‘Community isn’t necessarily where we need to agree. It’s where we need to belong’

The Rev. Samantha Gonzalez-Block is the most recent guest on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE — After growing up in an interfaith home — her father is Jewish and her mother is Presbyterian — it seems like a natural fit that the Rev. Samantha Gonzalez-Block, a PC(USA) pastor and the Christian spiritual leader with Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington, would serve alongside Rabbi Debbie Reichmann in a place where, as IFFP’s website states, “both Jewish and Christian partners can feel like equal members of the community, celebrate and learn about both faiths. At IFFP, we ‘teach not preach.’”

Headed into its 30^th year, IFFP has grown into a vibrant, active community of about 300 adults and children and is one of the largest interfaith programs in the country. It offers in-person and online interfaith worship, Sunday school and other programming to families who live chiefly in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, although others are scattered around the country and across the planet.

Gonzalez-Block was the guest of the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their 50-minute conversation here.

“I was raised in a family that was celebrating both [Jewish and Christian] traditions, but without a roadmap or a compass,” Gonzalez-Block told the hosts. “We had some wonderful mentors along the way, but my parents were at it for the most part alone.”

“For me, growing up in an interfaith home was a great blessing because it allowed me to know God through these two lenses,” she said. “It also brought a lot of great questions into my life that probably would not have been brought into my life had I not grown up this way. I was wrestling and growing in my faith.”

Gonzalez-Block said she has “a lot of empathy for people who are trailblazing a little bit or walking a path that’s not what most people in their community are doing. I don’t think I would have become a minister had I not grown up with this richness of traditions in my own home.”

The community she currently serves was started in 1995 by four mothers living in Takoma Park, Maryland, “who were just looking for a place to belong,” Gonzalez-Block said. “They started to meet in each other’s living rooms and kitchens with their kids and started an ad hoc Sunday school for their families. They are all interfaith homes — they weren’t attending traditional church or synagogue.”

Today, “We’re all families who are embracing this idea of doing or being both,” she said. Most of the families include someone who’s Jewish married to someone who’s Christian, “but that’s not everybody. We are all doing life together and celebrating and practicing Judaism and Christianity side by side. It’s not blended. It’s not a new religion. It’s the idea these two religions can walk side by side together. At the heart of it, we are a community of belonging. No one’s at it alone.”

Gonzalez-Block and Reichmann “are co-leaders together, and we get to be part of walking alongside these incredible families,” Gonzalez-Block said. Together the two spiritual leaders do a worship service called “The Gathering,” hold Sunday school for children and adults, and are present for life-cycle events from baby names at baptisms to funerals.

“I get to be a minster that’s also caring for that young me who didn’t have anybody there,” she said, “hoping to impact all those future generations and all these families who are walking this road.”

IFFP members participate in many traditions together, she said. “I have our Jewish members singing in the choir at Christmas. Our Christian members kiss the Torah as it’s passed along during the high holidays,” she said. “We’re really on this journey together and being enriched by each other.”

She said she often tells children gathered for Sunday school that they have superpowers. “You have something the world needs right now,” she’ll tell them. “Because of your parents’ love and because of who you are, you are a bridge-builder. You’re able to be bilingual or trilingual and navigate spaces. In this world of such division and chaos, to have people living into the fullness of who they are, embracing that and seeing that it’s beautiful and powerful — it’s so important.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday.

“Holding onto something tightly requires a tight grip, and it’s exhausting,” Catoe said. “When you release it a bit, it’s good for other people and it’s good for ourselves.”

With fighting that now reaches from Gaza to Lebanon, “it’s certainly been a painful year” for many IFFP families, she said. “I think the pain and concern people are feeling is raw and it’s real. Increasing antisemitism and islamophobia is real. The concern for safety is real. In our membership, folks have all sorts of connections to the Middle East — personal, family and experiences. This has been a moment when the uniqueness of our community can be an asset, and hopefully helpful for other communities.”

“The community was built from people navigating differences and saying, ‘We don’t agree on everything, but I love you and I want to be in relationship with you and all these people together.’ Community isn’t necessarily where we need to agree,” Gonzalez-Block said. “It’s where we need to belong.”

One piece of advice she has for fellow Christian pastors is to “knock on the [local] synagogue door or the mosque door and ask, ‘What can we do together? Are there things we’re both passionate about?’ The most important thing for me when it comes to welcoming and engaging interfaith families is affirming who they are, affirming their experience.”

“If we want our churches and our houses of worship to flourish, we need to stop saying, ‘I’ll only do this for you if you promise to only attend here’ or ‘do this thing for us.’ I’m with you for the ride. Let’s go.”

Gonzalez-Block offered several resource recommendations, including a book her congregant, Susan Katz Miller, wrote called “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.” Katz Miller is also the author of “The Interfaith Family Journal.”

Among the podcasts Gonzalez-Block finds helpful is “Interfaithing,” with Anna DeWeese and Ari Saks.

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous installments here.