Acts 13:4
Acts 13:44So Barnabas and Saul, sent forth by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus.
JWs read "sent out by the holy spirit" as a description of Jehovah's active force directing the early missionary movement. The verse is treated devotionally in JW publications as evidence that Jehovah blessed and guided his servants. The Watchtower's pneumatology — that the spirit is an impersonal active force, not a person — is preserved by reading "sent out by the holy spirit" as Jehovah doing the sending through his power, not the Spirit acting as an agent.
Luke uses ekpempō — "sent out" or "dispatched" — with the Holy Spirit as the agent. The same verb is used elsewhere of persons commissioning others. Read with v.2 ("the Holy Spirit said: 'Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul'"), the Spirit is unmistakably the sender — speaking, naming, calling, and now dispatching. The verbs of cognition and volition pile up across just three verses of historical narrative. Forces do not say "I have called them" and then send people to specific destinations. Persons do. The verse is part of Luke's consistent depiction of the Spirit as a personal agent alongside the Father and the Son in the church's mission.
The NWT renders to hagion pneuma in lowercase as "the holy spirit" — a consistent NWT pattern across the entire NT that refuses to capitalise the Spirit as a proper name. The lowercase choice is doctrinally loaded: it depersonalises the Spirit at the typographical level wherever the Spirit appears. Combined with the NWT's use of "it" and "that one" for ekeinos in John 14-16, the typographical and pronominal choices form a coordinated pattern that aligns with Watchtower theology rather than the Greek text. Here the Spirit is the named agent who sends Barnabas and Saul; lowercasing the noun does not change what the verb does, but it quietly tilts the reader's reading.