I grew up about three hours from Chicago, and remembered it for the Field Museum, the Aquarium, the Zoo, and the White Sox. Returning sixty years later, I was dazzled by the skyline, amazed at surprise encounters with friends, and awed by grass roots peacemakers from around the world.

Tri-Faith Initiative

I first heard of Omaha’s Tri-Faith Initiative in 2016. Omaha’s Temple Israel built a new synagogue in 2013, and by 2020, the American Muslim Institute’s mosque, a United Church of Christ, and a Tri-Faith Center were completed, forming the Tri-Faith Commons. As Tri-Faith Initiative’s executive director Wendy Goldberg notes,

Coming together in one neighborhood addresses the topic of fear directly. We could never build walls high enough to protect ourselves. But if we were to build bridges of mutual understanding, we together would have the opportunity to move beyond fear.

Goldberg and her colleague Jeremy Fricke led a Parliament session I attended on “Lessons from the Tri-Faith Commons.” Building a house can threaten a marriage, so I was really impressed with Tri-Faith’s building four centers while developing interfaith friendship and commitment to their shared vision. Over the years, the Initiative developed its “Bridge Building Model” for community. Rather than focusing on the faith communities’ differing beliefs, they focused on building relationships. Once they made friends, they were ready to explore their separate paths and come to understand each other better. This sometimes led to friction, but they drew strength from friendship. They persevered.

Stages of Relationship

Goldberg and Fricke walked us through stages of relationship communities experience. First, we may deny the validity of the other. This allows us to dehumanize the other. Or we may feel the need to defend ourselves and our positions, in a spirit of self-righteousness. If we pass beyond this, we may arrive at tolerance, an apathetic acknowledgment of the other’s presence.

But if we befriend the other, we will likely enjoy a stage of minimizing our differences. Later, we may gradually begin to discern and accept differences. We may grow into deep empathy with the other, and finally be willing to build bridges. We gain a fluid ability to welcome the other and even suffer the discomfort of being accepted and welcomed as a minority by the other. This is very difficult for anyone growing up and prospering in a privileged majority.

Our speakers noted that no community remains the same forever, and these stages, from friction to friendship between communities, may shift over time. Commitment does not travel a smooth path of progress. As the communities’ leadership, for example, has shifted over time, cycles of trust and cooperation wax and wane.

The Five B’s of Community

The Tri-Faith families developed “The Five B’s” of community, and I found it helpful. First, when it comes to religion, many begin with Belief. Fricke mentioned that this is especially strong in the United States among Christians. Christians have a creed, and we’re sticking with it, and we may not be interested in yours, which after all, must be deficient, “invalid.” This is an imperial creed.

But faith is also a matter of Behavior, the practice, the morals, and the rituals that express the belief. We find some overlap between communities in this area.

Third comes Belonging, the “team,” the “tribe,” the communion in which we find mutual support and understanding.

The Tri-Faith communities add two more categories: the Body and Becoming. As for the former, how does your tradition approach sexuality, gender, race, disability? And finally, who are we Becoming? How is a community developing? Changing?

As a Christian with a creed, I find this especially exciting because the same clarity about belief that gives us strength can also build walls and break ties with others. We may mistake our limited, historically conditioned language, our human interpretations of Mystery as perfect and unchangeable. But life means growth. An acorn becomes an oak. Failure to change means premature death. And nature teaches us that a great way to develop and flourish is through cross-fertilization.

Beyond Dialogue

And this brings me to the Tri-Faith presentation’s final plea: we need to do more than dialogue. Here in the United States, we need to fight hard against the Christian nationalism that forms an unholy alliance with white supremacy. Its “unchanging faith” becomes a violent ideology.  It markets vices of dehumanization and self-righteousness as virtuous zeal.

To counter the idolatry of our limited and flawed understandings of the Mystery, the Tri-Faith Initiative makes “religious pluralism a social norm.” They “envision a world in which differences are honored, similarities are built upon, and everyone belongs.” Wendy and Jeremy presented that vision as it is taking flesh in Omaha. It was a blessing to listen to and learn from their hard-won wisdom.