Weekly THIS AND THAT for September 3, 2006: A Blogging Church -- Ways to Reach New and Younger Audiences

This and That:
A Blogging Church – Ways to Reach New and Younger Audiences

It all began years ago with Ed Mullin, our parish Webmaster, suggesting that since I produce a bulletin note of some length and write out my homilies that I put them up on the parish homepage each week for others to see. It was a great idea and that was four years ago. The effort has paid dividends. I now have about 300 families receiving the weekly message, “This and That” bulletin column, and homily. Earlier this summer, I realized that it was time to move to another level of cyberspace pastoring – the blog!

Many have commented that each of the three items on the homepage – and which are emailed automatically to 300 others each week – differ both in content and appeal. The Weekly Message is generally something that’s going on at Our Lady of Grace or within the Church at large. The “This and That” is more of a reflection on current events, humor (one out of four to keep folks reading), homespun philosophy, or stories that make a salient point. So why not get this weekly material onto my own blog and disseminate it even more?

Blogs are very personal and interactive sites where anyone can say anything (almost anything, they are self-supervised for offensive material). I am looking forward to this new ministry where I can share our faith with a much wider community. Who knows where it will go? I say that realizing that one of our parishioners down loads the audio homily files from our parish homepage and plays them in his car on the way to work! And while I’m flattered, I’m also amazed at the communication potential for spreading the Word of God via the Internet.

It seems that as a pastor I need to be looking at connecting people using the same formats that they use so readily. Blogging seems to be a way of relating and sharing information that our youth find very appealing. Given the low Mass attendance we see in our parishes, it only makes sense to employ the new technology of the young – blogging. What a great way to get folks to begin thinking about their faith and perhaps taking it more seriously.

I recently read of pastor in Washington, D.C. who spends up to 20 percent of his day updating his blog. He used to think that blogging supplemented his weekly message to his congregation. By the very fact that his blog draws some 25,000 visitors a month, it really may be the other way around. Think of the potential for getting the message of Jesus out to folks! One wonders why a parish like Our Lady of Grace, with so many younger members, children at college, and young adults, would not get into blogging?

Did you know that every single day 75,000 new blogs are created by folks from all walks of life? What is different is that as a “blogging pastor,” who is willing to share a great deal of his daily life and ministry with the world, so to speak, does reflect a shift in the relationship people expect to have with their priest. At the moment, I’m waiting for a book to be published called “The Blogging Church” by Brian Bailey. It is about how churches can use the medium to reach out to their members. When you think about it, blogs provide a unique opportunity for people to feel more invested in their Church, even if the pastor does not have time for a face-to-face meeting. Blogging affords people the opportunity of interacting in a public forum around a homily or bulletin note that struck them in some way and to hear what others thought about it, as well as to have the preacher who wrote about it participate in the discussion in a very direct way. It can also keep folks up-to-date on a day-to-day basic with photos of a project of concern that may be of interest to those visiting the site.

In a nutshell, as I see it, pastoral blogging is about having an interactive forum for issues of faith and religion and to get people thinking about both on a daily basis and sometimes in untraditional ways. There is no question that there is still something in our secular culture that recognizes the role of a spiritual leader and blogging may be the technology to make that happen. My hope is that my blog will not only be a professional, but also a personal way, for me to interact with others. There no doubt that it can also serve as a portal connecting inquirers or participants to formal Church structures such as a parish and the ministries, programs, and services that are available at the parish website.

Unlike preaching from the sanctuary, virtual preaching allows pastor-bloggers to reach people from all over the world. How times have changed from the early years of Catholicism in Southern Maryland when preachers, especially Jesuit missionaries, road up and down that part of Maryland at 10-mile mission outposts preaching the Word and then moving on to the next mission.

I would invite you to visit my new blog at http://frnickamato.blogspot.com. At the end of the page there is a place to leave comments regarding anything you have read or anything you might like to say.