I recently heard an interview with Rick Warren and his wife, Kay, which can be found here. Rick Warren is the founder of the Saddleback Church in California, and one of the founders of the Mega-Church movement. He is also the author The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold nearly 30 million copies. (He has made so much money that he and his wife reverse tithe: they keep 10% and they give away 90%.)
Micah (since you maybe be the only person reading this) and anyone else-you gotta hear this guy. It's inspiring. For me, the most important aspect of the interview was his discussion of Sunday services (the huge service) as "the tip if the iceberg." I think we tend to think about Mega-Church services (and our own Shabbat services) as ends. We ask, "how do we get people to schul." But that might be the wrong question. The question is: how does our community expand outwards from schul. How does davening change who we are an impact what we do, as individuals and as communities? I do not know enough to say if what Rick Warren is saying works in practice, but damn, it's inspiring in theory.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
I dropped everything and listened (to most of it) and it is interesting. I certainly agree that Shabbat services ought to be the "tip of the iceberg" of our congregants involvement in the synagogue. However, something that I've found while working in a shul so far is that people have X amount of time they devout to the synagogue/week and that is that. For example, if a family has a child in the religious school here, Sundays from 11-1 and Tuesdays from 7-9 are their shul time for the week. Say we want to do a special program on a Thursday night instead of Tues (and we even cancel the Tues session) they won't come, because there are other commitments and that time is not blocked off. I'm not saying this is right, or even unchangeable, but I believe this is the culture at many of our synagogues at the moment. Our congregants are involved and busy people, and part of our primary challenge is convincing them that they should choose synagogue programs over other activities. This is not easy especially when those congregants' other commitments are at the JCC or being on the board at an Art Museum or raising money for AIDS research -- all great causes that we don't want to discourage them from supporting, but causes that use up their precious time that we would like them to use to devote to the synagogue. I'd be interested to hear if that is a problem at Saddleback and how Rick deals with it.
Now, this all doesn't mean that we can't ask more of our members. But when we encourage people to do holy work that happens outside of the synagogue, then we are also reduces the chances that they will make a larger commitment to what we want to do.
Okay, but the question is: do we aid and abett that way of thinking, by making schul (or 'Jewish' stuff) just another activity in the week? Warren's place, as you heard, is very Kaplanian: a pool, a gym, multiple forums and facilities. It's full service. We're not there, nor should we be, but there has got to be a way to have people see that the Jewish experiences they have should be ghettoized into an hour or two a week. There has to be a way to do that, doesn't there?
I think Kaplan was on to something in this regard. The way to bring people in is to give them a reason to be there. They are not just going to come to meet their spiritual needs, but their other needs as well. The other Conservative shul in CH is building a new building, and in it they are planning on putting a coffee shop. I was really surprised when many people around CH, including their own congregants, were not happy about the idea. For them a shul is a sacred place that the hol of Starbucks should not tread. That's certainly a good thing that they recognize the holiness of the bet knesset, but have we made it so holy that it is untouchable? How do we make it more accessible and useful for people? One of the challenges is that, in many Jewish communities, there are very nice JCCs that serve many of the purposes that Kaplan's synagogue would serve. The success of JCCs has further made the synagogue a scarily sacred place. So for me the question becomes -- how do we maintain the synagogue as a sacred place while making it more useful to people?
That's a great point. Funny that you mentioned the coffee shop, because that is a regular feature, as far as I understand, of the mega-church. In a way, as you say, synagogues have been victims of Kaplan's institution building successes. And now course, independent minyanim have sprung up to rob schuls of even their prayer function. What is to be done? Certainly more activity and programming for more interests is needed, and it's interesting that we are talking about here runs counter to the popular notion that we need to engage Jews in places outside of synagogues. But how do we break down this idea that schul is where you go to pray, maybe put your kid in school, and that's it?
I think one way of doing it is through the internet. Outside of the Orthodox and 'independent' Jews, there lacks a web infrastructure that appeals to the wider audience. Our synagogues have websites, but they are pretty pathetic. Why can't we add social networking applications to our synagogue's website to help people make connections with one another? Or create other connections points to Torah through the web? I've found that there is a clear generation gap in shuls between those who know how to use a computer and those who don't. But in 10 years the majority of people in synagogues will be computer-savvy, and we must have the infrastructure to encourage connections through that. Of course the internet does not and should not replace human interaction, but in most cases it is the first impression people get of a synagogue and it is accessible to them 24/7.
Amen to that. I go to a lot of schul websites because of the job, and so many are the equivilant of the 1950s style of architecture so popular at the bricks and mortar locations. At camp we have started to experiment with this issue, and we have a weekly dvar Torah podcast. But yes, we need to do more in this reagrd. As usual, we are WAY behind everyone else on this.
You think that only Micah reads the comments. Rude!
Post a Comment