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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jul 10th, 2008 06:58 pm |
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Greater St. Stephen's Full Gospel Baptist Church was destroyed by fire a few days ago. The news article that follows from the New Orleans Times-Picayune demonstrates the ecumenical spirit that permeates South Louisiana.
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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jul 10th, 2008 07:00 pm |
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Synagogue will share space with church
Baptists burned out of their sanctuary
Thursday, July 10, 2008
By Bruce Nolan
The burned-out, displaced members of Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church for the next few weeks will praise Jesus in a Jewish synagogue.
The leaders of the Central City church and Temple Sinai announced that the Uptown synagogue will shelter Greater St. Stephen in time for this weekend's services, Sunday at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
 Greater St. Stephen, with about 5,000 members, needed a new home in a hurry after a pre-dawn fire Monday ruined its church on South Liberty Street.
"They needed a place, and we're honored to be able to step forward," said Rabbi Ed Cohn, whose 1,200-seat synagogue is nearing the end of a multimillion-dollar renovation.
"We're talking about them coming for about a month of Sundays initially," he said. "We'll see if we're meeting their needs and they're meeting ours. And if so, we'll go a little longer."
But he said the relationship will have to end in September, when the Reform temple gears up its full schedule of fall activities.
The arrangement is a transaction between two faith communities with vastly different traditions: Greater St. Stephen, black, Pentecostal Christian, economically diverse but heavily working-class; and Temple Sinai, white, Jewish, economically diverse but strongly business and professional.
"We say all the time we're a house of prayer. Anyone who comes in a spirit of brotherhood is welcome," Cohn said. "We're walking the walk."
"We're really grateful," Greater St. Stephen Senior Pastor Debra Morton said. "After Katrina it's got to be, not about race or denomination, but caring and uniting and really helping one another rebuild." She said she hopes the rest of country will see the arrangement as part of the city's post-Katrina story.
Christians and Jews lending each other their sacred spaces is unusual, but not unprecedented.
Locally, during its formative years in the mid-1990s, the Northshore Jewish Congregation met in a borrowed Methodist church in Mandeville. And in 1992, St. Louis Cathedral hosted a Hanukkah service at Cohn's request.
Morton said she will preach Sunday, and will be joined by her husband, Bishop Paul Morton, who built Greater St. Stephen's into a megachurch and now splits his time between New Orleans and a satellite congregation in Atlanta.
Cohn said he will offer some words of welcome, but cannot stay for both services.
He is scheduled to guest-preach up the street at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church, a progressive Baptist church with close fraternal ties to Temple Sinai.
Said Cohn: "This weekend I'm up to my hips in Baptists."
The above article is reposted from the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
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