Finding a church for interfaith families is a particular problem, because most churches are built on the assumption that a household arrives in one piece and believes one thing.
Many do not. One person is Christian and one is Muslim. One is Jewish and one is nothing in particular. One is Hindu, one is agnostic, and one is twelve and undecided. Someone in the house is tired of the entire category and would like a quiet Sunday.
That household is welcome here, and welcome does not quietly mean the non-Christian members have been added to a list.
A Church for Interfaith Families Will Not Treat Your Spouse Like a Prospect
The thing interfaith families brace for is friendliness with an agenda attached.
You know the shape of it. The warm handshake for the Muslim wife, followed six weeks later by a book. The atheist husband who came to the picnic to support his family and finds himself in a conversation he did not agree to have. The Jewish grandmother invited to a service where the sermon turns out to be partly about her.
That is not hospitality. It is recruitment wearing hospitality’s clothes. Some people spot it at once. Others only work out afterward why an afternoon left them tired.
Somebody who comes here because they love a person in this congregation is doing something generous, and a church for interfaith families ought to recognize it as such. They are giving up a morning for someone else’s tradition. The correct response to generosity is not to attempt to convert the person offering it. Whether a church for interfaith families has settled that question is worth finding out early, and what you do with the answer is yours to decide.
Love Honors the Whole Household
If you love somebody, you inherit the people they love. The principle is not complicated and churches break it constantly.
In practice it means your spouse’s tradition gets described accurately here rather than used as a contrast that makes ours look better. It means a person who is not Christian can attend, be known by name, come to the potluck, help build whatever is being built in the yard, and be entirely at home without a single conversation about the state of their soul.
It also means a family does not have to split on the way in, with one part belonging and the other part waiting politely nearby.
There is a calendar problem in interfaith households that a church can easily fail to think about. December is negotiated. So is Passover, or Ramadan, or the week a grandparent expects everyone at a particular table. A church for interfaith families should assume that its own calendar is one claim among several rather than the fixed point everything else arranges itself around, and should not treat a family as less committed for missing a Sunday that collided with something else that mattered.
And it means the household is described here as it actually is. If your family looks like four traditions and a lot of negotiation, that is a family, not a situation to be regularized.
Children Can Learn One Story Without Being Handed a Verdict on the Other
This is the question interfaith parents actually have, and it tends to go unasked because saying it out loud sounds like an accusation.
Can my child learn the Christian material here without coming home having been taught that their other parent is confused, lost, or in trouble?
Yes. Children here learn Christian stories as Christian stories, told with conviction and without a comparative verdict attached about the traditions living in their own house.
That is not a watered down version. Children can hold more than one thing at once, and many in interfaith households are already doing it. Others find the differences genuinely confusing, or ask sharp exclusive questions no adult put in their head, and that is not a failure of the household either. What a church can do is decline to hand a child a verdict they did not ask for about people they love.
If a teacher here ever says something that lands badly at your dinner table, tell me about it. I cannot promise every impact can be undone, but it can be addressed with the person, corrected in the class, and learned from, and I would considerably rather hear about it than not.
Neighbor Love Starts in the House
The most famous thing Jesus said about neighbors is a story, and the point of it gets missed regularly.
Asked who counts as a neighbor, he answered with a Samaritan, which is to say with the religious outsider his listeners had been taught to regard as wrong. The person who does the right thing in that story is not the one with the correct religion. The parable is doing more than one thing and people have read it well in several directions, but that much is difficult to get around, and it was aimed at an audience who would have found it uncomfortable.
Our reading of that, and I will own it as ours rather than as the only conclusion available, is that a church cannot take the parable seriously and also treat the Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or atheist member of your household as an unfinished project.
It also cuts toward the congregation rather than only toward the family. If a church for interfaith families means anything, it means the people here have to learn something about the traditions in your house rather than expecting the traffic to run one way. Asking your spouse a real question about their tradition, with actual curiosity and no follow up agenda, is a different act from asking about their soul, and the difference registers immediately.
We do not need your family to be religiously simple in order to love your family well.
So arrive as a household, or arrive in shifts, or come by yourself for a while first and find out whether this is somewhere you would be willing to bring them. Any of those is a reasonable way to begin, and the third one is neither cowardly nor disloyal.
The next post is for parents who want to bring their children while still working out their own faith.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and what Christianity can become when love matters more than certainty.
If you are looking for a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and you do not have to pretend to have everything figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All