Maku Tasks Catholic Church On Internet Evangelism

L-R: Governors Sullivan Chime of Enugu State, Theodore Orji of Abia, Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State, Liyel Imoke of Cross River State, Peter Obi of Anambra State, Deputies John Gboribiogha of Bayelsa and David Umahi of Ebonyi, at the South-East South-South, Governors meeting in Enugu, recently.

The Minister of
Information, Mr Labaran Maku, has called on the Catholic Church to embrace the use of internet for evangelism.
Maku made the call at a teleconference with students of Bigard Memorial Seminary in Enugu.
He urged the church to use the medium to counter unwholesome messages being spread to young people through same channel.
The minister said that such messages easily got viral if not challenged, saying that the church was in the right stead to counter such messages.
“Today, evangelism is going on at a level we never imagined. The Catholic Church should make these facilities available in its institutions, not only at the level of the leadership.
“We no longer need to be limited by communication because God in His infinite mercies has provided these facilities’’, he said.
The minister, however, said that the challenge was how to deploy the facilities to good use, saying that the church should take the initiative to deploy them to the service of humanity.
On his part, Rev. Fr. Walter Ihejirika decried the way the universal church had treated communication in its pastoral work.
In his paper: New Media and Effective Pastoral Ministry – Practical Lines of Action for Catholic Priests in Nigeria, he said the church had been slow in appreciating the role of mass media in evangelism.
Ihejirika, the Head of Department of Linguistics and Communication Studies at the University of Port Harcourt, said communication was central in the life of the church.
He stressed that anything not communicated was incomplete.
Mrs Miriam Menkiti of Purity FM, Awka and Rev. Fr. Patrick Chibuko of the Catholic Institute of West Africa, Port Harcourt, also presented papers at the conference organised by the Mission Club of the seminary.
It was part of its 12th Mission and Pastoral Weekend with the theme: Evangelism in the Face of Modern Communication Media.