Salt Lake City roundtable hosting interfaith network meet

Whether they come together after a community disaster, or because they see the need for civil discussion, dozens of interfaith organizations have popped up throughout North America in the past twenty years.

And they're coming to Salt Lake City next week, modeling open dialogue — rather than debate — on "building a world of harmony" in and around the vexing social issues that tend to divide communities.

The North American Interfaith Network's (NAIN) annual meetings, which begin July 25 and run through July 27, are being hosted by the Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable, whose members came together in anticipation of the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Though their initial mission included providing faith support for athletes, the roundtable has since focused on fostering dialogue among religious communities in Utah. Their annual Interfaith Week encourages residents to get to know and appreciate people outside their own faith tradition.

Though some communities start talking across religious lines after a community disaster sparks the dialogue, others do so in response to long-standing problems that divide cities and towns based on faith

Bettina Gray, a documentary film producer, musician and chair of NAIN, has seen the interfaith movement grow from the ground up. In the late 1980s, she helped found an interfaith council in California, and members began to wonder whether similar groups existed.

"I helped conduct a survey and we discovered there were others. Part of the questionnaire was whether they would like to connect with other interfaith groups. Out of that response, we began a formative committee," and NAIN was organized.

Member organizations and individuals are located throughout the U.S. and Canada, most often in major metropolitan areas.

"There's no franchise with interfaith work. We're not telling people how they should organize. There's wonderful diversity in how they do this in each community, and they do it for different reasons."

A group in Syracuse, N.Y., formed shortly after 9/11, when angry youths mistook a Sikh ashram for a Muslim gathering place and burned it to the ground. Another formed in the San Francisco Bay area after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 forced cooperation among faith groups that previously had no compelling reason to come together, she said.

Whatever their founding purpose, as the councils mature, "they tend to incorporate both social action and dialogue. And once they start working on a project, they find that they need to talk some more. Once they talk, they find they have goals and concerns for their communities they can work together on."