Kyle Reese believes he is a better Baptist and pastor because of the years he has spent cultivating interfaith relationships.
“Interfaith makes me a better practitioner of the Christian faith because I have engaged with people from other faith communities and worldviews,” said Reese, senior minister at First Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga., and former pastor of Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla.
To help promote the benefits of interfaith engagement, Reese and Joy Carol have co-authored Different Together: Bridges of Mutual Respect. They wrote the book in collaboration with OneJax, a Jacksonville nonprofit that promotes cultural, racial and religious tolerance, and which Reese served as executive director from 2019 to 2023.
“We hope it encourages people that authentic interfaith relationships strengthen one’s own faith commitment and learning about the world,” Reese said of the book. “We also wanted to dispel the misconception that the end game of interfaith activity is to promote an all-encompassing worldview in which people lose the particularity of their own faith traditions.”
To help accomplish those aims, the book presents more than a dozen accounts of individuals reaching across diverse religious and cultural backgrounds to form life-changing and faith-strengthening friendships.
Different Together also offers a message that is desperately needed in a time of discord and division, the authors said.
“It shows that when people actually share their stories with each other in healing and kind ways, the world is a better place. We are so in need of putting some good information into the world because we have so much negativity coming at us every day,” said Carol, a spiritual director, author, national speaker and retreat leader in Penney Farms, Fla.
One of those accounts is about Ian and Cherian, who first met as children growing up in India in 1951. Ian, who is Jewish, and Cherian, a Christian, lived at the time in a religiously diverse community and celebrated each other’s holy days. Even with Cherian now living in the U.S., the two have maintained their friendship through occasional reunions and in regular WhatsApp calls.
“I am grateful for my wonderful friendship with Cherian and others in our class who were of different faiths. I believe we will always care for one another,” Ian said.
Another chapter presents the story of Lowey, a Christian raised by missionaries in the Middle East, and Shadia, a Palestinian American Muslim. The two women met when Shadia spoke at Lowey’s church in the 1990s.
Kyle Reese
They have since become “soul sisters,” Lowey explained. “I am grateful to have the privilege of being her friend, with whom I can share my faith and she can share hers. By doing so we learn about God’s love for all people, since we are all precious creations of God.”
Shadia said the friendship has helped provide her with insight into the essential commonalities between the two religions. “I believe there is a deep connection and parallel between the rise of Christianity and Islam as two social movements that have changed the course of human history. I have a deep reverence for the sacred or divine nature of both Jesus and Mohammad.”
Reese and Carol also relay in the book how interfaith and cross-cultural encounters have transformed their lives, personally and professionally.
For Reese, who had grown up Southern Baptist in a small Texas town, the journey toward interfaith dialogue began with open-minded professors in college and accelerated as a member of the inaugural class of George W. Truett Seminary at Baylor University.
“It was like experiencing the whole world — and not just a small corner of it. My perspectives on life and on faith were broken open. It made me be a more open person to the world and especially to other people who were different from me,” Reese writes.
The openness toward those with varied perspectives continued to expand while serving as pastor of Baptist congregations in Texas. “All of these varied experiences were increasing my openness and changing my mind about life and some of my earlier, rather limited beliefs. Also, I found I was developing an acceptance of other people who had different ideas about their religion or faith than I did.”
But it was his arrival at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville in 2006 that exposed Reese directly to the world of interfaith. The congregation, a partner of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, entered a programming partnership with a Reform Judaism synagogue and a mosque. Then in 2009, Reese joined the board of OneJax, taking him deeper into interfaith engagement through working partnerships and friendships.
Interviewed separately, Reese said his presence in these spaces helped others to see not all Baptists are fundamentalists. “I was often the only Baptist in the rooms. For many it was an ah-ha moment that there are many ways of being Baptist in the world.”
In fact, some core Baptist distinctives lay the groundwork for interfaith experiences, he said. “Our celebration of soul competency and freedom of the individual are a natural seedbed to learn how our neighbors see the world and, in the process, to learn from each other.”
Joy Carol
For Carol, teaching English to migrant workers in Southern California during her college years inaugurated her encounters with people with lives radically different from her own. “My students picked oranges and lived and worked in miserable conditions. But their zest for life was palpable, and their gratitude for learning touched me.”
Next up was a period developing schools and adult literacy programs in the slums of Karachi, Pakistan, where she encountered the meaning of hospitality from impoverished Muslims who invited her into their homes for chai and friendship. “I was amazed to experience such generosity and delight in those poorest of the poor,” she writes.
Subsequent work with Save the Children, the Christian Children’s Fund, the Ford Foundation and the National Council of Churches took her to Africa, Asia and Latin America, where her horizons continued to widen. “I felt a sense of camaraderie with the people with whom I worked.”
In the aftermath of 9-11, Carol was in New York City to witness people bonding across all manner of differences. “A new spirit seemed to take over the city. Strangers of all beliefs and cultures embraced one another and cried together. A new respect for different peoples emerged. Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples learned what it meant to be of service.”
The sum of these experiences cultivated a full-blown openness toward others, she writes. “I now feel an empathy for all people no matter what their culture or faith. In addition, I have gained an abundance of joy and a deepening of my own faith.”
Carol, who holds a master’s degree in spiritual direction from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, added separately that Different Together demonstrates the possibility of overcoming animosity even in the most divided of times.
“It openly reflects how people who are different from each other can relate to each other with kindness and compassion and therefore make the world a better place.”
Note: Kyle Reese is a member of BNG’s board of directors and is former chairman of the BNG board.