Saturday, May 23, 2015

A New Look


Welcome to The Flock's Feed- the official blog of Good Shepherd Catholic Parish.  As part of our continued effort to serve the people of Good Shepherd, we have introduced a new suite of tools to reach our parishioners, visitors, and others more effectively through avenues of new media.

For over 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has been working to evangelize, spread the Good News of Jesus Christ, to all the world.  With over 1 billion people worldwide, the Church has done a pretty good job at getting her message out to the masses.  As we have come into this age of technology and social media, however, the Church has sometimes lagged behind in adapting to new ways of communication.

On the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down to the first Apostles and gave them the mission to go out and spread the message of Christ to all nations.  So today, on this Feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Universal Church AND our first parish mass celebrated as a community, it is most appropriate that we introduce to you our refreshed and renewed communication means!

The weekly bulletin has been a mainstay of Catholic parishes forever.  Every once and a while, it is good to freshen things up.  As you have seen on this Pentecost weekend, our bulletin has a refreshed look with a new cover page and inside layout.  You will find a lot of the same information it each bulletin with just a slightly different look.  Bulletins are important because the parish is able to transmit a large amount of information directly to the people who come to mass each week.  

The largest amount of new media usage comes through the Internet.  You will notice we have revamped our parish website, from which you probably came to this page from.  The website is built through a content management system known as eCatholic, a company that was started by a group of Catholic men looking to make a difference in Catholic communications.  Recently our diocese, the Diocese of Paterson, has made a connection with eCatholic and has encouraged all parishes to look into the use of this hosting system for their websites.  Our website, like the bulletin, has a lot of the same information you could find on the former site plus more!  You will find information about our parish history, the sacraments, our ministries, ways that you can get involved, and resources to other helpful Catholic sites.  You will also find our weekly bulletin, our parish calendar, and Religious Education class schedules.  It has a fresh look with new pictures of our beautiful church building and the gems in and around it.  Make sure you mark goodshepherdrc.org in your favorites list so you can come back easily each time.

On the website you will also see links to our social media pages on Twitter and Facebook.  Since both of these platforms are quite prevalent among a variety of age groups, we hope to use Facebook and Twitter has a means of quick communication and open discussion and sharing among our followers.  

In the coming months, we hope to introduce you to these newer ways of communicating for us as a parish.  We will strive to keep our pages and sites current and vibrant as it is our hope that you will not only rely on them for information, but enjoy visiting them as well to help you learn about the faith and deepen your own spiritual life!

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