New York, USA - One Sunday morning in 1995, Ron Wolfson and Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman braked to a halt in an oddly enlightening traffic jam. The line of cars was creeping toward Saddleback Church in Southern California, whose services were drawing thousands of worshipers. As two Jews, Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman had crossed the sectarian divide to try to figure out how and why.
As they inched down the road, they spotted a sign marked “For First-Time Visitors.” It directed them to pull into a separate lane and put on emergency blinkers. Bypassing the backup, they soon reached a lot with spaces reserved for newcomers. When Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman emerged from their car, an official Saddleback greeter led them into the church.
Those first moments on the perimeter of the church set into motion a dozen years of increasing interaction between a Jewish organization devoted to reinvigorating synagogues and one of the most successful evangelical megachurches in the nation, the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
This has not been a studiously balanced bit of ecumenicism. Synagogue 3000, the group led by Mr. Wolfson, an education professor, and Rabbi Hoffman, a scholar of liturgy, went to the church to figure out what evangelical Christians were doing right that Jews were doing wrong or not at all.
“To put it bluntly,” Mr. Wolfson said, “if there are thousands of people waiting to get in, I want to know what’s going on. I want to know what they’re doing that’s tapping those souls.”
The latest outgrowth of this unlikely learning curve is Hallelu Atlanta, a gathering tomorrow of 4,000 members of 18 congregations. With its amalgam of praise songs and spiritual testimonies, Mr. Wolfson describes the event as “a Jewish tent meeting.” A similar event outside Los Angeles in 2002 drew 5,000 participants.
Since 1995, Synagogue 3000 and its precursor, Synagogue 2000, have taken member congregations and seminary classes to Saddleback and had Mr. Warren conduct a workshop in congregation-building for nearly 20 Jewish leaders.
Mr. Warren has delivered a d’var Torah — a sermon on the weekly Torah portion — at Sinai Temple, a prominent Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. His books “The Purpose-Driven Church” and “The Purpose-Driven Life” inspired similar volumes by Mr. Wolfson (“God’s To-Do List”) and Rabbi Hoffman (“Rethinking Synagogues”).
All this cross-pollination comes as a historical and theological anomaly. In the postwar decades, American Jews have built sturdy ecumenical bonds with Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and African-American Christians on social issues like civil rights and economic injustice. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Jewish congregations sought out Muslim leaders or congregations for dialogues.
Evangelical Christians, however, tended to excite the greatest wariness among Jews, with the exception of certain Orthodox groups that make common cause on issues like school vouchers. Not even the rise of Christian Zionism has overcome Jewish anxiety about a brand of Christianity whose defining word, “evangelism,” connotes a determined effort at conversion.
“Some Jews, especially in areas where they are a minority, fear that Christianity is contagious,” said Mark I. Pinsky, an author based in Florida whose books include “A Jew Among the Evangelicals.” “On another level, there is a palpable resistance call it arrogance to the notion that these relative ‘newcomers’ to religion have anything to teach us. And finally, there is the class issue, that evangelicals aren’t as deep as we are, that they are in their sanctuaries for entertainment, rather than for spirituality.”
What got Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman over those impediments was what is known in Jewish parlance as a “shidduch,” Hebrew for “a match.” From the early years of Saddleback, which Mr. Warren founded in 1980, the pastor had relied on an observant Jew, Mel Malkoff, for expertise in land acquisition and property development.
Mr. Malkoff in turn told his rabbi, Elie Spitz, of Saddleback’s propulsive growth since Mr. Warren started the congregation with seven people in his home. (It now has 82,000 members and routinely has 25,000 people attend its multiple Sunday services.) Mr. Spitz then told Mr. Wolfson, and before long he was stuck in traffic.
For all its utility and good will, the relationship between Mr. Wolfson’s group and Mr. Warren’s church has required some delicate diplomacy. Saddleback may be politically centrist on the evangelical Christian spectrum — Mr. Warren has taken on AIDS and global warming as key causes — but on issues including abortion and gay rights it stands in polar opposition to the socially liberal mainstream of American Jewry.
When Mr. Warren conducted his workshop for Synagogue 3000’s leaders in 2005, several participants challenged his view of homosexuality as abnormal and unbiblical. “Every faith has its own parameters,” Mr. Warren responded, calmly and firmly, in an exchange preserved on a DVD of the session. “You can’t believe it all.”
On the topic of conversion, Mr. Warren told his Jewish listeners, he “doesn’t believe in coercion” though he “does believe in persuasion.” That seemed to placate, if not necessarily please, the group.
The Jewish leaders were visibly captivated, however, when Mr. Warren recounted building the church — going door-to-door seeking people who belonged to no congregation, asking them why they didn’t belong, devising an initial program to directly meet their desires.
Those desires resonated immediately for Jewish leaders frustrated in the failure of synagogues to engage the unaffiliated, the disaffected, the spiritual seekers. Mr. Warren’s informants had told him they yearned for a friendly welcome, quality child care, a sermon that had a pragmatic message for their weekday lives and an overarching sense that the church cared more about each member as a person than as a revenue stream.
Mr. Warren told the workshop listeners what he had come to realize: “A congregation isn’t a building. God dwells in people.” He explained that Saddleback did not construct its own building until it had 10,000 congregants. Even in the church’s current vastness, a decentralized network of ministers and laity seek to connect every newcomer to at least six longtime members.
“The biggest challenge we have in transforming synagogue life,” Mr. Wolfson said recently, recalling the workshop, “is transforming the basic relationship of most Jews to most synagogues.” He added: “It’s a fee-for-service model. I’m going to write you a check, and you’re going to give me what I need — a rabbi on call, High Holy Days seats, a Hebrew school for my kids. It’s not deep.”
Mr. Hoffman said the most obvious exception in the Jewish world was the Chabad movement of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. Its success at what is called “inreach,” meaning proselytizing unobservant Jews, has become a source of fascination, envy and enmity. In a strange way, it may have been less controversial for Synagogue 3000 to emulate Christians who are total outsiders rather than a Hasidic sect that competes for the same pool of Jewish souls.
“Jews need to be more quote-unquote evangelical,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We need to do a better job of presenting Judaism to our own people. The story doesn’t get across that Judaism is a way to find meaning and purpose in your life. And that’s another lesson I’ve learned from the evangelical model.”