threatening.

At first, many white Pentecostal leaders joined him. They humbled themselves in the atmosphere of revival and worshiped alongside Black believers. But eventually, many of them recoiled from the implications of what was happening.

The chief among them was Charles Parham himself.

Seymour invited Parham to Los Angeles, hoping he would strengthen the movement. Instead, Parham arrived horrified by the interracial worship services. He denounced the meetings publicly, condemning what he called “animalism” and criticizing white people for imitating “crude negroisms of the Southland.”

Parham’s racism was not subtle. According to historical accounts, Parham maintained affinities with the Ku Klux Klan and promoted deeply racist Anglo-Israelite ideas.

When Azusa would not submit to his segregated vision, Parham split away and opened a rival campaign nearby.

And he was not alone.

Gradually, many white leaders left Azusa Street for the same reason. They could tolerate glossolalia. They could not tolerate equality. They embraced ecstatic worship while rejecting interracial fellowship.

The movement fractured along racial lines.

And in one of the great tragedies of church history, the man who helped birth global Pentecostalism died largely forgotten and marginalized by the very movement he helped create. Seymour died in obscurity in 1922 at the age of fifty-two. 

Seymour insisted that Pentecost meant reconciliation. Some preferred personal power over reconciliation and unity.

The uncomfortable truth is that this temptation has never left us.

Even now, many churches pursue experiences of the Spirit while remaining deeply shaped by division, consumerism, nationalism, classism, and separation. Worship becomes emotionally intense while communities remain socially fragmented. Spiritual gifts are emphasized while the fruit of sacrificial love is neglected.

Paul would not recognize this as maturity.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul constantly redirects the church away from spiritual individualism and back toward communal formation. The Spirit is given so that the body might become one. Jews and Gentiles. Slave and free. Male and female. The dividing walls are not merely softened; they are dismantled and reimagined in Christ.

This does not mean cultural differences disappear. Pentecost does not erase language. It sanctifies it. The nations are not flattened into sameness. They are gathered into communion.

The church becomes the firstfruits of the New Creation; a preview of a healed humanity.

And that means marginalized people matter profoundly to God's heart.

At Azusa Street, the Spirit moved through a Black son of former slaves. Through cooks, janitors, railroad workers, and washwomen. Through women whom most churches refused to platform. The Spirit consistently bypassed the centers of power and moved among those pushed to the edges.

To the outsider, the immigrant, the overlooked, the person wounded by the church, Pentecost still speaks hope. God is still building a family where the old systems of exclusion do not get the final word.

And to the church, Pentecost remains a confrontation.

Not every experience called “revival” is truly Pentecostal.

If our spirituality does not lead us toward deeper love, deeper humility, deeper reconciliation, and deeper unity across dividing lines, then we may have inherited the language of Pentecost while missing its heart entirely.

William Seymour saw something many Christians still refuse to see: The Holy Spirit was not poured out simply to electrify individuals.

The Spirit was poured out to create one new humanity.

The Problem with Saying “I’m Not Being Fed.”

Every day we are being formed by something. We’re all being shaped, bit by bit, day by day, into someone. Most well-intended Christians hope to be formed into strong followers of Jesus, but the problem is in the word “hope.”

Nobody will wake up one morning and go, “Oh wow, I’m a devoted follower of Jesus with strong, healthy habits and spiritual disciplines. So glad I made it!”

If you ever do wake up one morning with a thought like that, it will be because you chose to accomplish something Christlike, every day, a little bit each day, over and over again, over the course of years.

If you’ve ever had thoughts like,

“I’d like to worry less.”

“I don’t want to get angry this easily.”

“I want to care less about impressing others.”

“I want a better understanding of love and selflessness.”

The way to see those things happen is to make a conscious effort every day to progress towards such a lifestyle. But most Christians simply have no idea how to do this. We have great intentions and poor follow-through.

The basic Christian message in America’s religious culture is (1) Go to church, (2) Spend a few minutes in the bible and prayer, and (3) give and serve. These are all absolutely important, but there’s more to being a follower of Jesus than just these things. But with only these things, we end up with churches full of people feeling a lack in their spiritual life, and then they start looking for the reason they feel this lack, and might say something like “Well I’m just not getting fed where I’m at.”

What’s the answer? A stronger will won’t fix the problem. Deeper bible knowledge, (though always helpful) won’t fix the problem, and moving from church to church and leader to leader won’t fix the problem.

I’d like to propose a valuable understanding of the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 12 as a starting platform for being formed into a greater follower of Jesus,

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, and what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2 ESV).

Let’s look at this for a minute. When Paul says “Do not be conformed to this world” he’s addressing a group of people just like us: We’ve already been formed by the world. It’s kind of… too late. So what do we do? We have to undo the patterns we’ve been conformed to and act counter-culturally to them. The patterns and rhythms we naturally fall into have come from a place of being formed that we don’t want anymore, because they represent the patterns and values of a world sold out to selfishness, self-righteousness, and self-servingnes. so we have to create new patterns and we have to practice them daily. Paul calls this “testing” but the Greek word (dokimazein) best translates as “to prove,” meaning we prove our transformation through habitual training and practice!

So what are some spiritual disciplines we can practice that will roll back our poorly formed worldly patterns and help establish transformed and renewed ones? Here’s a simple, non-exhaustive list:

• Memorize scripture: Have negative, sinful thought patterns? Learn the words of God, don’t just read them. Pick a verse a week, perhaps, and be able to quote it by the end of the week.

• Quote scripture out loud: Engage your mind and body by making it more than a mental exercise. Your brain responds differently to things you say than things you think.

• Put down your phone, screens, and all entertainment media for a serious chunk of time each day: You can only beat anxiety by removing yourself from the source.

• Be quiet: You’ll never pay attention to God or others when you’re so focused on saying what you want to say.

• Kneel when you pray: This might sound old school to you, but physically assuming a posture of humility is something we all need to regularly engage in. Again, the body needs to reinforce what the mind is trying to assume. Too many of us think old rituals like kneeling are a bad memory from catholicism, but that’s simply not true. First-century Jewish Christians assumed praying positions 3 times a day, regardless of where they were. You can do it too!

• Spend time with other Christians, talking about Christ: Faith is not personal or individual. Americans get stuck in the trap of making everything personal, but God’s people were always a people (plural), a body, a group, a community who engage in heavenly behavior collectively. You need this desperately in your friends, family, small group, and so on.

So if you’re falling into that trap of “getting stuck” or “not getting fed,” I ask you to actually take a look at your habits and practices, and honestly assess whether or not you’re walking out a life of discipleship to Jesus daily, little by little, bit by bit, consistently.

On Sex and Marriage: Don’t Promise What the Bible Does Not.

I remember sitting inside the conference center screaming, surviving on adrenaline after getting 2 hours of sleep, and getting amped up alongside thousands of other teens as the worship team was about to kick things off. Everything is loud, flashing, and theatrical. It’s the perfect atmosphere for impacting young teenagers with a message that could last a lifetime. That message was,

“God wants you to have amazing sex!”

Literally, that’s how the guest speaker opened it up. I’ll admit, that’s a great way to grab the attention of thousands of teenagers and keep them engaged. It took me years to learn, however, that what the guest speaker called a promise from God is never promised in the Bible.

If you’ve heard the term, “purity culture,” there’s a good chance you’ve heard mixed reviews on what it was and whether or not it was good for the generation of people raised in it.

In this blog post, I do not want to be unfair to purity culture entirely because I share many beliefs at the core of what it's supposed to stand for. Purity culture (a term that was not coined until much later) developed at the end of the 20th century as a way to promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage. There were books, small group curriculums, and mass events dedicated to the subject. As teen pregnancy and transmission of STDs increased significantly in the 80s and 90s, purity culture did what North American churches have been doing for decades—responding to a cultural crisis by creating a cultural response dressed in churchy language. Purity culture attempted to promote a positive view of monogamous sex that is exclusively saved for lifelong marriage partners to counter the idea that multiple partners and a myriad of sexual experiences do not equate to sexual liberation and fulfillment (which I agree with). The problem? It promoted dozens of other unbiblical, toxically cultural, and at times abusive practices and expectations in sex and marriage. Talks on purity slowly moved away from biblical ideas of glorifying God with the body and covenant union (1 Cor. 6:12-20) to ideas of personal gratification via amazing sex, happy partners, and a household full of healthy children. Purity culture took sex and marriage and made it the “gospel-about-my-sex-life” rather than a gospel centered on Christ and his love for the Church.

The Bible strongly affirms marriage as a spiritual covenant between two people that signifies God’s love for humanity (Eph. 5:22-30), and that covenant is monogamous (Gen. 2:22-24; Eph. 5:31; Deut. 14:2; Isa. 54:5-8). Science now supports the notion that the human brain bonds powerfully to sex, and there is recognizable harm when sexual partners are removed from one another in various contexts and emotional intimacy is downgraded to irrelevancy. Purity Culture in some sense wanted to highlight an already firm belief among some practicing Christians that sex between two monogamous partners saved for marriage would benefit the married couple. I completely agree with this position still today.

But Purity culture completely over-promised, and under-delivered.

Purity Culture messages often proclaimed to young men and women that their sex life was guaranteed to be spectacular so long as they saved their sexual activity for their future spouse. “God wants you to have amazing sex!” was not only a theme at a youth conference; it was the banner of a kingdom for young men in the late 90s early 2000s. There are several problems with this, of course. On one hand, many young people, Christian or not, were already aware of culturally secular expectations for sexual gratification. Many young men assumed that a specular sex life meant the kind of sexual gratification they saw in movies and tv shows, or heard boasted about in pop songs and from insecure high school D-bags. They get it whenever they want, however they want, and there is no rejection involved. If a man has the urge to have sex, it is perfectly natural, and therefore, allowing him to have what he naturally wants is healthy for him (the world is only now waking up to the fact that it is unhealthy and unnatural for young men to indulge in every sexual desire whenever and however they want). Thus if a man saves himself sexually for his future wife, he is securing the fulfillment of these sexual needs in a perfect sexual partner. This same type of hyperbolic promise was pushed on young women too. The secular expectation that the perfect man will cherish and value you, instinctively know your needs, and readjust all of his needs accordingly will happen naturally if both partners saved themselves for marriage with each other. He’ll just “get it.”

Imagine the shock and disbelief when two people found out that they still had to work incredibly hard in their marriage, especially in the context of sex, despite doing exactly what purity culture told them to do.

It overpromised and underdelivered.

Purity Culture youth pastors often bragged about their “hot wives” that God gave them because they saved themselves for marriage (as if this is any sort of biblical promise at all—it's not). The idea promoted was that other young men would get the hot wife of their dreams if they abstain from sex until marriage as well. In contrast, some purity culture preachers described sex in such a negative light that women who obeyed and followed suit were so terrified of sex that they couldn’t bring themselves to trust their partner even after getting married and having biblically consensual sex. It felt so dirty that it almost couldn’t be redeemed for them, and it took years of therapy and redeeming theology to remove those barriers. Many women were told that if their husband wants sex, they were being sinful if they deny him, or at least they are harming their marriage and encouraging their husbands to look for sex elsewhere (porn, affairs, masturbation, etc). Without meaning to, purity culture messages were at times absolving men of sexual sin while lumping shame on women. Imagine the toxic weight a woman will carry by believing that her husband’s sexual sin is her fault because she didn’t sexually satisfy her partner as he wanted. Purity culture inadvertently stole the very thing it was promising—healthy sex between two faithful partners.

This may sound progressive to some but despite everything society, Christian or secular, proclaims, sex is not about us, and marriage is not about our fulfillment.

The increasingly liberal message in the 80s and 90s was that men and women are freer and fulfilled by having numerous, diverse sexual encounters. Instead of correcting this false assumption and dismantling it, purity culture tried to offer the same fulfillment using sex but giving a different formula: “You will be freer and fulfilled by sex if you abstain until marriage.” This never works in any context with any cultural or moral issue. You cannot try to promise the same things secular culture promises but offer a different formula, because the truth of Christianity is that everything the secular world promises is often meaningless and finite. Christianity reveals a greater, fulfilling, and eternal promise that in relationship with our Creator, God, we have everything we want and need. Secular culture will never understand this, so it will never offer it. That’s why people who don’t understand what it means to have a relationship with Jesus are always trying to find fulfillment in something else. Disguising secular fulfillment by clothing it in Christian moral terms and boundaries does not help: If anything, it damages the idea of true Christian faith in the long run.

This is why so many Generation Xers and Millennials are setting aside their previous Christian beliefs and walking away from the faith in the first place:

“If my pastor was wrong about what the bible says on sex and marriage, what else is he wrong on?”

The Bible never promises that sex will be awesome and fulfilling in our lives, ever. There is incredibly little written anywhere in the bible about sex in terms of fulfillment and satisfaction. Outside of procreation, sex serves little purpose in the narrative of existence. It is one of the least important aspects of your life in the grand scheme of biblical truth, and marriage is so much more than sex in scripture. The one exception to this is in the book Song of Songs, which depicts a beautiful portrait of two people romantically and physically devoted to each other. Song of Songs certainly does imply that two people can enjoy romantic love and sex, and that anticipation in waiting for sex to “awaken” at the right time is important (Song 2:7; 3:5; 8:4). But the much larger, more important truth communicated in Song of Songs is that love is beautiful, captivating, and created by God for the greatest levels of intimacy. Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship/marriage can attest to the reality that life gets busy, arduous challenges take precedence over spousal time, and things can fall into stagnant patterns. God is love, and an intimate, meaningful relationship is so much more than just getting by in life. Love is meant to be beautiful, and at times that can certainly manifest in the form of beautiful sex. God is certainly for healthy sex within a monogamous, loving relationship and Song of Songs informs us of this. It does not aggrandize sex for the sake of sexual fulfillment but aggrandizes love for the sake of revealing how deep and powerful godly love can be in every context, including sex.

In the end, every biblical teaching is designed to point us back to fulfillment, intimacy, and eternal rest in God. He alone is our source for all things (John 6:35; Psalm 16:11; 22:26; Isaiah 58:11; Jeremiah 31:25), and the Bible promises us with absolute assuredness that, regardless of how our marriage, sex life, job, or monetary status turns out, we will always be satisfied and fulfilled by our relationship with Him.

Is there wisdom in following the Bible’s command to save sex for a monogamous commitment with your spouse? Absolutely. Is there a formula that guarantees anything concerning your sex life and intimacy in marriage? No.

Sexual Immorality, the Human Body, and Community Holiness.

Paul’s first address to the church in Corinth articulates a unique theology of the human body and its purposes in God’s inaugurated kingdom on earth. In examining 1st Corinthians 6:12-20,  Paul addresses boundaries and abuses of freedom in the Christian life (6:12-13), God’s purpose for the human body in Christ (VS 14-20), the sinful practice of sexual immorality against both the body and the Lord (VS 14-18), and communal holiness for the collective church as Christ’s body (15-20). This paper will endeavor to explain and support the position that Paul’s theology of the human body, explicitly expressed and supported in this passage, was unique in Paul’s day and is coherent and consistent within greater Pauline literature. It will begin by addressing the wider issue at stake in Paul’s entire letter to the Corinthians.