Acts is not written, then, to describe examples of a ‘normal process’ of the spiritual development of individual believers. It is written to describe the one-off inauguration of a quite new reality. Pentecost, along with Good Friday, Easter and Ascension, constitutes the great turning point in the history of Israel and the world. Tom Wright

The early church is constituted as the single global family, the genuine article of which modern secular multiculturalism is a kind of parody. Tom Wright

And the point, putting together Acts 1 and 2, is this: Jesus and his people together constitute the new Temple, the heaven-and-earth place, the launching of new creation. Tom Wright

The New Testament declares that God has come back at last. In Jesus, God has come back to judge and to rescue. In the spirit, God has come back to dwell in and with his people – as the advance sign and means of his eventual filling of all creation with his presence and love. Tom Wright

So the point of Pentecost is not simply God giving his people a fresh injection of spiritual energy so that they can evangelise, teach, perform remarkable healings and so on. The point is the homecoming of God: God is doing at last what he had long intended and promised. Tom Wright

With the ascension, the human body of Jesus is gloriously at home in his father’s territory, against the day when he comes again to bring everything to judgement and to the long-awaited universal restoration, of which Peter speaks a couple of chapters later (3:21). Tom Wright

In fact, the New Testament isn’t about our going to be with God; it’s about God coming to be with us. Tom Wright

The mission of the Church is not about preparing for Jesus to become king. It is implementing the fact that he has become king, even if that new kingship doesn’t look like the sort of thing people had been expecting. Tom Wright

Christianity tells people they can only be redeemed through Jesus dying for them on the cross. Secular ideologies tell them they can only be redeemed through scourging themselves—by renouncing progress and modernity through adopting net zero policies, abasing themselves for the sin of “white privilege,” or junking markers of the “patriarchy” such as traditional male characteristics of courage, competitiveness, and emotional restraint. Melanie Phillips

The reason the West is teetering is that its leaders—in politics, education, policing, business, the church—have chosen to go with the flow of civilizational decline, defeatism, and degradation pushed by a relatively small number of fanatical secular ideologues. Melanie Phillips