Occasionally, while flipping through the channels on my television, I pause for a moment at a network sponsored by a consortium of those churches called Pentecostal. They are a loosely related confederation of individual congregations and denominations held together by their belief in the active presence of the Holy Spirit in the church today, just as the active presence of the Holy Spirit was with the disciples of Jesus while they were in Jerusalem for the minor Jewish festival of Pentecost, little more than a month following the resurrection.

Naive as I am, I often pause to listen for a few minutes to what is being said on this network, hoping to find some additional insights which will help me understand better the elusive presence of God's Spirit among us.

But, invariably, rather than a …