Background: Jonathan runs a large Messianic ministry called Jewish Voice. Over the last 4 years, he has also launched a unique Messianic community in the heart of L.A. called Heritage. He has a heart for young adults and a unique approach to ministry that has proven successful in various ways.
Main Points:
- The traditional template of a congregations giving fully supporting the financial needs of the congregation (salaries, building, etc.) no longer work in this economic climate. We need to think outside of the box to come up with alternative ways to make money.
- When congregations get a low-cost building they can just barely afford with their giving income, they typically end up in less-desirable areas of town and away from the Jewish population
- To fix these two problems, Jonathan proposes the idea of business partnerships – using the building you purchase or build to house other businesses that support the cost of the building. In his example, he explains how they are purchasing and remodeling a large, high-traffic storefront in L.A. for their young congregation by housing a well-known and trusted daycare center. They are also opening a coffee shop. By doing this, they will be able to better reach their local Jewish community through relationships and services that bless others. This also enabled them to afford a building that would’ve otherwise been outside of their price range.
Key: JB-Jonathan Bernis, MR-Mark Rich, DZ-Denis Zalevskiy, EZ-Evelina Zalevskiy, JR-Judy Rich. Also present in the conversation were Matt & Robyn Farley. The conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.
JB: I’ve been doing this for 44 years and as the Messianic movement has grown, congregations have built and bought buildings. A few have had the great fortune of buying synagogues that have been abandoned. (The Jewish community [especially in the east] is aging out, and then synagogues come on the market.) I don’t know if that’s the case in Boise, but churches also, especially historic churches, are shrinking and they’re left with lots of buildings. What has typically happened over the last 4 decades is that Messianic congregations have tended to buy buildings that they could afford – a stretch, but still what they could afford – and they end up outside of the Jewish community. They end up in areas of low traffic and then they have to pull people to an area outside the Jewish community to attend their services. And if you get people that are in the area they tend not to be Jewish. And so, the demographics of the Messianic Jewish movement have gone from around 2/3 Jewish in the 70s to about 20% Jewish now (and I’m just throwing numbers, but it’s typically around that).
As a result of this, we’re breaking new ground and we’re spending the money to try to build a model that takes a different approach: Get a building in the center of the Jewish community and create traffic through it so that the building becomes a social center.
For us, we’re renovating an old furniture store, and about 60% of it is going to be a daycare center. In the area that we’re in (west L.A.), there’s a 2-year waiting list for good quality daycare. We met with some of the national day care centers and decided on one called Lionheart. It’s a Christian organization that has about 30 daycare centers in cooperation with big churches. They’re very successful and they’re willing to let us adapt their programs to Messianic approach. They have Bible-based programs and a structure where the host congregation is involved in the hiring. You end up having a separate entity in one sense but it’s also an extension of the congregation. We don’t have the expertise to do daycare, but they do. We will work together in creating a daycare that flows into the congregation. We’ll have space for 200 kids and when it’s fully functioning it will provide 100% of the operating expenses of our building.
In doing a contractual partnership like this, you get the expertise, you get the financial commitment, you get a guaranteed income. In one way, you’re renting out the building, but they’re actually involved in the contractual relationship from the beginning. Why is that important? Because you can go to a bank with a guaranteed source of income. This gave us the ability of buying the furniture store. This is a model that can actually work, I think. We’re proving it out now. We’re not completely there yet, but if we prove it out, that it’s not theoretical, then you can actually build into your purchase of a building a contractual partnership. In our example, you get a flow of people too. If you get 200 kids in a daycare, you have over 100 families that are now part of the flow of the building. We’re also building a coffee shop for parents when they drop their kids off, and it will be open to the public.
With this flow of people, without being overtly evangelistic, we create a space where people can sit down and have a cup of coffee and get to know each other. Evangelism always has to be based on relationship, right? If you build relationships, you’re going to grow.
We have to shift away from the models of tithes-only income and growing the congregation only from inviting people into an area that’s outside of the Jewish community. We need a model that’s dead center of the Jewish community in high-value real estate with lots of traffic, and partnership with different entities that are like-minded. These partnerships will help you at the bank because of the guaranteed income. In this, a mortgage way beyond your ability to handle becomes a possibility. This model has already been proven out by mega-churches, so we’re not recreating the wheel but bringing it into the Messianic Jewish movement. We’re transforming the idea of a congregation into a center – a Messianic Jewish community center. There’s so many different ideas you can bring into that, and instead of a 1 or 2 million dollar building, you might be able to reach for a 20 million dollar building with a 14 million dollar renovation – that’s what we’re doing now.
MR: This is exactly what my wife and I have been talking about. We were thinking of putting in a coffee shop. We’re also a part of Foursquare, and I recently approached our regional pastor and asked him if there was anything against our congregation owning a business that would also support the congregation. He didn’t have much feedback on that. But our idea was that whatever building we got we would rent our facility to other churches, and then also create the classrooms to appeal to businesses and rent them out during the week for meeting spaces.
The other thing that I haven’t really talked about is that there’s no JCC in Boise. What if we could make a Messianic JCC and then have everyone coming here for us?
JB: You become the center – you turn it into the center of the Jewish community.
MR: Yeah. Boise is home to the oldest continuously-operating synagogue west of the Mississippi. It’s called CABI and the congregants are almost all 60+. There are only a few young families. We went there after October 7 for a vigil and I told Judy, “These guys are pretty old…” Judy said, “They’re never going to sell this to us.” I would love for that to happen, but… They’re very leftist…
JB: They’re leftist, but they’re dying. And at some point, they dwindle down to the point that they can’t keep paying upkeep even on a building, even if they own it outright.
MR: The Jewish community in the area – there’s a lot of people who might sometimes go to CABI, sometimes to Chabad, but usually don’t go anywhere. They’re not attached to a congregation, not very religious.
JB: That’s an amazing idea. Whether you buy land and build or you buy an existing building and renovate or you fall into something like this which would obviously be the ideal, you’re going to have to do what they were incapable of doing – and that’s generating income and activity. And the way to do that is to be centrally located and to create things in that facility that the community wants to engage with. There’s an unlimited number of ideas if you’re creative. You can have music events, you can have all the things that JCCs do. JCCs are more popular than congregations anywhere now. Jewish community centers are really becoming the epicenter of the Jewish community. Why? Because they have a swimming pool, they have a gym, they have plays, art festivals, music events. They have things that Jewish people and their neighbors want to come to be part of. Most synagogues aren’t doing that anymore – they’re not a draw for anyone. Their buildings, the majority of the time, are sitting pretty much empty.
Here’s another thing: we’re so centrally-located in West LA that we had a church of about 200 people (keep in mind we haven’t even renovated yet – it’s just a warehouse) say that they’d like to sign a contract with us and give us $300,000 a year to use our building for 3 hours on a Sunday. We have a place that people want to use because it’s so centrally located.
This will work anywhere, I think. If you get into the center of town, if you get the best real estate, you get creative and get partnership on board, you can go to a bank and get 10 times what you could get just as a congregation because you have all these partnerships now. AND you produce traffic. If you get traffic through your building, you’re going to grow – it’s just the reality. It’s not a model that exists right now in the Messianic Jewish world. There has to be groups like you who step out of the boat and say, “We’ll take these risks, we’ll be creative.” Look at Elon Musk – what an inspiration! The guy was near bankruptcy 10 times and he just took the risk. He doesn’t need any loans, but he could walk into a bank and get loan for any amount because everybody trusts him now because he’s been creative. And he brought people around him that are innovative.
We haven’t been innovative in the Messianic movement since the 80s, and you guys could do that. You could dream big, reach big, and put into place partnerships that will put you right in the center of the Jewish community and become the happening thing. Could you imagine if you guys become THE Jewish community center of Boise, and you just happen to be Messianic? You become the “in” thing. And you have the opportunity to do that. The older Jewish community (65+) has a lot of money but they’re not reproducing anything right now and they’re not attracting the younger demographics. You guys are kind of an anomaly for the most part when you look at the leadership, right? There’s an aging leadership and I’m wondering, “Who’s going to be innovative?” The group that becomes innovative is going to be leading the way. And it’s time, right? So you’ve got to think way beyond what you can do as a small group and think about what you can do by innovation. So that’s my shtick for you guys.
MR: I appreciate that because this is the exact kind of thing that we were already wondering about. We just spoke with our council on Tuesday about this. How do we get a building so that it pays for itself? And so that it’s close to the Jewish community. Because there’s an area within Boise that most of the Jewish population falls within.
JB: So, what’s hot in Boise? What’s creating crowds in Boise? And where are the young people gravitating to?
DZ: It’s definitely downtown Boise and The Village. When we have friends in town, that’s where we take them.
JB: The better the real estate, the more traffic you’re going to end up getting. It’s going to be the most expensive, but the payoff is so high. The historical idea of just building on tithes isn’t cutting it anymore. This is a different culture and you’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to be cutting edge. It’s about serving people. If you can find ways to serve people, that’s how good businesses succeed. They provide services and products that people want or need. And it’s possible to do that. We’ve got to think outside the box, and the Messianic Jewish box has been very, very small.
MR: I never considered something like a day care, or the partnership with somebody bigger who’s already doing it and just would like to another location.
JB: Another thing – coffee works everywhere in the country, right? Good coffee and an environment where people want to hang out while they’re drinking coffee works. And it also works for the gospel. Sitting with people that are hanging out or drinking coffee is a great opportunity to build relationships. So just about any entity that’s trying to get traffic, coffee is pretty much a winner. If you produce the best coffee, maybe you’ve got a little grocery in there or you get a company of believers that partner with you, and you go to town on the best coffee in Boise. That’s just one low-hanging idea but there’s lots of others too.
MR: So, broaden our horizon, right? Don’t think in terms of constraints, think in terms of liberality, of freedom. More of a business approach as far as the finances are concerned but using that for a Kingdom purpose.
JB: I’ll give you one thing. We were off to a big start and then COVID shut LA down completely. Then I had this health crisis and I haven’t been able to come into LA as much. But we grew from about 10 to about 100 while I was sick and we did it with Shabbat dinners. We have people RSVP and pay for it. It’s $20 and the catering costs about $15, so it’s a break-even thing. If you build something people want to come to, you can charge for it. But we have 100 people each month at our dinner and we build relationships. It’s almost all Jewish, about 80%. And we’re getting Jewish people hearing the gospel and getting saved by building relationships. We light Shabbat candles, we have 20 minutes of worship, a 20-minute message, and dinner. And it’s taking off.
MR: I would like to know more about that. We had a members meeting over the summer and we handed out books and talked about hosting Shabbat dinners and inviting people in – this sort of thing. But we fit the demographic about 20% Jewish and as everybody else not, so there’s a lot of, “How do we do that?”
JB: The way we do it, it is so simple and everybody has fun. We’re restraining ourselves from pushing it out on social media because we don’t feel like we’re ready for that kind of growth. There’s such simplicity and we tend to make it really complicated, but it’s not.
Anyway, innovation is what we need now and reaching to do something beyond the typical model that hasn’t worked for so long. We need businesses, partnerships, things that people like to do. You get traffic through because you have things under the roof that people are really attracted to, and you’re winning.
MR: I think also in our area almost every Jewish couple is intermarried.
JB: Here too. About 70% of Jewish couples are intermarried and here’s the thing. The Messianic movement has predominantly been intermarried couples and we should be recognizing it and doing things that draw intermarried couples. Our messaging should be to intermarried couples, our messaging should be to secular Jewish people that they will find more meaning. Whatever it is, we, the Messianic movement has to move out of the 70s culture into a modern culture and innovation is absolutely key.
Boise feels to me like a fresh new canvas, because I’m hearing all the time, “Oh, we’re moving to Boise because it’s a cool place to go. It’s viewed now as a hip place to move to. Over the last 2 decades Denver was the place to go, but now Boise seems to be a major destination and you guys can be in the ground floor of it. If you create an environment, a community, that’s one of the hip things in Boise, that’s cool.
MR: Now we have to figure out how to be hip! LOL But almost every Israeli that lives in our area is our age.
JB: And Israelis are open to spiritual things. They really are, maybe more so than Americans. They left Israel because they’re disenchanted with war, with the troubles of life, and they’re a great community to reach. Maybe you should start offering them falafel for free. Maybe you build your congregation on falafel Friday! LOL
MR: Yeah, if you’re not super orthodox, there’s not really a home for you if you’re not far left. And there are a lot of them that are pretty conservative and they’re not going to CABI and they’re going to Chabad. There needs to be something else in there.
JB: There needs to be a bridge!
MR: Yes. I think this is really good because it’s sparking a lot of different ideas. It’s lent a little validity to my idea of us taking up the mantle of trying to be a JCC of some sort, and also of incorporating business into the mix for financial stability. But the thing I didn’t consider was the traffic draw.
JB: Yeah, don’t do anything on the outskirts. We used to have a lot of messages in the Messianic movement about how we’re the head and not the tail, but if you buy a rundown place in the outskirts because it’s affordable, that’s not what we represent. Get in the middle, do something that is excellent. Everything you do, do it excellently. (conversation about which areas in the valley are most desirable)
Every city has an area (or 2-3) that’s most desirable. And if you get in early, you’re going to win. Because it’s going to keep getting more expensive and more popular. If I was coming to Boise I’d be going for the best area and reaching innovatively, building relationships, partnering, and really figuring out – what’s not here yet that people want to be here.
When I first had a vision for LA, it was Beverly Hills. But when I started to look around Beverly Hills I realized that the demographic was a gentrified community. It wasn’t the right place for a young growing Messianic community. The new area for us is where UCLA is. We planted smack in the middle of that. We’re now in the young up-and-coming Jewish professional community. So the answer is, go to the area that’s new and being built up and will be will become really the hit place to go. I don’t know if that paints the picture for Boise
JR: I think in the valley, the more central is better. Because in the valley, the new building is all happening on the outskirts, so it’s spreading out in every direction. But the main attractions are in the middle of the valley, off the freeway.
JB: I don’t know if daycare is a big issue in Boise. I can tell you in LA there’s a two-year waiting list – we’ll be full in 6 months after we start. There are things for Boise that definitely aren’t there yet and are in other bigger cities, and if you guys hit in on that in some way, shape or form… You’ve got to pray together and ask the Lord – He’s going to show you some dynamic things to do.
DZ: How many Jewish people do you expect to have in your daycare, and will it be a problem if you market it as “Messianic?”
JB: When we are fully renovated we’ll have around 200 kids. And we’ll market it as high quality daycare. Maybe we’ll talk about it being conservative, but we’ll do it with excellence. We don’t have to target the Jewish community because we’re in the Jewish community. Daycare wasn’t my original vision, but it became very obvious – if we serve the community with day care we’ll be overflowing. But I don’t know if that’s a good thing for Boise. There’s a lot of other things that you could house in that building. One of the most successful ministries we support in Israel is a Brazilian Jujitsu studio. They’re growing exponentially, engaging Israelis who want to learn it, and they’re coming to faith because they’re building relationships with them. It’s innovative, and it’s working. And I don’t know if Brazilian Jujitsu is the thing for you. But that’s an idea.
JR: Did you do a market analysis to figure out that daycare was the thing that you should do? How did you come to figure that out.
JB: It was really obvious because there were so many families I encountered that said that they couldn’t get into daycare. They’re waiting for us. But yes, I also had a partner that was doing demographic research for us. And remember, we’re not going to run a daycare, we’re going to partner with a daycare. And the income will cover all of the expenses in the building, so that all of the tithes will go into our programs and not to the building. It’s a building 10 times the size of what we need, but not if you have partners. Not with the day care and everything else. If you can get into an 8 million dollar building and it takes only 60% of your building space, and it’s free on the weekends, that’s a deal. If you can fill the space with weekday income that’s a win. Plus the traffic – if you have a luncheonette in there, or some kind of a restaurant, a coffee shop – whatever brings traffic in – and we start to build relationships – that’s the idea! And I think it’s sound, I think it will work, and I know from other entities outside of the Messianic movement that it does work. Mega churches that were actually declining, and they started daycare and they’re growing again because they’re getting more families. You get all these classrooms that are occupied during the week but on the weekends they’re for the congregation.
So, I’m just sharing a new concept. You’ve got to do the demographic work.
EZ: Wedding venue spaces are needed in Idaho. (side chatter about most weddings being on weekends and whether that would work)
JB: That’s what churches are doing in South Korea. They’re building wedding venues and they’re getting traffic flow. If you have the best wedding chapel environment in Boise, you’re going to get huge income from it and huge traffic from it, and you’d have a building size way beyond your needs.
EZ: When I was calling around in the Nampa area, the standard cost is $5-6k for half a day. It’s through the roof. (chatter about Sunday through Friday weddings)
JB: Go to South Korea and I’ll set you up with some of the churches doing wedding chapels there – they’re mind-blowing!
MR: Okay, so this has been incredible, because of the ideas that we hadn’t considered before and I’m feeling very validated. I think I was feeling like I needed to have permission, like, “Oh – hey – I want to do this thing and will it work?” And I think it would. And to hear you saying well this is what we’re doing already.
JB: Guys, don’t rent Saturday from a church, rent to them. And again, how do you get a flow of money? By serving people. If you serve people with they want or need, income follows. So you should be the ones renting to churches.
MR: That was what we were thinking, was that we would find at least 2 churches to rent to on the weekend and that would get us halfway to where we needed to be for our mortgage.
JB: And then add 4-5 things to it and then the building you can buy is way bigger. And you can literally take that to the bank.
MR: Man, this is such an awesome conversation.
JB: Well, I really hope to see you guys again soon. (discussion about Arch coming up). The target age for the Messianic movement really has to be the 18-45 group because they’re going to be the most open to the gospel. You’ll get some baby boomers too, and that’s great because if you have a multi-generational congregation, that’s a really healthy thing.
There are four groups that we’re trying to reach.
- Former Messianic believers – people who grew up in the Messianic movement but left
- Christians that don’t identify as Jewish but they have a Jewish parent or grandparent. If you ask them if they’re Jewish they say, “no but my father/mother is.” That’s a big demographic. It’s just a little flip of the switch to, “I am Jewish and that means something!”
- Three is going after intermarrieds. Young intermarrieds are trying to figure out how do we raise our kids – Jewish or Christian? Our message is both, right?
- Then the last one is secular Jews that identify as Jewish but aren’t spiritual, aren’t Jewish literate. They just know they’re Jewish, and they’re the most open to the gospel.
Don’t waste your time trying to build something that the orthodox will come to. You’ll never do it good enough for them.
MR: That was one of the things we had considered actually – broadcasting like on the Christian stations and saying, “Hey, if you have a Jewish parent, come to this event and learn what it means for you.”
JB: You also want Christians who aren’t Jewish that have a real heart for reaching Jewish people – not Jewish things. You don’t want them coming in saying, “We’re really committed to keeping the dietary laws and Shabbat, because then they make that the focus. You don’t want to do that in a Messianic congregation. You don’t want to be a Jewish roots thing where people aren’t Jewish want to be Jewish. You want Gentiles who say I’m Gentile but I love the Jewish people and I feel God’s called me to work to help reach them. Those are the ones you want. And then there’s got to be equal partnership with Jews and people who aren’t Jewish. You don’t want to create an environment where people who aren’t Jewish feel like they’re lacking if they’re not Jewish. You want the one new man. If you don’t protect that, you get into this legalism – like everybody must keep the Shabbat and only walk 10 paces, and you know there’s a “pork patrol” out – the dietary laws become elevated. It’s great to keep the dietary laws but if it becomes a priority, they’re the wrong people. You’ve got to squash that because it builds an unhealthy community. Anyway, those are all things to keep in mind when you’re building.
MR: We’ve been pretty intentional about that sort of thing, and I think we have a pretty inclusive and welcoming group. (Continued conversation about the importance of eating together and other things that our community is doing well.)