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Notice the insensitive but correct comment from:
BOB PRITCHARD: And if you look at the Hillsong website on the other hand, it's contemporary, it's sophisticated, it's fun. It's all about training you for a life of significance and, you know, your life of significance keeps flashing up. It's all about you, it's not about God at all.My comments on this:
First of all, Bob is correct that a website must be all about you. Specially if its trying to sell anything -- even faith.
However, to say "Its not about God at all" when describing Hillsong slaps Hillsong in the face to an extent.
There's also the small fact the there are practicing Catholics inside Hillsong Church.
There's also the small fact that Hillsong's membership is completely dwarfed by the Catholic Church world wide.
But yes, with regards to website design, of course most sites are better than the Vatican but not all sites Catholic is URL'd Vatican.VA. There's scores of All about You sites, like
http://www.Bosanchez.ph or even http://www.catholic.com. And of course who co uld forget the perhaps longest running Religious Video Podcast: Preacher In Blue Jeans. It's even probable that Bob hasn't even been to the Wordpressed glory of SQPN? These are all Catholics making a difference in the Internet. Let it not be said that the church who gave birth to almost all the renaissance art - doesn't know a thing about beautiful sites.
I think there needs to be proper perspective here.
The interview in whole:
(PM - Monday, 9 July , 2007 18:50:00 Reporter: Ashley Hall)
MARK COLVIN: In these days of short attention spans, with a seemingly endless supply of new diversions, the Catholic Church in Australia is facing a quandary.
Next year's World Youth Day celebrations are expected to entice a large number of young people to the Catholic faith.
But who will be there to greet them? And how can the church encourage back into the fold the estimated 4.2-million Australians who call themselves lapsed Catholics?
Ashley Hall reports.
ASHLEY HALL: The Catholic Church in Australia is facing a huge challenge.
How can it encourage its lapsed members back into the fold?
JOHN BATHERSBY: There are a number of people who are alienated from the Church, feel that it may be in some way old fashioned, too authoritarian, but I'm not sure that that's the major reason. It's seems to me that the people I've come in contact with give as an excuse that life is just too busy.
ASHLEY HALL: The Archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, is at the front of a mission to welcome worshippers home to the church, in time for World Youth Day next year.
The Australian Bishops Conference estimates up to 4.2 million people identify as Catholic, but don't regularly attend church. And about half of them could be drawn back by parish outreach programs.
JOHN BATHERSBY: People like that would need opportunities where they can talk about perhaps what has caused pain in their life, and it may be as simple as just a disagreement at some time with a priest, and maybe a disagreement over, over particular matters of morality. It may be those things. And I think people like that would need to be able to talk things through and to feel that they are still very much welcome in the Church and that, that the parishes would like to see them back in their midst.
ASHLEY HALL: A national recruitment office has been set up, and each parish is being urged to develop a strategy to bolster its numbers.
But the Religious Affairs Commentator for the Sydney Morning Herald, Chris McGillion believes the Church may be underestimating the number of people who've fled because they're uncomfortable with aspects of its doctrine.
CHRIS MCGILLON: They're well known these days. One is the ban on artificial contraception, the other is a ban on even discussing the possibility of women priests. There's a good deal of disenchantment with the continuing insistence on a celibate priesthood. There's disenchantment over attempts to kind of marginalise homosexuals in the life of the Church and so forth. These kinds of Catholics are largely the kind of middle to liberal progressive Catholics, who in many cases very much still cherish their Catholic culture and even their Catholic rituals, but are disconnected from the institutional Church on the, on the basis of its teaching.
ASHLEY HALL: And those lapsed Catholics, he says, would be difficult to bring back into the church, especially via a parish-based campaign.
BOB PRITCHARD: The Catholic Church is all about guilt, it's judgemental, the website looks like something from the Da Vinci Code, half of it's in Latin.
ASHLEY HALL: The marketing guru Bob Pritchard says the Catholic Church could learn a thing or two about recruitment from the Hillsong Church, where membership lists continue to grow.
BOB PRITCHARD: And if you look at the Hillsong website on the other hand, it's contemporary, it's sophisticated, it's fun. It's all about training you for a life of significance and, you know, your life of significance keeps flashing up. It's all about you, it's not about God at all.
ASHLEY HALL: Archbishop John Bathersby is planning to do exactly that.
JOHN BATHERSBY: We should be able to learn from all those things. But I think, ultimately I think we're still in a growing process.
ASHLEY HALL: And growing quickly, it seems.
Newspaper advertisements placed as part of the recruitment campaign are already paying dividends.
The Catholic Enquiry Centre has received 700 calls in the past three weeks.
MARK COLVIN: But doing some lightning mental arithmetic, even if all those 700 calls were translated into conversions as it were, and projecting it over the next year, that'd still only be an extra 12,000 members of the Church. Ashley Hall reporting.
From: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1973960.htm
