For many people raised in church, holiness arrived as a list: what you could wear, drink and say. These four sessions ask how the Black Holiness tradition’s deeper understanding of holiness and Spirit-filled worship can shape the way you actually worship and live without returning to that list. The first session goes back to what holiness means. The second reads Acts 2 beside the story of Azusa Street. The third looks at the freedom in worship the tradition gave back to the wider Black church. The fourth tests the rules that grew up around holiness. Each session pairs Scripture with the account Antipas Harris gives in his Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, then ends with one practice to try before the next meeting.
Work through it alone over four weeks or with a group in four meetings of about an hour. Bring a Bible, a pen and a sheet of paper you will keep until the end. Answering out loud is always optional, and no one has to tell more about their church background than they choose.
Before session one, write two sentences on that sheet. First, finish this line: When I hear the word holiness, I picture… Write the picture you actually carry, which may differ from the definition you would give. Second, describe the worship you are most comfortable with. Fold the paper and set it aside.
Session one: the word older than the list
Harris was raised inside this tradition. His father founded a Holiness Pentecostal church in Manchester, Georgia. “So all of my life, I’ve been holiness Pentecostal,” he says. When he defines holiness, though, he starts before his own movement. He places it in the Wesleyan stream, says Wesley was not its only champion, and then goes further back: “but holiness itself really dates back to the Old Testament.”
Read Leviticus 19:1-2 aloud. The command is plain: “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). Look at the word for. The command rests on God’s own character. Peter repeats it to scattered Christians: “But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:15-16). In older English, conversation meant your whole way of life, not just your talk.
Now read Leviticus 19:9-18. Draw two columns, one headed toward God and one headed toward people, and sort each command. You will find commands to leave the edges of the harvest for the poor and the stranger, to pay hired workers before nightfall, to refuse slander, and this one: “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:18). Christians understand differently how Israel’s laws apply today, and this session does not need to settle that. It only asks what holiness looked like when God first defined it.
Harris says his tradition received this emphasis through Wesley, who “said, there is no holiness, but social holiness.” In Harris’s description, Wesley paired private devotion with “how we treat other people as a part of what it means to be holy.” Compare your columns with the picture you wrote down. Did your picture include the second column at all?
Practice for the week: Choose one command from your toward people column and carry it out in a modern form. Pay someone you owe today rather than next week. Leave something useful for a person who will not thank you. Stop a piece of gossip before you pass it on. Afterward, notice whether it felt like a spiritual act, and if not, why you file it somewhere else.
Session two: poured on sons and daughters
Harris will not let the Pentecostal story begin in Los Angeles. He says it “really does find itself back to Acts chapter number two,” and that the Spirit’s work did not stop between then and 1906: “In fact, it never stopped moving.” He is careful about the evidence. He names figures such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross while saying we cannot always tell whether they spoke in tongues.
Read Acts 2:1-21 slowly. It is narrative, and Christians who love Scripture still disagree about how gifts like tongues and prophecy operate today. Give your group room for that difference. The text is plain about who receives the Spirit. Peter quotes Joel and lists sons and daughters, young and old, then adds, “And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:18). Underline every kind of person named in verses 17-18. In the gatherings where you worship, which of those groups usually leads or prays aloud, and which mostly watch?
Now hold the story Harris tells. William Seymour was a Black pastor with one eye, the son of enslaved parents. He wanted to learn from Charles Parham, who was teaching on Acts 2. Because Black people could not sit in the classroom with white people, Harris says, Seymour listened from the hallway through a cracked door. Parham taught that the gifts were present for the church now. Seymour’s response, as Harris tells it, was “if God is pouring this Holy Spirit out to us today, then I want it.” He went on to lead the Azusa Street Revival, where, Harris says, Black and white worshipers came together while newspapers mocked them. Harris adds that organizations born from that revival later split over race. “And we really need a renewal of that,” he says of the unity it showed.
Read Seymour’s line beside Acts 2:17. Which words in his sentence echo the verse? What condition does he set, and what does he ask for?
Practice for the week: Each day, pray through Acts 2:17-18 one phrase at a time. At each category, name someone you know who fits it, especially someone easy to overlook, and ask that God’s Spirit would rest on them. Pray for every category before asking anything for yourself.
Session three: the freedom that came back
Harris names freedom of worship as this tradition’s first gift to the wider Black church. Many established Black churches, he says, drew on the folk religion of slavery while reshaping it to match the slaveholders’ idea of church, which he calls “cleaning it up to be more proper.” He describes Charles Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ, bringing back the ring dance, which Harris calls clearly an African practice. He is exact about Mason’s role: “he didn’t introduce it as much as he reintroduced it.”
The change came slowly. Harris recalls a Baptist church in his hometown where, in those days, “you get excited and people sort of contain you.” A gospel group from his father’s church carried guitars to that church’s door, someone asked whether the instruments could come in, and the pastor said yes. Harris says that congregation now dances freely. He remembers the phrases he grew up with: “let the spirit have its way, stir up the spirit, let the Spirit have free course.”
Read three passages and notice what kind of writing each is. In 2 Samuel 6:14, “David danced before the LORD with all his might.” Read on through verse 22, where Michal despises him and David answers that he will humble himself further before the Lord. This is narrative. It describes a king’s worship and does not command yours. Psalm 150:4 is poetry calling for praise with everything available: “Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.” In 1 Corinthians 14:40, Paul writes to a church whose gatherings had become disorderly: “Let all things be done decently and in order.” He wants worship that builds others up. Together they welcome the body in worship and ask that worship serve the people in the room. None of the three asks anyone to stay quiet in order to look respectable.
On a fresh sheet, list four or five things your church does or avoids in worship: standing, raising hands, silence, instruments, call and response, keeping still. Beside each, write where you think it comes from: Scripture, custom, concern for others or personal comfort. Some will have more than one source. Look for any habit that could be a cleaned-up form of something God never asked you to clean.
If you lead a group, expect people from very different churches. Freedom in worship is not measured by volume. For someone raised in loud praise, sitting in silence may be the real surrender.
Practice for the week: Choose one way of worshiping you usually hold back from, such as open praise, kneeling, silence or asking God aloud for something specific. Do it fully, once, in a setting where it serves the people around you. Afterward, write one honest sentence about what held you back before.
Session four: holiness measured by God
The same tradition that freed bodies in worship often bound them outside it. Harris says holiness in his church sometimes took a practical turn to a fault: “It became a list of things you should do and not do.” He lists rules against drinking, smoking, dipping and chewing, along with required clothes and forbidden words, and says “it was very task oriented, if you will.” Lisa Fields remembers that when her mother became a Christian, she could not wear makeup or shorts and was expected to wear long skirts. “So it was a lot of rules and kind of more legalistic,” Fields says. She understood the intent, she adds, but “it kind of got kinda outta hand in some instances with the extremes.”
Harris also makes a historical claim. In his account, those lists did not always match the Wesleyan teaching the movement claimed, and he gives the example that the Wesleyan tradition permits drinking alcohol. That is his reading of the tradition’s sources, offered in conversation. Before relying on it, ask what would confirm or complicate it. Wesley’s own sermons and rules for his societies, the early disciplines of Holiness denominations, and the historians Harris recommends, such as Estrelda Alexander, would all be places to look. If his claim holds up, the lists were a later hardening and not the root.
Read Colossians 2:20-23 and 3:1-3. Paul names the rules that grow up around religion, “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (Colossians 2:21), and says they look wise but cannot change the heart. Then he points elsewhere: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1). Paul answers legalism with a bigger focus on Christ, not with carelessness.
Here is the strongest objection to this whole study: if a tradition produced this much legalism, why trust it on holiness at all? Harris asks the tradition to sort its strengths from its weaknesses, “instead of throwing out holiness all together, we really do need to rethink holiness and own the tradition.” First Peter 1:16 supports him. If holiness rests on God’s character, a distorted rule list does not cancel the command. It shows the command was being measured by the wrong standard.
Now do a rule audit. Write down one rule you keep, inherited or still feel guilty about, and ask three questions:
- What did this rule claim to protect, and was that worth protecting?
- Does it rest on who God is, or mainly on how a person looks to others?
- Does it make any difference to how you treat your neighbor, the second column from session one?
Then decide whether to keep it, keep it with a different reason, or let it go. Some rules will pass. A discipline freely chosen out of love for God is not legalism.
In a group, this session needs the most care. Some people were hurt by churches that used rules to shame them. Others still love the discipline those churches gave them. Both belong in the conversation, and nobody’s home church is on trial. If someone shares real pain, slow down and listen. A pastor or trusted counselor can help with what one meeting cannot hold.
Practice for the week: For a rule you decided to keep, write a reason for it that rests on God’s character instead of appearance. For a rule you decided to release, replace it with one concrete act from Leviticus 19:9-18.
Questions to work through together
- Session one sorted holiness into two columns. Why do you think so many Christians picture holiness mostly in the first?
- Seymour learned about Acts 2 from a hallway. What does it change in your reading of Acts 2:17-18 to know who carried that teaching furthest?
- Harris says Azusa Street united Black and white worshipers, and that groups born from it later divided along racial lines. What makes unity in worship easier to begin than to keep?
- From your worship inventory, which habit was hardest to trace to a source? How could you find out where it came from?
- Can a rule be right and still be held for the wrong reason? Give an example that does not involve anyone in the room.
- Paul answers rule-keeping with a focus on Christ. What would that look like where you lean toward rules, and where you lean toward having none?
Back to the folded paper
Unfold the sheet you wrote before session one. Read your picture of holiness and your description of comfortable worship. Under each, write a sentence or two about what has changed, if anything. If nothing has moved, that is honest and worth knowing.
Then write one question at the bottom of the page and keep it: where might a fence you keep be standing between you and a neighbor?