The so-called “edifice complex”-building bigger, newer, more luxurious religious facilities-is over. In our current economic crisis, clergy will be compelled to cease being CEOs and program directors of their institutions and return instead to the tasks they were trained to fill: spiritual counselors to the ill, lonely, frightened and troubled folks in their midst.
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)
