The Most Reverend Mathew Kwasi Gyamfi, the President of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference at the weekend urged parishes and catholic institutions to leverage social media and sharpen the narratives of the Catholic Church.
He said the new media offered enormous opportunities for the church to intensify evangelism by projecting the doctrines and teachings of the church and to advance the Kingdom of God.
“Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ordered us to preach every corner of the earth. All can’t be priests, and we should leverage on the digital space to achieve that mandate,” Mt Rev Gyamfi, also the Bishop of the Sunyani Catholic Diocese stated.
He was speaking at the day’s media training organized by the Department of Social Communication (DEPSOCOM) of the Sunyani Catholic Diocese in Sunyani.
The day’s training sought to provide the requisite skills and thereby empower some volunteers from the various parishes and catholic institutions under the diocese to use social media actively to project activities of their respective parishes and institutions.
It was attended by about 80 volunteers drawn from 51 parishes and catholic institutions within the diocese.
Mt Rev Gyamfi expressed worry that the world had evolved with technology speedily advancing however the Catholic Church and some of its institutions still lacked in efficient communication, hence the need for the diocese to empower the parishes to “tell our stories and achievements, as we advance evangelism in the digital space.”
He entreated the parishes to adopt the spirit of volunteering and community service, while preaching the word of God online.
The Rev Father George Kumi-Mensah, the DEPSOCOM Director for the Sunyani Catholic Diocese, said modern technology had made it easier to propagate the gospel message, saying as technology evolved, the was the need for the catholic church to leverage on it too.
He said the church faced challenges in effective communication towards spreading the gospel in the digital age, hence the need to train the volunteers, saying “we don’t need to get stuck as a church as technology evolved.”
Describing the new media as a digital continent, Rev Fr Kumi-Mensah said: “people come to the social media to seek meaning for their lives and we must also use it to give meaning to them by preaching the gospel message.”
He therefore urged the participants to go back to their respective parishes and to use the new media tools to tell the stories of the spiritual and social events of the parishes and the educational and health facilities too.
Mrs. Victoria Nana Ama Figyina Adu of the Department of Communications at the Sunyani Technical University and Mr. Vincent Amankona of the Catholic University of Ghana (CUG) took the participants through news writing and reporting, data protection and hacking social media accounts as well as news blog creation and management.
GNA