This Sunday, I began leading a Sunday School class of middle schoolers on the New Testament book of Acts at First Presbyterian here in Spartanburg, and I find myself looking forward to it in ways that feel deeper than simply preparing a lesson series. Acts has long been one of those texts that quietly works on me over time, shaping how I understand faith, community, and change. Stepping into it with young people now feels especially fitting, not only because of where they are in life, but also because of the questions our broader current moment is placing before all of us.
Acts is not, at its core, a book about certainty. It is a book about beginnings. Its story opens in a space of waiting and confusion rather than clarity. The disciples and 120 or so members of the community that followed Jesus to his death and resurrection do not understand what is happening or what comes next. They ask Jesus if this is finally the moment when everything will be restored, when history will resolve into something stable and predictable. They are looking for a plan, for an answer that would make the future legible. Same as many of us do most days.
Instead, they are told to wait.
What comes is not a roadmap but courage. The Spirit does not arrive with instructions for building an institution or managing a movement. It changes how they see and how they attend. Wind, fire, speech, gathering… these are not merely supernatural signs but shifts in perception on Pentecost. The vicious violence that met the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry in the flesh has to still be raw for them as they gather and wait. But then the world that had seemed dangerous and closed off begins to appear open and alive with possibility. The people around them are no longer threats or strangers but interlocutors. The city of Jerusalem is no longer a place to hide from but a place to enter.
This is one of the ways Acts intersects so closely with the phenomenological work that shapes my doctoral studies at CIIS. Phenomenology, at its heart, is about attention. It asks how the world shows up for us and how our habits of seeing shape what becomes possible. My own work on ecological intentionality circles around the idea that participation in the world begins not with mastery but with perception. Before we act, we notice. Before we organize, we attend. The texture of reality shifts when our mode of attention shifts.
Acts is, among other things, a narrative of transformed attention. The disciples begin by asking questions framed by old expectations. They are still looking for restoration in familiar political or cultural terms. Pentecost does not hand them new information so much as it alters their field of awareness. Suddenly, they hear languages where before they heard noise. They see neighbors where before they saw differences, and they perceive opportunity where before they perceived danger.
This is why the movement in Acts unfolds the way it does, I think. It does not grow because its members possess certainty. It grows because their way of encountering the world has changed. They step forward not because they know exactly what will happen, but because they can notice new openings and respond to them. Faith here is less about holding the correct ideas or doctrinal points and more about cultivating a posture of attention that makes participation possible. It’s a reason that Acts is such an alluring text to many of us Baptists, in my opinion (with talk of “New Testament Church” and “house church” approaches being popular over the last few decades).
Middle schoolers are already negotiating this terrain. They are learning, often without naming it, that belonging depends on how we see one another and where we direct our attention. They know that a classroom can feel welcoming or hostile depending on subtle shifts in perception (both for teachers and students, as I learned in my two decades in Middle School classrooms!). They know that a friend group in the cafeteria can expand or contract based on who is noticed and who is ignored. In that sense, Acts meets them where they already live. It offers a story in which change begins not with certainty but with a reorientation of attention that makes new forms of community imaginable.
In an age marked by ecological strain, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation, political strife, and war… there is a strong pull toward waiting for perfect clarity before acting. Acts suggests another path. The story begins when people are willing to step into a world they do not fully understand, trusting that attention and courage will carry them further than certainty ever could.
Following Jesus did not make life predictable for what would become the earliest church. It made life larger, not by solving uncertainty but by opening their perception to a shared and unfolding world.
My hope in the weeks ahead is that these young people will glimpse that faith is not about resolving every question in advance. It is about learning to notice, to attend, and to take part in something that continues to unfold in our own communities today.