Dear Friends,
Our present pandemic crisis has speeded up a social change that was already transforming almost all parts of life. That change is the reality of living in a social media age. It is filled with both blessing and challenge.
Let me ask you, before you use the bathroom in the morning, do you check your phone? Before a prayer is on your lips or slippers are on your feet, is your phone in your hands? Are you checking email, news, and social media before you have breakfast in the morning? And, is it not just the first thing in the morning, but do you have digital experiences throughout the day?
The world has changed and changed quickly. These new tools consume our home lives, social activities, and career paths. It is how we order food, plan our vacations, get our news, track our exercise, manage our appliances, turn off our lights, and for work many of us sit in front of a computer all day long. With the simple touch of a button, the swipe of a finger, an utterance, or a focused view of our face, we are connected, empowered, and informed by and with our multiple devices.
Like it or not, this has changed the way we view church. Thank goodness during COVID we have been able to stay in touch with our parishioners through those many methods. We have been able to enter your homes with Mass online and send you this weekly letter and further your spiritual growth through online options like Alpha and The Wild Goose.
I have been listening to many church leaders who are struggling to figure out where we go from here because “church” no longer seems to be strictly location based. We used to go to “church”. Now “church” is where we live and is with us throughout the day whenever we need a bit of help with a prayer or something to remind us that God is present.
Some of these changes can feel a bit unsettling. The Barna Group, which studies church patterns, makes this point: “Generation Z’s lower cognitive regions, which stimulate impulse, are constantly being activated by the bombardment of neurological arousal provided by text messages, Facebook updates, and video games. At the same time, the so-called Google culture of learning— finding answers to any question within seconds—continues to change the way Generation Z youth concentrate, write, and reflect…Their capacity for linear thinking has been replaced by a new mode of thinking, in which they need to take in and dish out information in a fast, disjointed, overlapping manner.” This is likely true of older adults as well. Is your phone with you while you eat, when you are conversing with loved ones, while you drive or watch a movie? Is everything overlapping?
What this means for us at Cabrini is that every member increasingly comes to us from a digitally connected world. Parishioners are empowered, informed, and influenced by digital information at an unprecedented pace and scale. The things that matter most to people today are received on screens and inter-faces that connect with their careers, homes, health, family, education, travel, finances, and more. This connectivity will only continue to grow dramatically as each digital system speeds up and becomes easier to use.
I know that when the COVID crisis ends next year we will not return to the church we were. As the Barna Group likes to say, this is not an interruption but a disruption. We will have changed. We will continue to need to provide church on a digital platform or we will not exist in the future. This does not mean that face to face encounters will go away. We will continue to be a social people that does church together, but we will also need to be readily available to those who are looking for us at this moment.
To accomplish some of that task we need your help. I will be sending out a letter in the next week asking for your financial help to make some of this happen.
If you have been in church, then you may have noticed that we have mounted cameras on the choir loft to record the Mass. We have also bought the hardware and software needed to bring a high-quality presentation of the Mass into your homes. None of that was cheap. We are also completely rebuilding our website so that it will provide more materials for you and our visitors. It should also provide easier access to our digital history. We have joined Formed.org so that you can go there as a parishioner and learn about Scripture, spirituality, saints, etc. The parish pays a yearly fee so that parishioners can watch it without cost. When you find nothing good to watch on cable, you can go to Formed.org and watch a movie about Jesus or a saint or a series covering some aspect of our faith.
I imagine that these steps are only the beginning. For example, I am going to have to learn how to teach a bible study in the next couple weeks that will be both live and online. There will be more in the future. Ready or not, here it comes.
Equipping our parishioners digitally will hopefully make the faith more relevant in your life, increase your spiritual knowledge, and empower you to share the gospel— digitally. Without this shift, the church is at risk of losing meaningful connections with the people that will be its future. I imagine that when the printing press was invented, the monks who were transcribing Bibles thought it was a really bad thing. Or those who first heard a radio or saw Bishop Sheen preaching on TV thought that it was a step away from really being church. God was working through it all, however, and today the communication blessing comes in the form of digital media. We at Cabrini are committed to making “church” happen no matter what the medium may be.
Peace,
Fr. Damian