Marketing catechism

Our bishops are ever more aware that the biggest challenge facing the Church today is the education of the laity–particularly young people, who simply do not understand what the Catholic Church is all about.

One would hope that such education would not be a one-way street. Religious organisations need to bear in mind that people nowadays live at a sometimes hectic pace, with their attention increasingly distracted by movies, sport, an all-invasive Internet, and the marketing process, with its basic fundamental of motivating consumers in a certain direction.

A classic example of how marketing can play a constructive role in the Church was an experiment conducted in a Durban parish about 30 years ago. It all started with catechism and a parish priest who refused to accept mothers of Catholic children attending government schools dragging their offspring to catechism classes at the church–offspring who cared little about who made them, apples in the garden of Eden, or loving their neighbours.

Adults too arrive for Sunday Mass with little else on their minds but weekend sport, hassles at home, or goings-on at the office. Mass to many has become a Sunday routine with about as much religious or intellectual stimulation as an afternoon stroll around a shopping mall.

Those catechism classes seemed so pointless–the kids clearly didn’t want to be there, their parents found it a pain to fetch and carry, and only did so because they didn’t want to burn in hell.

In desperation the priest asked some marketers in the parish if they could help make the kids look forward to catechism, and to learn something about what it meant to be a Christian.

A plan was hatched, and after catechism one day the kids were asked to bring their cricket kit the following week.

Word got around and suddenly there were more kids than normal. Catechism took place outside and the kids were introduced to a session of “Christian Cricket”. It was just like the normal game only the objective of the exercise was that every child had to concentrate 100% on making sure that every other kid was having more fun than they were.

They took to it with enthusiasm. The good players insisted on the poorer performers having more chances to bat and bowl and instead of howls of derision when catches were dropped, the guilty player would be surrounded by all the others and there would be pats on the back, assurances that even Springbok cricketers dropped catches and genuine offers of help and coaching.

Shy and self-conscious lame ducks were made to feel like princes by their peers.

Suddenly a bunch of self-centred, uninterested, dragged-to-catechism-by-their-ears Catholic kids had discovered the joy of giving. The very fundamental of Christian and Catholic life.

And so the catechism classes grew, and alternated between “Christian Cricket” one week and a lesson in the classroom the following where instruction from the catechism book relied on cricket analogies to get points across.

It succeeded in creating Christian understanding, but sadly was eventually abandoned because more and more mothers complained that they wouldn’t forsake their shopping sprees and tea-parties just for their kids to play cricket.

This misperception of being Church still exists today, and calls for a long-term programme of education by clergy for laity.

The Church also needs to apply those marketing methods that turned Christian Cricket into meaningful catechism, to bringing about a closer more relevant appreciation of the Church by a currently very distracted and lackadaisical laity.