He donned vestments adorned with the symbols of nearly a dozen religions. He unfolded a portable bookshelf and set the Koran beside the Hebrew Bible, with both of them near two volumes of the “Humanist Manifesto” and the Sioux wisdom of “Black Elk Speaks.” Candles, stones, bells and flowers adorned the improvised altar.
Some of the congregants began arriving to help. There was Steve Crawford, who had spent his youth in Campus Crusade for Christ, and Gloria Parker, raised Lutheran and married to a Catholic, and Patrick McKenna, who had been brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness and now called himself a pagan.
They had come together with about 20 other members to celebrate the end of their third year as the congregation of the Living Interfaith Church, the holy mash-up that Mr. Greenebaum had created. Yearning for decades to find a religion that embraced all religions, and secular ethical teachings as well, he had finally followed the mantra of Seattle’s indie music scene: “D.I.Y.,” meaning “do it yourself.”
So as the service progressed, the liturgy moved from a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi to the “passing of the peace” greeting that traced back to early Christianity to a Buddhist responsive reading to an African-American spiritual to a rabbinical song.
In other weeks, the service has drawn from Bahai, Shinto, Sikh, Hindu and Wiccan traditions, and from various humanist sources.
If the Living Interfaith Church could appear hippie-dippy, as if scented with sage and patchouli, that impression proved deceptive. Mr. Greenebaum’s goals were serious, and they exemplified a movement in American religion toward dissolving denominational lines.
“Many of our most intractable ills may be laid on the altar of our divisions into ‘them’ and ‘us,’ ” Mr. Greenebaum, 65, said during his sermon. “Such a mind-set allows us to judge others and find them lesser beings. Now, I’m not here to try to convince anyone that there is no such thing as right or wrong. But I am here to say that there is no ‘them.’ And there is no ‘us’ who are somehow superior to them.”
From the lectern, Mr. Greenebaum pointed to the concrete ways that his congregation had put virtue into action.
Members had collected 700 pounds of food for a local food bank and donated money to survivors of Hurricane Sandy. He had been an advocate for gay marriage. And 60,000 online visitors had clicked onto the church’s Web site, intrigued by its radically inclusive model.
Indeed, fully one-quarter of Americans attend worship services outside their own faiths, according to a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center. The report attributed that trend to the growth of interfaith marriage and to the influence of Eastern religions and New Age spirituality.
Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, placed the experiment of the Living Interfaith Church within the larger “idea of religion as compassion.”
Its exponents, he said, include the Dalai Lama and the author Karen Armstrong. Americans can readily connect such theology to the national civic values of neighborliness and tolerance.
As for himself, Dr. Prothero expressed admiration and reservations.
“This strikes me as a kind of institutionalization of a very strong trend,” he said of Mr. Greenebaum’s start-up. “It’s the idea that all religions are different paths up the mountain, and when you get to the top of the mountain you find compassion.
“But one reason we have different religions is that we have different rituals and different beliefs. Those are not insignificant.
“So for all religions to be one religion, you need to elide all the elements that were central to religion in the past: the hajj to Mecca, Jesus dying on the cross, whatever it might be. You’ve got to turn these first principles into last principles.”
In Mr. Greenebaum’s case, he grew up as a Reform Jew in suburban Los Angeles and does not consider that he ever left that faith. But from the time he began being exposed to other religious traditions as a member of his college choir, he found himself rejecting Judaic exceptionalism.
“I believed that God spoke to Moses,” he put it. “But I don’t believe he spoke only to Moses. So it never made sense to me to worship separately.”
Over the course of his professional life — teaching, writing for television, directing choirs — he searched futilely for a spiritual home. Many ecumenical efforts involved mutual respect but not shared worship. The rhetoric extolling “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the “Abrahamic faiths” excluded other religions and humanism.
Then the Sept. 11 attacks, with their “holy war” justification, hit Mr. Greenebaum as a “depressing and saddening reinforcement that we need to pray together — or else we’ll keep slaughtering each other in the name of God.”
He firmed up his theological foundation by earning a master’s degree in divinity from Seattle University, a Jesuit institution. He put forward his case for interfaith as a capital-I religion in “The Interfaith Alternative,” his 2012 book.
Now his church has bylaws, a written covenant with “Six Fundamental Assumptions,” tax-exempt status, regular tithing and 30 regular worshipers.
He remains, however, a decidedly humble shepherd.
“I wanted to join something like this, not start it,” he said. “I kept thinking someone more holy, more knowledgeable would’ve done this. But I do what I need to do.”
Source: The New York Times
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