Pentecost Sunday falls this year on Sunday 28 May. It's a day in the Church calendar which goes back to the Early Church, and transcends denominational boundaries.
Why Do Christians Celebrate Pentecost? by Kathleen Mulhern, Ph.D.
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Pentecost is a Christian feast day that is traditionally celebrated on Sunday fifty days after Easter. Pentecost honors the day when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all the disciples, who experienced this as tongues of fire and rushing wind. This miraculous event is described in chapter two of the Acts of the Apostles. During the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit “filled the whole house where they were sitting…All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2.1-4). This unusual event understandably drew a large crowd. The Apostle Peter took advantage of the situation and preached the Gospel to the people. This led to 3,000 people converting to Christianity. This event is sometimes seen not only as a pivotal moment in the history of Christianity but as the birthday of the Christian church.
Compiled and Edited by the Crosswalk Editorial Team 2021 14 Jan
Right before Jesus ascended into heaven, he instructed his followers to stay in Jerusalem until
the event happened. What event? They didn’t know. So they waited. Ten days later, the Holy Spirit stepped onto the scene and indwelled all of them in an event known as Pentecost. What is Pentecost? As discussed below, it’s the birthday of the church, when the Holy Spirit indwelled believers, and after they spoke in Jerusalem, they converted the first few thousand to the church.
But Pentecost didn’t take place ten days after the ascension by accident. It happened to fall during Sukkot, a Jewish harvest festival, showing that the seeds God had planted had finally come to harvest through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. In this article, we’ll dive into what Pentecost is, and why Christians should know about this important event