…Sounds like Shabbat to me!
This post was written by Ron Wolfson
It looks like our Christian friends have discovered Shabbes.
In the New York Times article (10/22/06) titled “Prepare Thee for Some Serious Marketing,” we learn that one of the granddaddy megachurches - Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois - has introduced “The Table,” a new program for members featuring a meal, conversation and prayer. Willow Creek brought in Randy Frazee, a well-known author and leader in the church growth movement (see his The Connecting Church), to create a new way to do small groups. In his book, Frazee emphasizes the importance of relationships that lead to a genuine sense of belonging as opposed to the sometimes superficial social circles that are the result of forced groups. With “The Table,” the church is targeting members who live in the same neighborhoods and bringing them together for an informal meal and conversation, hoping to strengthen connectedness and loyalty to the brand of Willow Creek. More than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding the church.
There’s a new movie coming out called Deja Vu and this story feels like deja vu all over again. Some 25 years ago when I first began to research “family education” approaches in other religions, I visited with the key leadership of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City to learn about their very successful “Family Home Evening” model.
“Oh,” Brother John told me, “it’s really quite simple. Every Monday night, we ask families to gather together for a meal, seated at a table rather than in front of the television, and we encourage the parents and children to talk with one another about spiritual matters beyond ‘what did you do in school today.’ There is usually some Bible study, some singing, and lots of interaction. Some families even do the dinner by candle light!”
Add some wine - and it sounds like Shabbat to me!
Synagogue 3000 has identified a similar phenomenon among what we call Jewish Emergent spiritual communities - groups that emphasize the notion of hospitality as a fundamental building block for community organizing. Rabbi Dov Gartenberg of Panim Hadashot in Seattle has hosted many “table” meetings over Shabbat and holiday celebrations in homes throughout the area… Some of our S2K/S3K congregations have introduced similar attempts to transcend the borders of the synagogue parking lot.
In my recent book, The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community (Jewish Lights Publishing), I emphasize the importance of creating a synagogue of relationships that goes far deeper than the typical program-centered menu of activities offered by most congregations. “The Table” and the experiments of Jewish Emergent are examples of what I call radical hospitality, a critical component of sacred community.
Finally, lest you think this idea is only for young professionals, my wife Susie and I - along with four other baby-boomer couples whose adult children have flown the coop - enjoy Shabbat dinner once a month with our “Empty Nester Shabbat Group.” It’s a potluck “table” which begins at 7:30 p.m. and often lasts late into the evening, filled with great food, ritual, heated political conversation, good jokes, and always begins and ends with blessings. There is only one rule: no children allowed. No synagogue created this group; we did it ourselves to meet a sharply perceived need; Shabbes just didn’t feel right when sitting alone at home.
Clearly, it’s harder to do this than to bring people into the synagogue building. But, just as the Hillel Foundation learned to transform itself by branching out beyond its buildings to reach college students, synagogues that reach out and extend their brand into the neighborhoods and dining rooms of their members may very well find this to be an important step in transforming frequent-flyer congregations into communities of meaning.
October 27th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Great analogies Ron, although I’m not sure I would agree that it’s harder to organize havuroth then bring people into the synagogue. Over 10 years ago the mainline church community embraced the small group movement as a way of revitalizing their congregations. Glenn McDonald, one of the gurus of the small group movement, created a church based on small group affiliation. So goes the success of the megachurches - they do their best to stear new members directly and immediately into some kind of sub community.
We could learn from their successes. Synagogues seem to focus on getting people in the door, i.e. programs like Synaplex. Our problem is that once we get them to show up we don’t know what to do with them. Perhaps, if synagogues had havuroth as a value rather then as a program, we could use these relationships as a revitalization method.
December 29th, 2006 at 5:16 am