Scarly
New Day is my faith community for over six years. It sustains me and keeps me hopeful that creating a just world for all is possible.
Allison Manuel
New Day Church has been a brave spiritual community that has witnessed and held me through my struggles and growth in the Bronx. Ten years ago, someone pressed me into coming after I insisted church was not for me. But I found a church that was not about the performance of perfection, dogma that perpetuates oppression, or control through fear and shame. Here, I've entered into a family that is committed to the messy work of loving across boundaries, asking questions and being with mystery, and striving for integrity between values and action. Here, I recovered my creative life force through singing and writing. Here I have found partners with whom I have marched and occupied, created new spaces for learning and healing, gotten a little more liberated and a lot more queer.
I couldn't be more inspired and honored to have welcomed Pastor Tabatha Holley as our new pastor. She is deeply listening and boldly moving us to embody the community we are meant to be.
Alexis Francisco
New Day is a spiritual haven in the northwest Bronx with a big vision to re-imagine what ‘church’ can be for those who have been most disconnected/discarded from spiritual community. New Day welcomed me at my messiest, and helped me put my pieces back together - not with what they professed, but with with how they lived. There was nothing ‘perfect’ about this community, but I could sense there was integrity in their striving to be who they believed they could be. That was enough for me to lean in, and God met me the rest of the way. This community invested in me, and developed me as a person and as a leader. Beyond Sunday services, New Day shows me what it means to connect with a Higher Power authentically, to do the messy (and at times seemingly impossible) work of being community across boundaries, and to live in ways that dare to confront injustice, not from a place of righteousness but from open hearted faith that another world is truly possible. Even as my spiritual practice and identity has shifted, New Day is forever a spiritual home for me where I feel whole, welcome and inspired to live in faith and in community.
With the new leadership of Pastor Tabatha Holley, New Day is shedding skins and emerging into a future that is still to be written. I pray that New Day Church continue to be that surprising - “I didn’t even know I was looking for this...” - type of blessing for many others for many years to come. We are extending an invitation to our broader network of friends and supporters to help usher that new future into being with a financial contribution. Any amount is welcome and deeply appreciated!
Morgan Richard-Melamdir
New Day brings people together in a way I've never seen before. A person's whole self is always welcome, and this creates an inclusivity that is absolutely necessary for the future of church. We love widely and deeply.
Mayra Francisco
A unique faith community much needed in the Bronx and the whole NYC area.
Gregory Jost
In 2019, after 25 years of righteous agnosticism, I found my way back to God—first manifesting as Grace, through taking a leap of Faith in claiming God’s existence and power in my life. God led me to this through many fraught twists and turns, sleepless Adirondack nights, and unwavering lessons from our ancestors, of which I am called to write. When I returned to the Bronx in July, my church of ten years had just transitioned to a new pastor who visually was the opposite of our outgoing founder. Pastor Tabatha Holley is young, black, woman, queer, Southern, and ... compact. As we had recently left the United Methodist denomination over its refusal to budge on gay marriage, our new pastor’s arrival coincided with a new legal and financial organization. In many ways, we all had been reborn.
As in any rebirth, we are moving through both our beautiful divine discoveries as well as our challenges and growing pains. I’ve heeded a calling to attend church and give regularly for the first time since high school, to join the praise and worship team first playing my trombone and more recently singing (into a microphone for the first time in my life!), and to join the finance team where I help us look at our budget and giving in new, creative ways.
We are a church of abundance, of radical acceptance and liberation, a place that practices boldly that we are all created in God’s image, including reimagining God. We are a healing space for those who have felt the trauma when we weren’t accepted as who we fully are in our past churches. Through this, we are a place in the Bronx for any and all to (re)connect with God, cross boundaries that would normally divide us, and confront the injustice of 21st century empire in a faith community.