I grew up in a conservative Evangelical home and had two born again experiences as a child. Now, I’m a progressive Christian and work in a progressive church.
This summer at my church, we had weekly testimonies from church members and staff about times that we had experienced God in our lives. When it was my turn, I wanted to share how my understanding of being “born again” has changed.
Like many other exvangelicals, I was born again as a kid. And at the time, I thought those experiences (the second time in particular) meant that I was “saved” and going to heaven instead of hell.
Now, as a progressive Christian who doesn’t even believe in hell, I’ve had to grapple with the question, “What WERE those experiences if they weren’t about changing my eternal destiny from hell to heaven?”
Something real happened, but what is that something?
Here’s a video and transcript if you’d like to hear/read how I’ve come to understand my born again experiences as a gift from God.
Transcript of “I’m an exvangelical, and I was born again (twice)” VIDEO
Hello, I’m Sarah Bereza. And usually I blog about church staff related things and music related things. I work full time as a minister of music at a church.
But today I want to talk about something really different. I want to talk about being born again, and what that means to me as someone who is not an evangelical anymore.
I grew up in a very conservative evangelical family.
I went to independent Baptist churches – fundamentalist churches – as a child.
And I grew up in a culture where it was very important to be born again – to have an instantaneous conversion experience – where I was taught that prior to the conversion experience a person was going to hell – a person was unregenerate – a person was not child of God, and then at that moment – at that instantaneous conversion – a person was born again and now a child of God, now someone who was going to heaven, now someone who was able to follow God.
That’s how I grew up. And that’s not what I believe anymore.
I have been born again twice. Here’s the story.
The first time I was born again, I was about three I guess. And I knew that being born again was important. I knew that I should pray, and admit that I was a sinner, and believe in Jesus, and confess my sins.
And I did something like that. I knelt by the side of my bed, and I prayed.
I think everybody else was asleep at that point at night, and I walked into my mom’s room. I was like, “Mom, I just got saved!”
And my mom was like, “Go back to sleep!”
And now as the parent of a three-year-old, I’m like “Oh that’s called stalling. I know that strategy well.” But, yes it was probably stalling in some kind of way, but at the same time it was still something that I understood to be a born-again conversion experience.
However for several years following, I was horribly, horribly afraid of dying.
I was afraid of going to hell.
I was afraid that my doubts of God’s existence were a sign that I was not saved, that I was going to hell.
And that’s terrifying right? Especially when you’re like six, and this is keeping you awake at night and you’re like, “I’m gonna go burn forever.” Absolutely terrifying.
So fast forward several years, and I’m 11. And I had another conversion experience. I wasn’t anticipating this. I didn’t pray. I didn’t say, “Dear God, I’m a sinner, and I believe in you, and save me please.” I did none of those things.
I experienced the love of God, and I experienced the realization that I was beloved of God, that I was a child of God, that I had no reason to fear.
In retrospect, I think I experienced the love of God that casts out all fear. Right? We believe as Christians that “perfect love casts out all fear” is I think how the King James puts it. (I did grow up independent Baptist. I know my King James well.) And I experienced that, I experienced that radically, and I didn’t just experience that in that moment of like, now I have been what I understood at the time to be born again, now I am for real a Christian.
It wasn’t just that I thought so. It was that I know that I was transformed. I became a different person. There was something in me that was just like, now a different person.
Things changed in my family – I have a kinda big personality, and I have several siblings, and I changed a lot in the home life where I was.
I haven’t had fears like I did before, I haven’t doubted who God is since then. Something really profound in me shifted because of this experience that I had, because of what I understood to be this born again instantaneous conversion experience. Something shifted.
Okay so there I am age eleven. Now fast forward.
Now I self-describe as off-the-deep-end liberal. I identify as a progressive Christian. I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe that God is out to get me.
(Which I know is not exactly what I was told as a child, but that’s how I understood things as a child – y’all current evangelicals don’t at me – that’s how I experienced things. I realize that’s not what people were telling me. I experienced this, as God is out to get me, and if I don’t do things just right, I’m gonna end up in hell. I don’t believe any of that anymore.)
And so for a long time, I thought, “What is this thing that happened to me??” Because I can’t deny that it was real.
I can’t say, oh yeah you know, that was just this thing that happened because I was an easily manipulated kid who – you know that would be so easy for me to say.
But I don’t think that that’s actually true. I think that something really real happened to me. Something genuine. And something that literally did change my life happened in that moment in that instantaneous thing that happened to me.
This is why I’m recording this video. Not just to talk about my childhood experiences.
But because I think that for those of you who grew up in an environment similar to mine where it was really important to have a born-again conversion experience – because you wanted to not be going to hell, you wanted to be going to heaven, because you wanted to follow God so now you have to have this instantaneous thing that happens to you.
I want to share this with you because I’ve really had to think about what is this thing that happened to me.
Here’s what I’m thinking now.
I think that I was given a huge gift by God. I was given the gift of experiencing God’s perfect love for me as an individual.
And I experienced that in a moment. I experienced that in a radical and transformative way.
I don’t think that that experience moved me from heaven to hell or anything like that.
But I do think that it was a real manifestation of God’s love to me personally.
It’s different from thinking it’s a born-again conversion experience but it is very similar in thinking of it as, “I experienced the love of God, the presence of God, the realness of God for me in my life.”
I experienced what was, and is, a gift.
I was in a very narrow theological environment. I was in an environment that was in many ways very harmful to me. I mean yes, I did get all the King James Bible verses memorized – I still have them memorized. I experienced a lot of good things in that environment. I experienced a great love for God’s Word, a huge importance of loving God and loving my neighbor. I experienced all that.
But I also experienced a lot of fear. And if you had similar a childhood environment to me, you understand that kind of fear is terrifying.
And I was given a gift. God came to me me individually. In that moment, God was present to me in the most real way possible, and changed my life.
That is a huge gift that the vastness, the bigness of God, that I could even have a glimpse of that, that any of us who had that kind of born-again conversion experience, that real thing that happens.
We have been given a huge glimpse in our tiny small way, a huge glimpse into the bigness of God that is an amazing gift no matter where we are theologically these days. No matter what our current beliefs are, no matter even what our current beliefs about God are.
We have all been given a huge gift if we’ve had that kind of experience of God.
So I hope if you have a background like mine where you had a born-again conversion experience, and you don’t know what to do with it these days – because of it was real, but like, not real in the way that you thought it was as a kid. Because, you know, that isn’t part of your theology anymore.
I hope that maybe this is helpful to you. That this could be a way of understanding what God was for you, God is for you, in your life.
