The internet is a continually changing environment. There are always new websites and technologies launching on an almost daily basis; the pace of change is that quick! And as adoption of the internet as a part of ‘normal’ life continues unabated, it’s a good idea to look at the need to stay current.

Take, for example, websites. While recently planning a night out with my wife, I checked out the website of a restaurant near the cinema we were going to. According to the website, everything was looking good – the food, the location, the prices: all were on target. Even the design of the website impressed.
However, upon calling to make a reservation, I discovered that the restaurant had gone out of business. I was more than a little surprised! Such a professional looking site, still up and running like nothing had happened.

While, thankfully, the Church doesn’t close parishes on a regular basis, the number of Church organisations that have websites that have not been updated for months or even years is astonishing. This is almost as bad as not having a website presence at all! Almost.

For parishes in New Zealand, there really isn’t a technical reason why they cannot have an easily updatable website. Free content management systems – like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – provide the ability to establish websites that can be updated by non-technical folk without too much trouble at all. In fact, in Auckland, the Spoke Project (www.spoke.net.nz) was established a number of years ago specifically with the mission of bringing this technology to our parishes and Church organisations.

It’s strange, therefore, that even with the ease of use and low cost of these options, some websites are static snapshots of the history of a parish, rather than dynamic pointers to the present and future.

In the past week, there has been an excellent Congress held on digital media in Italy, called "Testimoni digitali. Volti e linguaggi nell’era crossmediale" [Digital Witnesses. Faces and Languages in the Cross-Media Age]. For an insiders view of what the conference was like, check out our favourite priest from the Netherlands – Father Roderick (http://fatherroderick.sqpn.com) However, I’d like to focus this article on the closing address Pope Benedict XVI gave.

In his address, the pope talked about the challenge the world faces with the advent of the internet – the expansion of communication on a global scale and across multiple forms of media comes with the risk of both creating a new divide between those that have access and those that don’t, and also the risk of people becoming lost within the digital world – without a clear moral compass.

The attendees were called by the pope, as we are all called, to bring a human face to these new forms of media to counter the anonymity of the internet – thus helping the men and women of our digital age to sense the Lord’s presence.

To finish, in the words of Pope Benedict:

‘Let us set sail on the digital sea fearlessly, confronting open navigation with the same enthusiasm that has steered the Barque of the Church for 2,000 years. Rather than for technical resources, although these are necessary, let us also qualify ourselves by dwelling in this world with a believing heart that helps to give a soul to the ceaseless flow of communications that makes up the web.

This is our mission, the inalienable mission of the Church.’