A stronger community and reconciliation result when individuals draw together, accepting differences yet look-ing for common ground. The Genesis Project offers the opportunity for peoples of faith to chart some of that common ground and to make familiar the territories of other beliefs.

Thus reads the closure activity composed by one of the groups from the Genesis Pilot Project. Their assignment for the sixth and final night of group meetings was to write a news bulletin to the people of Los Angeles expressing why "An-gelinos" would benefit from the Genesis Project in that city.

From October through December, 1996, two hundred seventy-two people from thirty congregations crisscrossed Baltimore exploring sacred stories and the varied ways in which we Christians and Jews, whites and blacks, are rooted in the foundational narratives from the first book in the Bible.

The Genesis Pilot Project began with a program in the spring of 1996 that brought together thirty clergy from across the city to review segments from Bill Moyers' PBS series Genesis: A Living Conversation. The project was funded by a grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation to provide other American cities with a template for interfaith encounters, ultilizing Gene-sis as a touchstone. Each of the project's nine study groups included a cross-cultural, interfaith mix of individuals and represented almost every walk of life. The ground-breaking nature of this initiative led the Interfaith Action for Racial Justice Coalition to award the ICJS the 1996 Bridge Building Award.

The Reverend Kay Albury, pastor of Ames Memorial United Methodist Church and member of the Genesis Project Steering Committee, expressed a hope at the beginning of the project that these conversations would "put faces on the issues." While the project was not designed to resolve the ethnic and socio-economic tensions that fragment our city, crucial in-sights into the varied landscape of this metropolis were achieved as participants ventured into unfamiliar territory.

As anticipated, Genesis proved itself an ideal catalyst for searching exchanges. Tales of sibling rivalry, envy, deceit, for-giveness, hope, and despair -- who could have constructed a better lens for examining the challenges facing society today? As one of the group facilitators expressed, "I have served for years on committees dealing with social justice and the elimi-nation of prejudice. In those meetings we sat looking at each other and tried to hash out solutions. In the Genesis Project, we took a different approach. Instead of looking at each other, we looked together at these common sacred stories. We accomplished more toward tolerance and understanding in these six sessions than in all of my previous experience of sitting in a circle, staring each other down and winning points for our particular side."

Another participant noted that he started to read the news-paper through new eyes and with a heightened sense of his own responsibility. For the first time in his life, while reading reports of racial and religious injustice, faces replaced mere words -- the faces of friends from his group. Once-distant issues had now become up-close and personal.

In addition to an increased awareness of the humanity of "the other," the project also led to a deeper understanding of the texts themselves. As people studied stories rooted in their childhoods, new and unexpected discoveries emerged. Several groups brought a variety of translations of the text to each meeting and reported that they began to realize how even the simple change of one word could put a complely different spin on a story. The richness of the narratives came into focus as participants discovered how stories get under our skins, how they speak words of consolation and judgment to different people in different circumstances. As one woman reported, "The group knew these stories. They are woven into some of our earliest memories. But we kept finding more things we wanted to learn and new ways to look at the text."

The Genesis Project culminated in a Town Meeting on January 21, 1997. On that evening, some two hundred Genesis Project participants converged on Beth El Synagogue to celebrate new friendships and new insights, and to look toward the future. The individual groups broke off for discussions of "where do we go from here," and then returned to the plenary with recom-mendations. The consensus was a resounding call to continue sacred text study in an interfaith, multi-cultural environment.

In response to this request, the ICJS has developed a special curriculum for the 1997-98 season. The new program, In the End is the Beginning: Jewish and Christian Visions of the Future, turns the focus from beginnings to endings. In the End will commence in mid-November and promises to guide the groups into a deeper investigation of our religious and ethnic backgrounds and their relation to sacred texts. The steering committee for In the End has discovered that Jews and Chris-tians, blacks and whites view the topics of "end times," "God's Kingdom," "utopia," "the messianic era," and "apocalypse" from very different points.

Whereas the Genesis stories left many people with a heightened awareness of what is held in common, a study of the end times will enable participants to discover significant differences. We enter into this new venture with the optimism expressed in yet another group's news bulletin: "This project provides an opportunity to wrestle with a good book in the company of good and diverse people and to discover that we have been wrestling with angels."

In addition to the two hundred seventy-two participants from congregations, twenty students from Johns Hopkins University also formed a Genesis Group. The faith and ethnic mix in the Hopkins group was quite different from the congregational groups -- eight Jewish participants, eight Christians (including three Roman Catholics and two evangelical Christians), three Hindus, and one Muslim. Sharon Kugler, head of Johns Hopkins Campus Ministries, said that she was concerned initially that she would be unable to keep the students for the entire one-hour session. After the first week, however, she had a difficult time convincing them to leave. While the discussions were all lively, the story of Noah and the flood provided an especially unique opportunity for cross-cultural, interfaith sharing. For that discussion, the Hindu students researched their own flood story and brought it to the group for comparison and conver-sation. Sharon told a follow-up meeting of group facilitators that the Genesis Project was the most rewarding program she had conducted in her twenty years of campus ministries.