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:
“The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars,—far as they were distant from us, so were they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the “unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)