Jewish, Christian Groups Keep the Faith but Share the Facilities

When a trio of newborn Jewish congregations started sharing churches with Christian flocks seven years ago, no one expected the odd couplings to last long.

But the links between three sets of Jewish and Christian congregations--in Mar Vista, Brentwood and Santa Monica--flourished over the years.

Simple rental agreements grew to include joint square dances, Thanksgiving services, food drives for the hungry and the exchange of guest sermons.

Now two of the Jewish synagogues are about to move on, each having grown from a handful of founding families into flourishing congregations big enough to buy or lease their own buildings.

The third temple hopes to stay.

“We are really proud of the ecumenical statement made by our being here together,” said Neil Comess-Daniels, rabbi of Temple Shir Shalom (Hebrew for Song of Peace), which celebrates the Sabbath every Friday night at St. Bede’s Episcopal Church in Mar Vista.

“Most of the members of our congregation told our survey that this is where they want to be,” he said. “There’s a huge cross outside, but they (the Jewish congregants) refer to it as the temple. . . . I would like to see this last forever.”

At first the church housed the Jewish congregation for economic reasons, “to make a small church meet its budget,” said the Rev. Michael Carr, rector of St. Bede’s.

The experience was hard for some to digest at all three sets of synagogues and churches. Several first-time churchgoers never came back after seeing the synagogue sign outside, and prospective members of the temples hung up the telephone after hearing where they were housed.

But actually “it’s good religiously, it’s good economically and it’s good spiritually as well,” Carr said.

Not only that, he and Rabbi Comess-Daniels even play racquetball together. The indoor crosses are covered up for the Jewish services and the Torah scrolls required for the weekly reading from the Hebrew Scriptures are stored in an ark on wheels.

“We bring our ark in and, voila, it’s a temple,” said Comess-Daniels, a rabbi in the Reform branch of Judaism, which generally takes a liberal approach to the practice of the ancient faith.

“We’ve talked about what we could do architecturally if we were actually to merge financially in the future,” Carr said. “It’s still in the early stages of our relationship, but at least we’re looking at the long range.”

A concern for the future made the leadership of Kehillat Ma’arav come to the conclusion that its seven-year arrangement with the Brentwood Presbyterian Church should come to an end.

“There have been ambivalent feelings about it,” said Mel Gottlieb, rabbi of the 7-year-old congregation.

Even though the two Brentwood congregations hardly see each other, there is a feeling that “religions should be differentiated (more) clearly. . .that it’s important to have that distinction, especially where children are involved,” Gottlieb said.

The synagogue is now in escrow, hoping to move into a new home at 21st Street and Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica this fall.

Kehillat Ma’arav is a Conservative congregation, part of a middle-of-the road denomination that tries to maintain the ancient laws and traditions of Judaism while making allowances for change.

When it was founded seven years ago, members of the congregation found the low-key decor of the Presbyterian church on San Vicente Boulevard to be a good setting for their Saturday morning Jewish prayers.

Jewish law and tradition require that a place of worship be bare of statues that might suggest idol worship, but the church’s unadorned wooden walls posed no problems once a tapestry was draped over the big cross at the front of the sanctuary.

The Rev. William McNabb, associate pastor of the Brentwood church, said the sharing has been “wonderful” for his 700-member, 50-year-old congregation.

“It sends a good message to people that we are not living in the past and that these are not two rival groups, but two branches of faith that share a common heritage,” he said.

“We have people who come here specifically because they’ve seen the two signs out front,” he said. “They’ve either been in a Jewish-Christian marriage, or they like what that says about tolerance of another religion.”

Several visitors have asked the rabbi and pastor to perform joint wedding ceremonies, but Conservative Judaism bans such marriages unless the non-Jewish spouse converts.

At St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Santa Monica, co-pastors Reg and Peggy Shultz-Akerson said they found the presence of the Santa Monica Synagogue to be especially helpful at sermon-writing time.

“It’s such an advantage for two Lutheran pastors to have our own personal rabbi,” said Reg Shultz-Akerson, who leads the 63-year-old congregation together with his wife.

“We say, ‘Hey rabbi! What’s a good story from the Hebrew Scriptures,’ ” Peggy Shultz-Akerson said.

Like the other sets of Jewish-Christian congregations, St. Paul’s and the Santa Monica Synagogue hold joint Thanksgiving services and work around each other most of the rest of the year.

Thanksgiving is best for a joint service because it has no specific ties to either religion.

“The attitude of the three of us has been that we want to be as true to our traditions and heritage as we can be,” Reg Shultz-Akerson said. “We do look for places where we have commonality, but we don’t ignore the differences.”

Jeffrey Perry-Marx, rabbi of the Santa Monica guest synagogue, said it has grown from 30 to 150 families in seven years.

The Reform congregation hopes to move to its new home in a remodeled old supermarket at 18th Street and Broadway in Santa Monica later this year, perhaps in time to host the yearly joint Thanksgiving service.

“The church really took us in and stayed with us as we grew, and once we got to the point where we could fly on our own it was time to go,” he said.

Not all the partnerships have been happy ones all the time. Pastors and rabbis spoke of occasional scheduling mishaps, tempers flaring over broken kitchen appliances and the need to expand the physical facilities.

Still, the economic benefits of halving housing costs while sharing an edifice outweighed those doubts.

“Frankly it’s unusual,” Perry-Marx said. “Not every church would be willing to take the risk of openness, and over the years it’s been a model of Christian faith. And for us it’s been good too. The fact that we’ve been in a church has helped further Jewish-Christian understanding, no question about it.”