What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Shtiebel

This is the first video in a series of short videos called: What Christians Can Learn From Judaism. It goes into some of Judaism's best practices, and tells you what Evangelicals can learn from them.

When the Hasidic sects came to America, they noticed how most Jewish communities were liberal, superficial, and in a state of decay. They went into the synagogues and noticed that these synagogues were large and expensive. When they asked about the day schools, the American Jewish leaders responded that the communities that even had a day school in the first place usually had small ones. Most Jews went to public schools.

The Hasidim decided to do the opposite. They invented the Shtiebel, which is a very small and basic synagogue, and invested the rest of their money in the day schools, making sure that everyone in the community could send their kids to the day schools. Their justification is that kids learn their worldview in their schools which they attend every day, much more so than the synagogues, which they visited once a week. The Synagogues might be great places for Jews to connect and network, but it is in the day schools that the next generation learns its worldview.

As a result of this action, the Hasidim experienced growth while the rest of American Jewry experienced decay. This effect is still going on to this day. Most sects of Judaism are shrinking, while Orthodox Judaism is growing.

It makes me think: is the Christian community guilty of the same thing? Are we spending too much money on our churches and not enough on Christian schools? Can we in one day a week compensate for the politically correct, secularizing influence being pushed on our children five days per week? Is it worth having more sports programs for our children, if it means we have to send our kids to secular college, whose professors are experiencing a 70% or so success rate at deconverting Evangelical students? Is this the right investment of our money? Perhaps it is time that we took a page out of the Hasidic playbook, and focused on small churches, large schools.