“This App is an invitation to engage with a process of generating hope,
solidarity and healing in a society that is fractured and hurting in many ways.” – Bishop McKeown

Some will caricature this as just a churchy gimmick that will try to give the impression of modernity to something that is passé, a vain attempt to market something that belongs to yesterday. I know that, for very many young people in modern Ireland, the word ‘vocation’ is not a meaningful term and they have little idea what clergy do, other than for an hour or two on Sundays. But the social media is where young people are.

From my own little venture onto Facebook, I am very aware that this is how news travels. This is the market place, this is the public square. Like Jesus, who hung around where people were, and who thus met Matthew the tax collector, the Samaritan woman and the lepers, if we claim to speak in his name, we have to be in the public forum, like St Paul on the Areopagus, ready to engage with people where they are.

But, like all vocations promotion, this App is not primarily a recruitment exercise. It seeks to engage with people on their journey and helping them to engage with their own story. Vocations work never seeks just to get people to sign up, to sign their life away. It can only be there to help people get into conversation with themselves, with their own life story – and thus help them to discern where call in calling them, what truth that lies in the depths of their hearts, how they can be truest to themselves.

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