By Rabbi Dan Fink
Interfaith Sanctuary was a refuge born of crisis: In a brutally cold winter twenty years ago, people were freezing in our city streets with no place to go. Boise lacked a low-barrier shelter, leaving many of its citizens exposed to the elements: families that wanted to stay together, LGBTQ+ folks, individuals struggling with substance abuse, and anyone who sought a roof over their head that did not require them to profess evangelical Christianity.
In this state of emergency, a diverse group of clergy and lay leaders came together to address the pressing practical and moral challenges. The need was great and the timing was urgent, so after some preliminary discussion around a tent city, we began housing people at First Congregational Church. Relying entirely on volunteers, we learned how to run a makeshift shelter on the go, while doing just that. Our efforts were sometimes clumsy and amateurish but from the start, we welcomed our guests warmly and kept people out of the cold, both literally and metaphorically.
And we created a kind of ecumenical community—in a world where religion so often divides us, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, Mormons and atheists and agnostics all came together to serve the most vulnerable among us. We offered up a kind of collective prayer, not with sectarian words or music, but through the shared work of our hands.
For all our differences, we affirmed what remains the guiding principle of Interfaith Sanctuary: Every person is sacred, created in the image of the Divine. The first year, the shelter was temporary. We closed shop when the weather warmed with winter’s end. But over the next two decades, we grew—sometimes in fits and starts and sometimes in leaps and bounds. We moved to the old Carnegie library, and then to our current site downtown. Over time, we added services and support groups of all kinds, and became a full- time, year-round operation. Today, as we prepare to move into our new home on State Street, Interfaith is a vastly more ambitious and comprehensive operation than we could have even dreamed about during our humble beginnings. But the spirit remains very much the same: nhonoring our guests, welcoming people of all faiths and of none with compassion and loving kindness.
So may it always be.