The Global Faith Forum in Keller, Texas on March 6, 2022. Photo by Camden Robinson/Multi-Faith Neighbors Network

KELLER, Texas— On a stage inside a Texas megachurch worship center, a Muslim man wearing a traditional North African “thobe” — a long tunic — that hung to his feet took a deep breath and began reciting passages from the Quran. 

The Islamic ritual in a Protestant sanctuary was part of a conference organized by the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, a group co-founded by a Christian pastor, a Muslim imam and a Jewish rabbi to promote international religious freedom and increase cooperation and understanding between the Abrahamic faiths. 

Over two days at Northwood Church, an international cadre of religious and civic leaders led panel discussions about establishing collaborative relationships. Appointees from three presidential administrations spoke on stage about promoting religious freedom. Mohammad Al-Issa, the secretary general of Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League, gave a speech in Arabic about the need for religious tolerance. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was held hostage with members of his nearby synagogue by a Muslim gunman less than two months earlier, shared his story. 

During breaks, attendees ate together — halal meat for the Muslims, kosher dishes for the Jews and Chick-fil-A for the Christians — while the sound system played a curated loop of Yusuf Islam’s “Peace Train,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” and the 1980s anthem “We Are the World” overhead. A Southern Baptist preacher from Georgia read the Apostles’ Creed. A Jewish cantor led songs of worship, and a Christian band belted out gospel tunes. In a single word, the title of the conference summed up this gathering of people who arrived with significant and uncompromising differences of religious conviction: “Unlikely.” 

Despite the agenda — and the soundtrack — this wasn’t meant to be a mere feel-good moment of compromising kumbaya. Many attendees — including co-founders Bob Roberts Jr., global senior pastor of Northwood, and Mohamad Magid, executive imam of All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center in Sterling, Virginia — are direct about their stark theological differences. 

Both men take exclusivist views of their faith: Roberts, a self-described “very strict fundamentalist from deep East Texas,” argues that belief in Jesus Christ is the sole entryway to salvation. Magid, a Sudan-born immigrant, rejects the divinity of Christ and believes that Islam is the one truth path. In a counterintuitive way, their openness about their strict commitment to their faiths has made cooperation easier. Each knows where the other stands.

“Everywhere he goes, he doesn’t hide his faith,” Magid said of Roberts. “He spoke in a mosque, and he said, ‘I’m for Lord Jesus’ — in my mosque, in front of a Muslim congregation. Working with others does not mean you water down your religion.” 

Magid and Roberts first met at a retreat in Nepal, where they began discussing the barriers to building relationships between members of their faiths. 

“I challenged him about his people helping us in America, because evangelical Christians have the most misunderstandings and misconceptions about Muslims,” Magid said. 

They organized a small conference in 2014 at a ranch outside Dallas that brought together 12 Christian pastors and 12 Muslim imams for three days of meetings. The gathering, however, began with tension. Worried about how they would appear to their congregations, the pastors requested that their pictures not be taken with the imams. But over the weekend, after meals of halal barbecue and days spent hunting and fishing together, they loosened up. In the end, the clerics stay in touch and visit one another at their houses of worship.

Over the next few years, Roberts and Magid grew closer. They traveled together, encouraging relationships between faith leaders.

“Imam Magid is literally one of the best friends I have on the face of the earth,” Roberts said. “I’d rather hang out with him than most Christians I know.” 

Instead of getting along by avoiding difficult topics, they’re open with one another about their differences. Tact plays a minimal role in their relationship. “If there’s one successful thing I can do as a pastor and die in peace, it would be to baptize Magid,” Roberts said bluntly. 

Their comfort with one another is evident. When Magid and Roberts are in the same room, they lovingly hassle one another like brothers. When Magid arrived a few minutes late for a conference presentation, Roberts couldn’t resist ribbing him. “You’re on Texas time now. Don’t give me none of this Sudan stuff,” he said with a grin. Magid shot back: “I was praying.” 

Forging those bonds, however, has not been easy or without controversy. Roberts has been called a “secret Muslim” by detractors and accused of being a heretical universalist, which he emphatically denies.  

“You’d better have thick skin and long-term endurance — those two things are critical,” Roberts said. “You will not win any votes and be celebrated as an evangelical by your own tribe for doing this. It ain’t going to happen.”

It was a lesson Roberts learned early. 

In the mid-2000s, Roberts befriended Suhail Khan, a Colorado-born Muslim who had been working in former President George W. Bush’s administration. Roberts invited Khan to church for Sunday service. At the time, tensions over the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 remained high, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raged on. 

Khan, a son of South Indian immigrants, took a seat in the packed auditorium at the church in Keller — a Brown face in a sea of White. During his sermon about loving one’s neighbor, Roberts unexpectedly asked Khan to stand up and join him in front of the pulpit. The crowd applauded when Roberts introduced him as a staffer with the Bush administration. They cheered again when Khan, who wore a crisp suit over a pair of cowboy boots, listed his favorite country music stars. 

“Then, he says, ‘and you’re a Muslim,’” Khan recalled. The room fell silent. “It was like a record scratch.” 

Khan was the first Muslim to speak at Roberts’s church, and Roberts paid a price for it. Parishioners threatened to leave the church. They didn’t come to church to hear a Muslim, they said. 

As Roberts continued his open efforts to work with Muslims, hundreds of people left his church.

“Bob doesn’t dip his toe in,” said Khan, now a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement. “He’s all in.” 

Roberts has tangled with other evangelical leaders who don’t share his enthusiasm for cooperation with Muslims. In 2015, after a man killed five U.S. service members in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Rev. Franklin Graham called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. He said the country was “under attack by Muslims.” Roberts pushed back. “This is not ‘evangelical’ and even less evangelistic,” Roberts said at the time, during a press conference in Washington alongside Magid. “I don’t want American Muslims to think we fear them or that they are our enemies.”

Data on views toward Muslims shows how difficult interfaith work can be in the U.S. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that 56% of Protestants thought Muslims “are not part of mainstream society,” and 51% said the faith “promotes violence.” Among White evangelicals, those numbers rose to 67% and 63%, respectively. It’s likely that some of them adopted those views from their pastors. A 2015 poll conducted by Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 59% of evangelical pastors agreed that Islam is “a very evil and a very wicked religion,” and 54% said it promotes violence.  

Roberts understands the source of the untrustworthiness among evangelicals. As a 64-year-old pastor who was educated exclusively at Southern Baptist institutions, he hasn’t always been as comfortable with Muslims as he is now, he said. 

“I believed all Muslims hated me. They wanted to kill me,” he recently told a group of Muslims during a visit to a mosque. That changed during a service trip to Afghanistan. When he started to meet Muslims on a personal level, his views about building relationships with them softened. Polling suggests that this is typical: Christians who know Muslims personally have a more favorable view of them.

But evangelicals aren’t the only ones to be skeptical of efforts like these.

The week before the conference at his church, Roberts visited the East Plano Islamic Center for a public talk with Yasir Qadhi, a local Muslim scholar who invited him to the mosque so that Muslims could hear directly from an evangelical. Roberts was the first Christian minister to speak at the mosque. 

Muslims & Evangelicals: Bridging the Chasm (A Dialogue Between Dr. Yasir and Pastor Roberts)

“The term (evangelical) sometimes is a bit frightful for us because of the experiences we’ve had,” Qadhi told Roberts before an audience of congregants seated on the mosque’s floor. 

The two went on to discuss the importance of cooperation between the faiths, despite their theological differences. They spoke plainly about their views about God and salvation. Roberts professed his belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ; Qadhi invited him to convert to Islam. During the conversation, some people walked out. Some congregants later criticized Qadhi for letting Roberts speak in the mosque. 

“There was pushback, and I knew there would be,” Qadhi said. “If you want to bring about change, you’re going to have to face criticism, and sometimes the most painful criticism comes from within and not from without.” 

Jews who are part of the effort have also had to face criticism from their own for the interfaith work, said Ari Gordon, director of Muslim-Jewish Relations for the American Jewish Committee.

“It’s certainly true that we receive pushback,” Gordon said. “For working with some of our Muslim friends, I get called a Jew for Jihad.”

The impact of collaborative work was put to an extreme test in January, when a gunman took four members of Congregation Beth Israel hostage. As the standoff with the gunman stretched into several hours, local religious leaders relied on relationships they had built before the crisis: Gathered at a Roman Catholic church, Roberts joined local imams, rabbis and priests to pray, aid law enforcement and support the hostages. After 11 hours, the gunman was killed, and the hostages escaped unharmed.

“There is strength in these relationships — real strength,” said Howard Rosenthal, former president of the Beth Israel congregation, who was on hand that day to help. “It all came back to me in a matter of minutes. I think that’s what gave me whatever strength I had that day was to know that all these people wanted to be with us and do whatever they could.” 

Chris Moody is a roving freelance correspondent. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN Politics, The New Republic and other publications. Follow him on Twitter: @Moody