Interfaith worship spaces are buildings that are home to congregations representing two (or more) religions. Buildings shared by churches of two Christian denominations are common, but there are only a few known places where, for example, a Jewish congregation and a Christian congregation share their home.
Such buildings are of interest as concrete ventures in the interfaith understanding which many religious groups now espouse.
There are several cases in North America where a small congregation of one faith is a tenant in a building owned and chiefly occupied by a congregation of another faith.
Buildings that were planned and erected as joint projects include:
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, St. Clare of Assisi Episcopal church and Temple Beth Emeth share a building called Genesis of Ann Arbor.
- Waterloo, Ontario, Westminster United Church and Temple Shalom share The Cedars Worship and Community Centre.
- Columbia, Maryland, (a planned community originally developed by the Rouse Company), five Interfaith Centers have been built, the first in 1970, and another is planned.
- Derry, New Hampshire, The Church of the Transfiguration, Episcopal, and the Etz Hayim Synagogue began as a landlord/tenant relationship, but expanded in 2009 to become the Derry Interfaith Campus.
Famous quotes containing the words worship and/or spaces:
“A self-denial, no less austere than the saint’s, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that, and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)