Detroit, USA - Nineteen-year-old Josh DuBois recently started carrying a slice of his home church in his iPod wherever he goes.
Eighty-two-year-old Herb Kaufman keeps the weekly services at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Township as close as the cell phone in his pocket.
Young and old, Americans are using communications technology to stay linked to their spiritual homes, even if they wind up scattered across the state or country.
DuBois, a freshman at Michigan State University, lives an hour away from his hometown of Saline.
"I like living up at MSU," DuBois said. But several times a week, he loads the latest audio from services at Saline First Assembly of God into his iPod, "and then it feels a little more like home up here," he said. "I can get the latest podcast the day after services. It's so portable, I can listen anywhere."
Podcasts can be downloaded from the Internet and listened to or viewed on a computer or portable device like an iPod.
Kaufman and his wife, Babs, who flee Michigan's chill for southern California for a few months each year, donated the new toll-free telephone system to Temple Beth El.
Members who cannot make it to a service ask the temple staff for a code. Then, just before the start of a weekly service, a funeral or a wedding, they dial a toll-free number, punch in the code and can listen to a live audio feed.
New microphones and an amplifier Kaufman paid to have installed in Beth El's audio control room allow telephone listeners to hear all aspects of a service clearly.
Kaufman, the president of the Ira Kaufman Chapel, a funeral home in Southfield, said he enjoys hearing weekly services, but the new system is especially valuable for special occasions.
"I still remember the day my sister Jean Sucher in Scottsdale, Ariz., could listen through the telephone as the name of her husband, Gerald, who died last year, was read aloud in the service ... as a memorial," Kaufman said. "That connection was very, very emotional for my sister and myself."
These new communications tools are hot news in the congregations using them, even though no one is claiming they're technological innovations.
Devices like iPods that play digital audio files have been around for several years. Toll-free audio lines have been used for decades by businesses and at sporting events.
The real news is about innovations in ministry. Nine of 10 Americans tell pollsters that faith matters to them, but only four of 10 say they regularly attend services. Those numbers have been stable for years, but clergy always are looking for ways to close the gap. When new ideas work, the buzz spreads quickly.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit recently started audio podcasts of devotional messages and talks of an upcoming reorganization of parishes.
In Detroit, Greater Grace Temple has been a multimedia powerhouse for decades, starting with radio in the 1970s, then moving into local TV broadcasts and finally nationwide cable TV distribution. The church now offers video clips on the Internet that can be viewed online but are not compatible with iPod-style handheld devices.
"We haven't tried podcasting, but we're thinking about it," said Melvin Epps, director of communications at Greater Grace. "We want to see how it's working in other places."
Over the years, the 6,500-member Greater Grace has demonstrated how multimedia outreach can help to build a congregation. Far-flung followers who tune into services from outside Michigan now make up about 1,500 of the church's supporters, Epps said.
"Every day, we're seen on the Word Network," Epps said. "That's on major cable companies coast to coast, and that's brought us a lot of people who feel they've adopted Greater Grace as their home."
These TV followers occasionally send donations, sometimes contact the church to ask for prayers and, once or twice a year on average, visit Michigan to attend in person, Epps said.
At Saline's much smaller Assembly of God, where about 140 people attend Sunday services and the Wednesday youth service draws 40, the Rev. Randy Bomey said he is not sure how many supporters their new iPod audio service may draw.
"We're just thrilled to offer this to people like Josh DuBois," Bomey said.
Podcasting is an inexpensive option for a small congregation, said Caleb Cohen, the church's technology director. "It's easy to do. For a long time, we'd been making audiotapes for people. Now, we just upload our audio onto the Internet and people download the newest podcast whenever they want."
The new toll-free telephone lines are more expensive. Officials at Temple Beth El and at Congregation B'nai Moshe in West Bloomfield, which offers a similar service to its members, declined to say how much their systems cost. They try to limit the service to members and their families, because the congregations pay a per-minute fee for service.
"We'll say it's not inexpensive, but it is not prohibitive, if a congregation wants to try this," Rabbi Daniel Syme at Beth El said of the new system.
"What impresses us about this idea is that we keep hearing from people that it's been a profoundly moving experience for them," Syme said. "So far, that's far beyond the impact we ever imagined."