First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City

Living Pentecost	Pentecost comes home as OKC First Baptist worships in five languages
	May 25 marks the global Church’s celebration of Pentecost Sunday, the day recorded in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit empowered the early disciples to preach on the streets of Jerusalem. The gift of the Spirit was that each person was able to hear the gospel story in his or her own language. For First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, the flavor of Pentecost has become a regular part of its worship experience, as members of five distinct language groups gather together to pray and praise, each in their own tongue. In 2006, the MidTown church started an English as a second language (ESL) lab to teach English to those new to our country. By 2008, the church learned of a small band of Baptists from the Chin State in Myanmar (also called Burma) whose story was defined by persecution and difficulty. From a group of 16 grew the now 60-member United Myanmar Baptist Church (UMBC). The UMBC chose Burmese as their language of worship so that they could also include other refugee groups from Burma, including the Kachin and Karen. A small subset chose to establish a secondary congregation based on Hahka, the Chin language, and named themselves the Lai Baptist Church. The Hispanic Bible Study was launched to touch the growing Latin community that live within easy reach of the church. Recently, a new body—the Sudanese Christian Fellowship, composed of Arabic speaking Christians from Southern Sudan—have begun to meet at FBCOKC. Like the Burmese refugees, the Sudanese story is rife with persecution and abuse. “They came to First Baptist because they had heard that our church had a heart for people from other parts of the world,” said FBCOKC Senior Pastor Dr. Tom Ogburn. “In many churches, these groups would worship and operate separately, but our church has chosen to embrace another model. It’s like a living Pentecost right here in Oklahoma City.” The first Sunday of each month the congregations worship side-by-side in a service that now includes elements from the five shared languages the congregations use in their unique worship services. “We have learned together that while the complexion of our skin, the language of our hearts, and the nature of our cultures are different, our faith in Christ makes us one,” said Ogburn. “Worshiping together, even when we don’t understand every language, gives us a little glimpse into what God is doing in the global Church and a small taste of what it means to be a part of the Kingdom of God.”