Multiple Religious Belonging and Community Leadership from a Buddhist-Christian Perspective

abstract: How does multiple religious belonging (MRB) affect the leadership of religious communities and the religious communities themselves? Specifically, when the leader is a dual belonging person, what repercussions does it have for the ministry? As a Buddhist-Christian local (Christian) church pastor and an Assistant Teacher at a Zen temple, the questions above form a kind of “koan” at the heart of my calling and my practice, that is, the koan of dual belonging. This paper draws from my own experiences of MRB in my leadership roles, the effects of MRB leadership on the communities I serve, and the broader implications for the practice and theory of multiple religious belonging. The paper engages selected literature to sketch a “practical coherence” among strands of the two traditions to which I belong.