The largest church congregation in the world is the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea. The congregation has 830,000 members (2007 figure) and worship space that seats 26,000.

In 1906, a black preacher named William Seymour was invited to pastor a small black church in Los Angeles. Seymour was soon locked out of the church after he told the astonished congregation that the sure sign of their having received the baptism of the Holy Spirit was that they would begin to speak in tongues.

The World Council of Churches' 1991 assembly in Canberra, Australia, had as its theme, Come, Holy Spirit, Renew the Whole Creation.

St. Basil the Great (330-379) is best known as the founder of eastern monasticism. He was also a father of the Church, one of the great early theologians who helped usher the Church from the period of the apostles into the period when Catholic teaching approached maturity.

It is perhaps easy to get trapped in books and concepts when trying to understand a transcendent reality such as the Holy Spirit. Knowledge can deepen, however, by learning of the lives of the saints, Christian believers who have come to a profound, abiding relationship with God.

One challenge facing Christianity in the post-colonial era has been the need to express our faith in ways that are meaningful in widely diverse cultures without undermining the core of the faith.

Sister Elizabeth Johnson maintains that we have forgotten the Holy Spirit, the Spirit whose presence "is consistently linked with the power to denounce social wrongdoing, announce comfort for those who are suffering and bring about justice for the poor."

The contemporary German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann has developed an understanding of the Holy Spirit as "the power of creation and the wellspring of life."

The simplest explanation of the apostolic nature of the true Church is in terms of apostolic succession. The bishops today and throughout history are true successors of the apostles because of the unbroken chain of consecration - the laying on of hands from one generation to the next.

God chose to make his First Covenant with one people, one nation. But after Pentecost, the apostles began fanning out to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The New Covenant is for all people in all times.