Is this just a Reform+American thing?

[cellio]

Dear Jewish LJ brain trust,

For a while I've been hearing leaders of the Reform movement talk about how we have to "innovate" and "rethink congregations" in order to build for the long-term. Young families and millennials, we're told, aren't really into joining congregations, so we need to be more appealing, a mix of actual changes and marketing. Most visibly (in my congregation) this means more Shabbat services targeted to specific subsets of the community (young families, youth group, others), though it also affects the school, program overall, and finances.

Tonight I came across this article on this theme, and it got me wondering:

Is this just a Reform thing? Or maybe just an American Reform thing? I'm not aware of Orthodox congregations changing what they do -- nor perceiving a need to, because (it appears to me) community is already a core value there. So, sure, people come and go, but I don't perceive that they're as worried about "losing the young". On the other hand, I don't frequent an Orthodox synagogue and these sorts of things would be more visible to insiders. So I haven't picked up on it on my visits to Orthodox synagogues, but would I?

Any insights and/or "reports from the field" would be most welcome.

Comments

[richardf8]

Happens in Conservative congregations too.

[siderea]

I don't know about it being a Jewish thing, but the Christians are all up with this, especially the mainline Protestant sects that have been losing out to the evangelicals and fundamentalists. I get the impression that congregation withering also afflicts the Roman Catholic church in the US, but that they've not gotten on the popularization bandwagon, unless Vatican II counts.

emailed reply

[cellio]

This response is from Isaac, who is having trouble signing in to LJ:

Here's my perception of how this issue manifests in American Orthodox world, or at least the part of it that I've seen.

I think that generally, Orthodox people consider it de riguer to attend synagogue on at least a weekly basis and tend to locate themselves within walking distance of at least one Orthodox synagogue. So, there's a pretty strong market for Shabbat services.

However, wherever the Orthodox walking-distance clusters are large enough (and I think Kemp Mill, where I live now, is a couple of sizes than this threshold), the neighborhood will contain more than one synagogue, and possibly more than one Shabbat morning service per synagogue. As a result, there is potential for people in the community to drop in to whichever services are convenient and appealing and to feel less allegiance to a particular synagogue and less responsibility to become a member. From what I've heard, at least one of the large synagogues here is concerned about having significantly smaller membership rolls than its population at services might indicate.

In addition, the prevalence of multiple services in a small area sets up competition between the different services for attendance, partly with the aim of encouraging membership in their synagogues. Some services definitely do better than others, for various reasons, and there is ebbing and flowing over time. There is some intentional experimentation and tailoring going on, to try to accommodate specific populations, but the rule tends to be stability, since incumbents at a particular service tend not to like its being messed with.