SALT LAKE CITY — The Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable has been around for over 2½ decades, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. In fact, the group is hosting a sacred music evening for all faiths at the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Sunday evening.
The group was formed in preparation for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
“There is a statement (related to hosting an Olympic Games) that says the city needs to be responsible for providing access to every faith required by both the athletes and the trainers,” roundtable Chair Josie Stone explained to the Deseret News.
Stone joined the group two years after the Olympics.
“I think normally those committees are disbanded in most cities around the world after the Olympics, but here, they didn’t want to disband it because they had really enjoyed the company of people from other faith working on it. And so Interfaith Roundtable was born,” Stone said.
Diverse faiths set to worship in the tabernacle on Sunday
Speaking at a press conference leading up to Sunday’s interfaith event, roundtable board member and Rabbi Alan Bachman spoke with sincerity about the tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
“To me, the tabernacle here in Salt Lake City is a very special building, because it’s built by people who put everything they had into it. You can feel the love in there,” he said.
Rabbi Bachman continued, “And when you have people from different faiths and belief systems, all a part of God’s family, there is a vibration in that tabernacle that can’t be explained in words. You can really feel the presence of God in this tabernacle when various faiths are in there together, and we’re doing something that is really beautiful together.”
The event will start at 6 p.m. and feature the Salt Lake Children’s Choir, Divya School of Dance, Salt Lake Buddhist Temple, Luz de las Naciones Choir, the Utah Pipe Band and others.
The need for interfaith groups in Utah
Rabbi Bachman outlined a potential concern people may have with interfaith groups during Wednesday’s press conference. “At first when you think, oh interfaith, you may think, ‘Oh no, we’re going to lose everybody to some other faith.’ That’s a fear many people have deep down, is that we’re going to lose everybody,” Rabbi Bachman said.
However, the rabbi believes “the opposite actually happens.”
“When you meet people from different faiths, your own faith actually gets strengthened,” he said.
Rabbi Bachman explained that when attacks on religious buildings happened several decades ago, members of respective faiths “had to deal with that situation by themselves.”
Thanks, in part, to a stronger interfaith community, “now in the Salt Lake Valley, maybe Utah in general, when one faith gets hurt like that, you see participation from the other faiths, and it’s a really good feeling,” Rabbi Bachman said. “I think the congregations are becoming more and more aware that they’re really not all alone in their own particular congregation.”
Baptist pastor and roundtable vice chair Curtis Price believes an important aspect of interfaith roundtables is the relationships built between faith leaders.
“I think the interfaith roundtable has afforded us relationships that we normally wouldn’t have, and that creates a situation where there’s cross cultivation,” he said.
The Rev. Price continued, “I would have never met Imam Shuaib (who hosted the press conference at the Utah Islamic Center) if not for the roundtable, and you know, we connect on a lot of different levels and get to have all kinds of conversations, and my people are fascinated. I keep thinking, I need to have Imam Shuaib come to the church sometime and have a conversation like this.”
“So this is building on the relationships that happen in this small little gathering. It spreads out to the different congregations, and those relationships spread, and people make connections. So it really becomes a web,” he said.
The goal: ‘To promote love, harmony and understanding’
“There’s a lot of congeniality between faiths here,” Stone told the Deseret News.
The aim of the roundtable is not “to change anybody’s religion,” Stone said. “We’re not here to teach religion, we are here to help people to understand that they need to get to know each other, and when they do, they’ll feel much more comfortable about it.”
“It’s interesting working within a state that has a very predominant religion,” Stone continued. “We have two members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on our board, and they contribute a lot and invite us to things, they come to our meetings, two were there today that were on our board.”
The roundtable also works with several universities around Utah, including Utah Valley University, Utah State University and Brigham Young University at their various faith events.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
