Source: The Kansas City Star
On April 19, 2000, The Kansas City Star published an article on Pilgrim Chapel, an interfaith chapel in Kansas City, MO that has no weekly congregation and serves as a place of worship and meditation for people of all religions. An English Gothic structure that was formerly a Lutheran church for the deaf, the chapel was bought by ordained ministers Roger and Liz Coleman in 1997 and opened as Pilgrim Chapel in 1998. Roger Coleman stated: "We have some people who just pop in during the week for a few minutes of quiet time before heading to work." Coleman also spoke of the increasing exposure that the Chapel is experiencing: "We're becoming a regional pilgrimage site where people seek us out...There seems to be a holiness in this setting that draws people, and perhaps it even has a healing effect on those who enter. It's hard to explain." Pilgrim Chapel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and stands as one of the few public interfaith chapels of its kind in the United States, accompanying one in Dallas' Thanksgiving Square and another site in Washington, D.C. Numerous weddings, baptisms, and funerals have been performed at Pilgrim Chapel, typically for people who don't have a regular church or for interfaith marriages. Liz Coleman thinks: "the concept of the public chapel is a reflection of where we're moving as a community globally...This chapel reflects people's lives...Everyone knows Jewish people and Muslim people and Buddhists and Catholics and Christians."