Megan K. Westra - Born Again and Again: Jesus Call to Radical Transformation

Megan Westras Born Again and Again offers an especially winsome example of a new post-evangelical spirituality and ethic that is emerging in our time, especially among a massive cohort of young Christians. Westras lovely book mixes her own story and reflections with those of many others she has invited to speak within its pages. I am glad to encounter this book. It gives me hope for the future.

David P. Gushee , professor of Christian ethics and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University and author of After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity

Megan Westras story is my storyand the story of so many who were born into a transactional version of Christianity and tried our very best to live it in the world. What she found, and what I hope for all of us, is a faith rooted in deep connection and relationship, a way of being Christian in the world that values and honors the voices of all Gods people. If you are doing the work of reimagining your faith, read this book. Youll find hope and inspiration here.

Amy K. Butler , public theologian and former senior minister of the Riverside Church

What could the future of Christianity look like in America? Pastor Megan Westra has been living it in her community and now shares what shes learned in this wide-ranging, historically informed, and hopeful book that centers diverse voices and helps us see new possibilities for the church. This isnt an attack on what has failed. Westras strength is in her call to expand our view of what the church can be in the future with a personal, communal, and public faith.

Ed Cyzewski , author of Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction and Flee, Be Silent, Pray: Ancient Prayers for Anxious Christians

This book should be required reading for every Christian! Megan Westras masterful biblical and theological work unravels and uproots the vision of salvation as merely personal and not communal, as verbal assent but not sacrificial, and as emotional but not transformational. She lights the way forward for her readers, revealing a faith patterned after the life of Jesus, and a salvation not just for the self but for the flourishing of everyone. If you have been left empty and disappointed by a personal relationship with Jesus that failed to address the injustices in the world, this book will challenge and encourage you. Westra has gifted us with a robust and clarifying doctrine of salvation, pointing us in the direction of liberation, not just for the individual but also for a church bound by the empire.

Karen Gonzlez , author of The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong

Born Again and Again nails it! Megan Westras artistically woven words contrast the journey of American Christianity and its history of individualism and capitalism with the teachings and life of Jesus as well as Old Testament journeys of Gods people. She incorporates interludes of her own personal journey, which includes insights from present-day scholars and past theologians. She also gives a way forward that creates in the reader a love for Jesus. Her writing is compelling and page turning. In a sense, as I was reading it, I was struck with the prophetic tones. A must-read.

Jo Anne Lyon , ambassador and former general superintendent of the Wesleyan Church and founder of World Hope International

From a birds-eye view and with a particular lens, Megan Westra invites us to look again at the implications of being the church in the US, not as individuals saved from hell but as a communal people saved for God and bearing public witness to Gods transforming presence and purposes for the world. On the canvas of her Christian experience and against the backdrop of US church history, Westra paints panoramic and local scenes of unlearning and returning that are simultaneously insightful, troubling, challenging, and uplifting. For churches seeking to rediscover their born again life in Jesus cruciform, other-oriented gospeland to be saved from consumerist narratives embedded in North American evangelicalismWestras passionate, practical book is an able companion.

Cherith Fee Nordling , associate professor of theology at Northern Seminary

Herald Press

PO Box 866, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803

www.HeraldPress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Westra, Megan K., author.

Title: Born again and again : Jesus call to radical transformation / Megan

K. Westra.

Description: Harrisonburg, Virginia : Herald Press, [2020] | Includes

bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019059961 (print) | LCCN 2019059962 (ebook) | ISBN

9781513806747 (paperback) | ISBN 9781513806754 (hardcover) | ISBN

9781513806761 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism--United States--History. | Christianity and

politics--United States--History. | Church and social problems--United

States. | Jesus Christ--Example. | Salvation--Christianity.

Classification: LCC BR1642.U5 .W475 2020 (print) | LCC BR1642.U5 (ebook)

| DDC 261.8--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059961

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059962

Study guides are available for many Herald Press titles at www.HeraldPress.com.

BORN AGAIN AND AGAIN

2020 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803. 800-245-7894.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019059961

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-5138-0674-7 (paperback);

978-1-5138-0675-4 (hardcover); 978-1-5138-0676-1 (ebook)

Printed in United States of America

Cover and interior design by Reuben Graham

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture text is quoted, with permission, from the New Revised Standard Version , 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOREWORD

I t is the highest honor when someone takes in a concept, theory, or viewpoint that you offered the world so deeply that it becomes an integral part of the way they conceptualize, theorize, and view the world... and then they move it forward. Megan Westra has done exactly that in this beautiful and insight-filled book.

Perhaps my favorite line in the pages that follow is the very first: I was four years old the first time I got saved. Profoundly particular stories, worldviews, political allegiances, histories, struggles, theologies, and ecclesiologies are held in those eleven words. In those words I see white evangelical faith, mostly rural or suburban, family-oriented, but steeped in the insular concern of whos in and whos out, and in a commitment to God and countryfirst as Democrats, and then as the Republicans that they became in the 1980s. This faith followed the tide of white evangelical support for Ronald Reagans American dawnthe dawn of a postcivil rights era that reclaimed white power and reasserted white Christian sovereignty. I see the granddaughters and daughters of white sharecroppers and fishermen and coal miners, some who scattered north by northwest in their own great migration at the turn of the twentieth century, and others who fled west to escape the Dust Bowl. I see white churchesliterally painted whitewith high steeples, pillars flanking double-door entrances, and hymn numbers slid into wooden slats behind church organs. I see all-white church communities that have played and fought and married each other for generations. Finally, I see a cultural kind of Christianitycaught by osmosiswith little to no likeness to the physically brown, politically black Jesus of the actual text.