TruthBook Religious News Blog

By JEFF STRICKLER, Star Tribune
June 13, 2009

A Church Is A Business

Eyes roll when Rabbi Hayim Herring tells his fellow clergy that they should spend an hour a day on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Listeners at his seminars exchange smirks when he says blogging should be considered mandatory. They look aghast when he recommends posting short video clips from their sermons on YouTube.

It's a lot better than the reaction he used to get.

"They used to look at me as if I'd just said a four-letter word," said Herring, the former senior rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park and now the executive director of STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal). But in its seven years, the organization has seen more converts to what many call one of the dirtiest words in religion: marketing.

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Labels: Facebook, Jeff Strickler, marketing, MySpace, religion, Twitter, YouTube

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Here's the steeple; open the door, and where are the young people?

A survey finds that many youths draw a line between being spiritual and participating in an organized religion.

By JEFF STRICKLER, Star Tribune

November 9, 2008

The full survey is available at www.spiritualdevelopmentcenter.org. Highlights include:

• 35 percent said they never talk to their parents about religious faith, and 42 percent do so only infrequently.

• 75 percent said there is a correlation between a person's spiritual beliefs and a person's behavior.

• 82 percent believe that there is a God or other higher power, 8 percent said there is no God and 10 percent said they don't know.

• 41 percent believe that there is a purpose to life.
More from Faith + Values

A new benchmark survey finds that 55 percent of young people ages 12 to 25 say they are more spiritual now than two years ago. But nearly one-third of the young people said they don't trust organized religion.

The survey, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, was conducted by the Minneapolis-based Search Institute and released here last week at the four-day Healthy Communities-Healthy Youth Conference. Peter Benson and Gene Roehlkepartain, co-directors of the institute's Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, said that it will take several months, if not years, of serious number-crunching to figure out all of the study's implications.

The survey included 6,853 subjects. The first question was, "What does it mean to be spiritual?" There were nine choices, running from "believing in God" to "being true to one's inner self." They also could say that there is no spiritual dimension, and there was an "I don't know" option.

The good news for faith communities is that 93 percent of the young people surveyed believe there is a spiritual aspect to life.

Labels: Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, Healthy Communities-Healthy Youth Conference, Jeff Strickler, organized religion, Search Institute, spirituality, youth