Interfaith efforts elevate the way BYU students engage with religion.
Latter-day Saint BYU students tend to be great missionaries, says religion professor Andrew C. Reed (BA ’04). And that’s a good thing. But Reed worried about what that meant for extending interactions with students of other faith traditions beyond proselyting to build belonging. Students of other faiths, he noticed, sometimes struggled “because there wasn’t a space for them,” he says.
To help create this space, Reed and religion professor Michael H. MacKay (’25) recently introduced a new interfaith-leadership religion course, which works alongside the Interfaith Student Association (IFSA) in encouraging BYU students to stand and serve with other people of faith.
“Interfaith work often gets cast as coming together and singing ‘Kumbaya,’” says Reed. Instead, he brings together people of different faiths in meaningful worship, service, and conversation. On campus they partner with religious organizations, like the Muslim Student Union, which recently collaborated with the IFSA on a Ramadan event. Interfaith work, says Muslim Student Union member Sama Salah (’25), “gives a face to faith.”
—Grace Chipman
“I’m seeing God more . . . because of my interfaith efforts. He sees me, but He also sees everyone else.”
It also provides partners in service. Students in the interfaith class have developed a relationship with Catholic Community Services in Salt Lake City. Each semester they lead their BYU peers in serving meals and organizing other projects to benefit those experiencing housing and food scarcity.
As students interact with members of other faiths and attend their services, they discover that “loving and learning are deeply connected,” says A. McKay Bowman (’25), an interfaith-leadership class teaching assistant. “To love others as a disciple of Christ,” he says, “I need to take learning from them seriously.”
Interfaith-leadership students say they find Heavenly Father’s influence in new places: in synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals. “If I can learn to sit with someone who sees the world radically different than me and be patient and learn from them,” explains Reed, “that’s where I think growth happens.”
Grace Chipman (BA ’24), a member of the IFSA who is headed to Harvard’s Divinity School this fall, says she has felt strengthened in her own faith tradition through her interactions with others in theirs. “I’m seeing God more in my life because of my interfaith efforts,” she says. “He sees me, but He also sees everyone else.”
Reed says interfaith interactions can be transforming for Latter-day Saint students: “They begin to recognize that we’re not the only set of people searching for God.”
