Dear Brethren, Co-Workers and Friends:
When you receive this letter, the annual Feast of Pentecost has almost arrived. The Church of God has understood for many years that Pentecost must be kept on a Sunday—counting 50 days from the Sunday, which falls within the annual Holy Days of Unleavened Bread. We explain how to count Pentecost (as well as the reasons why we have to keep it today) in chapter 3 of our free booklet, “The Meaning of God’s Spring Holy Days.”
Not everyone in the Church understands or believes that we must keep Pentecost when most of us do, and some have begun to “observe” Pentecost at a different time.
Some maintain and uphold a mistake, which the Church of God had made many decades ago (but which was corrected in 1974/75), when it erroneously concluded that Pentecost had to be kept on a Monday. Others count the 50 days leading to Pentecost from the Sabbath (not Sunday), which falls within the Days of Unleavened Bread. Still others reject the concept of postponements relative to the Hebrew calendar, and have therefore created alternate dates when to keep Pentecost. (And then, there are some who have changed the dates strictly because of “convenience”). . We should easily see that these different approaches have led to confusion and disunity in the body of Christ, rather than to “the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (Ephesians 4:13). When we are wrong in our understanding, we must change; but unless we can clearly see from Scripture that we are mistaken on a given point in doctrine, we are to “hold fast what [we] have” (Revelation 3:11) and to even “contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
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