Pentecost: God’s Communication Strategy

The story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is often remembered for wind, fire, and the astonishment of people hearing voices in their own language. One idea that we do not hear with equal force, is how Pentecost is about creating understanding across language divides. With that in mind, this article will explore the connections between Pentecost, the Moravian event of 13th August 1727 and the rise of the Pentecost movement.

Pentecost as an Anti-Babel Moment

In Acts 2, we learn that the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in other tongues. The gathered crowd responds with amazement because each one heard their own language being spoken. The miracle in that moment is sometimes over looked and should not be confused with the religious excitement. The miracle is about the communication made possible by God. The miracle was the divine communication strategy. The good news was not to be trapped inside a single culture, accent, or sacred dialect. It was to audible to Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Romans, Cretans, Arabs, and others gathered in Jerusalem.

The story of Pentecost may remind us of the Babel confusion in the book of Genesis, where divisions and disunity hindered progress and achievements. Babel is the memory of human division, confusion, and estrangement. As an event that overcomes confusion, which that different languages may create, Pentecost becomes an anti-Babel moment. Pentecost is not a reversal that flattens humanity into sameness, but a redemption of human plurality for the praise of God. People do not cease to be many peoples. Rather, they are addressed as they are, and yet drawn into one body in Christ through the Spirit’s gift of intelligible witness.

Understood as anti-Babel moment, Pentecost can serve as important imperative for unity in the Christian community. Christian unity is not achieved by demanding that everyone sound alike, pray alike, or carry the same cultural habits. At Pentecost, the Spirit honours difference while creating communion. The church becomes most fully itself not when it speaks in a way only insiders understand, but when it speaks Christ so faithfully and hospitably that outsiders also can truly hear.

Herrnhut and the Moravian Pentecost

August 13, 1727, remains so central in Moravian memory. The community at Herrnhut had been troubled by deep tensions and serious conflicts, prompting Zinzendorf to introduce the Brotherly Agreement and call the settlement into renewed prayer, Bible study, and mutual love. During the Holy Communion service at Berthelsdorf on 13th August, the congregation experienced a profound renewal and reconciliation that later generations would call the spiritual rebirth of the Unitas Fratrum.

The Pentecost idea in 13th August 1727 arose not principally from ecstatic display but from the recognition of the fruits of the Spirit, especially love. People learned to love one another, a theme that would influence characterisation of what is central to the Moravian Church. The prerequisite for salvation, which even children call or show, is to love Jesus. The sign of the Spirit’s coming was not noise for its own sake, but a transformed communal life in which old hostilities gave way to forgiveness, shared devotion, and common purpose.

James Montgomery’s famous poetic retelling captured this connection between love and the ability of children to model it, in hymn 15 of the 1960 MHB:

Glory to the Holy Ghost:

be this day of Pentecost;

Children’s minds may he inspire,

touch their tongues with holy fire.

Glory to the highest be,

to the Blessed Trinity,

for the Gospel from above

For the word that ‘God is love.’

From Pentecostal Renewal to Mission

In Herrnhut, the Spirit seems to have created an impetus for mission by empowering the whole community. Mission was born when estranged believers were taught again to love and to hear one another in Christ. Pentecost, in this Moravian framing, is the creation of a people whose common speech is love, praise, and obedience.

The connection between August 1727 and Moravian missionary outreach is probably more than sentimental hindsight. The fact that by 1732 the first missionaries had been sent to the West Indies makes it plausible to connect 1727 and the 1732 missionary impulse. On 8th October 1732, the first two Moravian missionaries sailed from Copenhagen to St Thomas, marking the beginning of a remarkable missionary era.

Within a relatively short period, the renewed Moravian Church developed a global missionary impulse far out of proportion to its size. By 1760 the church had sent out 226 missionaries, and by 1832 there were 42 Moravian mission stations around the world. The assertion, if established as true, that within fifteen years of the first sending in 1732, Moravians had sent out hundreds of missionaries and established churches on every continent, would be simply astounding.

Seen in light of Acts 2, this would be more than heroic expansion. Without minimising errors and failings of the Moravian mission to enslaved people, we can assert that Pentecost drove people of the church outward because the gospel is meant to be heard by all peoples. The same Spirit who made the apostles intelligible in Jerusalem made the renewed Moravian Church restless for St Thomas, Greenland, South Africa, and many other places. The missionary century from 1732 to 1832 can therefore be read as an extended Pentecost theme in Moravian history: one gospel crossing languages, cultures, and oceans.

The Pentecostal Movement

The early twentieth-century Pentecostal movement also looked back to Acts 2 as a defining scriptural pattern. Standard descriptions of Pentecostalism emphasise baptism in the Holy Spirit and the manifestation of spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues, as central features of the movement’s self-understanding. In that sense, Pentecostalism sought not only to remember Pentecost liturgically but to experience it again as a present reality in the life of the church.

The rise of Pentecostalism can be seen as a third reformation in Christianity. The idea arises from the fact Pentecostalism represents another major renewal current with global consequences. Its extraordinary growth in the twentieth century gave new prominence to themes of spiritual empowerment, lay testimony, healing, praise, and missionary energy.

However, the point of tongues in this Lukan narrative is not spectacle but the intelligible declaration of the wonders of God to those gathered from many nations. Pentecostal spirituality stands close to the deepest logic of Pentecost itself. In it we see a movement making Christ known across barriers of class, race, language, and geography.

For Moravians, then, Pentecost should be seen as a basis to work for reconciliation. Where divisions are emerging, even within the Moravian community, we can see Pentecost as a shared language of grace, and openness to the other. The anti-Babel moment of Acts 2, Herrnhut in 1727, and the later Pentecostal awakening all testify that the church is renewed when speech becomes hospitable to those who would otherwise remain outside.

Maybe the most urgent Pentecost lesson for the contemporary church in Britain and Ireland is a communication strategy centred on the priorities of the Gospel. In a fragmented society marked by inequality and contested identities, Christian witness has to move beyond correct doctrine spoken in an inaccessible tongue. The church is called to speak of Jesus in ways that can be heard, received, and trusted by those around us. Understood in this way, Pentecost is more that miraculous speech. It is also about the Spirit creating understanding and giving us the language and challenge to speak, so that all people can hear the gospel in ways that they can understand.

Br Livingstone Thompson

Minister at Kilwarlin and University Road Moravian Churches, and Provincial Board