NEW YORK CITY — The flourishing of interfaith relationships across New York City’s diverse range of religious worship and charitable service is a model worth replicating, said Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
The Big Apple has a rich history of interfaith cooperation, but the burgeoning developments of the past decade have been a happy boon to religious leaders across the city who have seen old barriers fall to new efforts to build bridges, said the Rev. A.R. Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center megachurch.
Elder Cook was in New York to honor the Rev. Bernard, as the New York Latter-day Saint Professional Association presented him with its Visionary Leadership Award on Saturday night, June 8. The professional association is sponsored by the BYU Management Society.
Elder David L. Buckner, formerly an Area Seventy, was sustained in April as a General Authority Seventy and has sat for several years on New York’s Commission of Religious Leaders, which the Rev. Bernard described as a catalyst for increasing cooperation that has blessed the lives of congregations and those in need throughout the city.
“We have the Commission of Religious Leaders, which is a body of different faiths coming together and seeking to respond to social issues, especially when they’re issues of tension within communities,” the Rev. Bernard said during an interview with Deseret News. “Whether it is along racial lines, class lines, especially religious lines, we come together and demonstrate what can happen when we sit at the table and have civil discourse, seek to understand, find common ground and work toward the common good, so I think that what we do here in New York City is quite unique compared to the rest of the country.”
Elder Cook agreed and suggested the council is a model.
“As an outsider, to watch the council of church leaders operate in New York has been just absolutely marvelous,” he said. “With you and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik and Rev. Que English and all of you that are on that council, I think it’s something that really could be duplicated in other ways that would really bless other major metropolitan areas.”
Elder Cook also praised the Rev. Bernard, whom he accompanied when he met President Russell M. Nelson and the First Presidency in Salt Lake City.
“And your role in that has been very significant,” Elder Cook said to the Rev. Bernard. “You’ve brought to [the council] this concern for those that have challenges that is so deep inside of you, and that’s been a very important part of what’s happened there. So we want to congratulate you on that as well. Thank you so much.”
The Rev. Bernard and Rabbi Potasnik host a Sunday radio program on WABC in New York City called “Religion on the Line.” They often refer to it as “The Rev and the Rabbi.” When they had Elder Buckner on recently, they called it, “The Rev and the Rabbi and the Elder.”
Elder Buckner called the Rev. Bernard “a great example of a trusted voice.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed the reverend as chair of the executive committee of the state’s interfaith council.
“When you sit on that commission, you find that trusted voices can have civil discussion and illuminate political leaders, educational leaders and others,” Elder Buckner said to the Rev. Bernard. “You’ve been a magnificent example of how to do that. If the rest of the world can capture this, and encapsulate it in the way in which [New York leaders] rely upon religious leaders, we would have less contention, more peace, and, truly, we’d be augmented in our own faiths.”
The banquet to present the award to the reverend doubled as the professional association’s fundraiser for needs-based scholarships for college students in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region.
More than 400 people attended the sold-out dinner, including New York and New Jersey religious and government leaders. Those leaders included representatives of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, Greek Orthodox and other Christian denominational organizations.
“My plea this evening is that all religions work together to defend faith and help bless all of God’s children,” Elder Cook told them.
Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, who is a member of the Church, also spoke at the dinner, and he praised the religious and government leaders for their charitable efforts.
“I love what you’re doing,” he said. “I love what you do, bringing it together, putting aside all the [divisive] stuff that’s going on in this world today and having a purpose, one purpose.”
The Rev. Bernard’s Christian Cultural Center was feeding 25,000 hungry New Yorkers every year before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the crisis expanded the need, the Rev. Bernard worked with Elder Buckner, and he engaged senior Church leaders to help meet it. Today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helps support the Christian Cultural Center as it feeds 135,000 people a year.
The Rev. Bernard drew on that partnership again in 2022 after the Tops supermarket massacre in Buffalo, New York. The market was the only grocery store in a food desert in the city. The governor asked the Rev. Bernard for help, and he reached out to Elder Buckner. The Church then dispatched a tractor-trailer of food from a bishops’ storehouse that fed 2,000 families and supplied local food pantries for four months.
Reid, whose team has won consecutive Super Bowls, used a football analogy built around his MVP quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, to cheer on the Rev. Bernard, Rabbi Potasnik and other religious leaders for their interfaith cooperation on behalf of others.
“I tell Pat Mahomes once a week: You have the keys to the car,” Reid said. “‘You make that throw through that little hole. You do it to the best of your ability, and there is no hesitation.’ And the people in this room are doing that. They’re doing that. They’re taking the guidance that they’ve learned through whatever faith you are and you’re leading. You’re leading the charge.”
He pounded his chest above his heart and said: “I mean, it gets you right here. It’s unbelievable what you have done in this city.”
Elder Cook praised Reid for the efforts he and his wife, Tammy Reid, have made to help the Church’s missionary efforts wherever they have lived, supporting mission presidents and missionaries.
The banquet was held in the historic Riverside Church, a massive cathedral on the Upper West Side of Manhattan built by John D. Rockefeller. Elder Cook noted that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke several times in the Riverside Church and that the Rev. King called its founding pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the greatest preacher he knew.
Elder Cook quoted a Fosdick saying from memory: “He who picks up one end of a stick picks up the other. He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.”
“I think we have two examples here,” Elder Cook said of Reid and the Rev. Bernard, “of people who have chosen good roads, righteous roads, and pursued them in different ways but have accomplished great good for enormous numbers of people. So to have these two tonight be the primary speakers and to give the Visionary Leadership Award to a great reverend who has just accomplished so much, A.R. Bernard is just marvelous.”
