EXCERPT:
Sometimes I wonder: are our parishes really serious about reaching out to the next generation?
Several weeks ago I was conducting a year-end retreat day for a parish staff. A top priority for the upcoming year was “promoting a vibrant virtual community.” They recognized the fact that younger Catholics lead professional, social, and even family lives that mix live, in-person contact with virtual, online connections. Common sense dictates that if parish life does not join in that mix, those people may not join in parish life. In other words, we are long past the point where churches can ignore how people’s lives have been reshaped by the Internet and still expect to reach them.
Which brings me to the matter of parish websites.
When I began writing CrossCurrents in 2003 I conceived it as a resource that parishes might add to enhance their web sites. By adding an adult faith-formation piece, websites could become more than just parish directories or online bulletins. They could become educational tools and even instruments for community-building.
In those days many parishes had no website at all, and those that did were often offering sparse and static parish profiles. But recently I’ve surveyed more than 200 sites and noticed a dramatic change. In 2011, most parishes do have websites, and most of these features several pages of parish information, access to the parish bulletin, and links to other (usually official) Catholic sites.
You would think such online communication would be an increasingly important key to reaching and retaining the next generations--people from 15 to 50, for whom establishing and maintaining relationships online has become second nature.
That is, you would expect an evolution of parish websites toward a more transparent, more accessible, more welcoming online community--a virtual community, to be sure, but one that could serve the next generation as a gateway into parish life.
Now, in my research, I assumed it might be expecting too much to look for real interactive online features: a pastor’s blog, a Facebook page, or Twitter link, let alone chat forums or instant messaging or even teleconferencing. No, I thought, I would settle for the simplest, most basic form of online communications (community, after all, presumes communications). I would simply check websites for their e-mail connections.
The results astonished me.
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In sum, while collecting more than 500 addresses, I almost never found a website that offered online pastoral staff contact up front on the main website page. Most website home pages proclaim “welcome to all” but are not actually welcoming. Many even say “we look forward to hearing from you” but do not tell visitors how to do that.
What is going on here?
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Limiting access reduces the flow of incoming communication to a trickle, thus depriving parish leaders of a valuable and free source of information and insight about the very generation that our future depends on--a generation many leaders struggle to understand.
Also, it sends the wrong message about our intentions. It creates the impression that any talk of outreach, hospitality, and welcoming to younger Catholics is mere lip service--a public gesture we fail to back up by actually making contact as easy and comfortable as possible. In short, we risk undermining the credibility of our efforts to evangelize.
Finally, it reinforces the worst impression about the institutional church: that it is out of touch, with outmoded ways disengaged from contemporary life, too busy protecting itself from the world to adapt its methods and avoid obsolescence. In a word, we risk reinforcing the impression that the Catholic Church is irrelevant to people’s lives.
I cannot see any theological or pastoral justifications for creating the impression that Catholic tradition is not only old but also old-fashioned. Catholic parishes simply cannot afford to put their online identity and presence on the back burner--let alone behind a protective barrier.
Parish leaders may think that limiting e-mail access (not to mention avoiding Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, blogs, and teleconferencing) will keep people at a safe distance--but it’s actually a dangerous distance, for it endangers our very future.
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