Lessons for Streaming Synagogues from the Evangelical Experience

Last week, I had a conversation with a close friend in which we reflected on what changes to everyday life wrought by the pandemic will, twenty years from now, be entirely routine and taken for granted. We agreed that there would probably be a proliferation of unoccupied buildings in cities as employers learn that remote work and Zoom are cheaper alternatives to expensive leases.

The change in corporate culture is just one area where a digital revaluation is in the offing. And it relates to a tectonic shift toward what I call “digital spirituality”—the ability for religious adherents, catalyzed by the pandemic, to mediate their spiritual lives through online communities, on their own terms, displacing the pre-pandemic practice of convening in person, displacing, that is, brick-and-mortar spirituality. Digital spirituality will accelerate as the physical spaces and infrastructures typically associated with religious gatherings are hollowed out and adjusted to the new normal of online religiosity.

So, as a Protestant evangelical Christian, it was with great interest that I read Jack Wertheimer’s essay in Mosaic on the pandemic’s tolls on the Jewish communities of America. Wertheimer’s findings corroborate the fact that no religious body will emerge from this pandemic untouched. And the forces at work on Jewish communities also affect my own; in fact, the experiences and trends he describes happening in synagogues reflect a challenge that our evangelical churches have been wrestling with for roughly three decades now: how to adjust the delivery of religious rites to meet the consumer-like expectations of our congregants.