Area Interfaith Group Born Out of Tragedy and Charity

A donation of food from a Frankfort mosque and a Tinley church's outreach of compassion after 9/11 created the SouthWest Interfaith Team that strives to build bridges between religious communities.

The SouthWest Interfaith Team is a nonprofit group in the south suburbs of Chicago that was born through an act of giving. Rev. Jim Young, then of the Tinley Park United Methodist Church, met with Khalid Mozaffar and Tariq Khan, of Frankfort's American Islamic Association, in November 2002 after the AIA donated to the church a large collection from a food drive. Young, who’d worked at Ground Zero, said he was looking to do something more with Christian-Muslim relations and this meeting with Mozaffar and Khan planted the seeds for that. Around the same time, the Rev. Terrence Baeder of Zion Lutheran Church in Tinley Park reached out to the AIA in a show of support after hearing about threats against area Muslims in the wake of 9/11. This …

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