Features

The Necessity of New Birth

By Kelly Ladd Bishop

My local social media groups are full of posts asking about meet-ups, yoga classes, book clubs, and events for kids. Neighbors
separated by walls, fences, or yards are seeking to build community with like-minded people. Churches also provide community. I can scroll through any number of church websites and see statements about being a loving community and announcements of events that offer community and connection. The church is, and should be, a loving community—but it’s more than that. When we gather, we read from the same Book and sing the same songs, but we are not a book club or a choir. The Church is the body of Christ with a mission in this world. As such, new birth in Christ is essential to our identity, both as individuals and as a body of believers.

While online connections can offer positive ways to find social communities, they can also offer ways to build taller walls between us. It’s easy to disagree with each other, and we are tempted to build communities based on those disagreements. An online search can help us find a church community of like-minded believers in our various causes, but the Church offers something beyond that—something much more complex, holy, and sacred.

Church isn’t about our shared interests or causes; it’s about our shared identity as people reborn into the family of Jesus. It’s a multifaceted mosaic of God’s adopted children. As people reborn, we are growing into our identity in Jesus, constantly changing and being changed as we learn to walk and talk as heirs of Christ. In our divided world, it is only a church built on new birth in Christ that can ever seek to build God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Kelly Ladd Bishop

Kelly Ladd Bishop is the pastor of children and family ministries at Newton (Massachusetts) Covenant Church.

By Ramelia Williams

We can envision the necessity of the new birth in the ministry of the Covenant’s anti-sex trafficking initiative, FREE. FREE partners with ministries in local communities that are doing the work of prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation to oppose the evil of sex trafficking and to serve those impacted by the abuse of power, poverty, and injustice around the world. When victims of sex trafficking, sexual violence, and prostitution are encountered by one of our partners, they are drawn to the idea of something hopeful, something new—a new birth.

Our partners are the midwife at the birthing stool, calling forth new life from a groaning woman. The midwife is praying that the vulnerable baby will respond to the call to transition from a life of darkness to a new experience of light. This invitation to new life is a liminal space where the victimized woman realizes she would like to emerge from an oppressive life experience but knows she doesn’t have the tools and resources (both human and material) to make the transformation happen on her own. Our partners offer this transformative experience free of charge.

Even though it is free to the recipient, it does have a cost. Because of the generous donations of our churches, we partner financially with our partner organizations to help pay the price. When she is empowered to navigate the birth canal and enter the new birth, she is born—a survivor. Transformation happens as she enters a community of peers who are healed and who desire to see her healed. Without the moment of transition, the liminal space, the partition between who I was and who I am becoming, without the moment of new birth, none of these women would be able to enter transformed lives.

Their transformed lives lead to moments of reconciliation; to new, healthy family connections; to the ability to serve their communities; and to the sacred task of going back to the dark spaces from which they came to tell the good news of salvation—to demonstrate the result of the new birth.