I’m spending the weekend at the Catholic New Media Conference and quite frankly, I’m impressed. The quality of the speakers, the content, and the questions are on par with any secular social media conference I’ve seen. There’s about 120 people here from a broad spectrum of parishes and dioceses and they’re all excited and engaged.
In my day job at LPi, I have the opportunity to talk to many churches who aren’t yet embracing new media. This can be at times disheartening. Here at this conference though it’s clear that there is an increasing minority that do indeed “get it”. While these attendees may be a minority, they do get it, and more importantly they’re doing their part to make it happen.
The conference’s twitter feed, #cnmc11, is very active. While contributing to this feed, something seemingly small and insignificant happened, Bishop Coyne (@bishipcoyne), re-tweeted a post of mine. I stopped and thought about that. A Bishop re-tweeted my post? In the past, I could of never imagined a bishop on Twitter yet responding to a layperson like me.
The 2 or three clicks that Bishop Coyne did, tells me the Catholic Church is climbing the technology hurdle and overcoming the fear and resistance of many-to-many communication that is social media. The church is indeed starting to turn the corner on the adoption of new media.
If you want to get in on the conversation at this conference join the live stream here, http://sqpn.com/sqpn-live/
We are on our way!
