Social media in the enhancement of evangelization among the youth of Pakele Parish in light of Christus Vivit

Abstract

The Net has transformed into a social network, a place of participation and sharing. It connects ordinary people who want to share thoughts, knowledge and parts of their lives as well (Spadaro, 2014). Many people use social media to keep in contact with friends and families and some use it to communicate and interact with different communities. Inevitably, this shapes the way participants conceive the world and their own place particularly the youth. In this line of thought, human life and technological history have it that Mass (social) media is now at the centre of human life especially in the situation of the youth of today. The researcher identifies this as possible signs and indications of effective evangelization among the youth and the people of God. On a sad note, however, majority of the youth in Pakele Parish and elsewhere (Uganda) and in the world have seemingly failed to utilize this opportunity very well for proper development (evangelization). As a result, social media that should have given them opportunity to know Christ has turned out to be a nuisance sometimes. Hence, instead of carrying out evangelization with social media, they specialize in immorality, for example, fuelling violence, hate and promoting nude pictures, addiction, development of habits like self-isolation, copy and paste behaviours, spreading of rumour, inadequate sleep which leads to depression, low self-esteem, cyber bullying and hacking. This is a perfect mismatch because these behaviours are directly opposite to evangelization strategy. This paper presents findings of the study of young people’s use of social media for effective evangelization. The study used questionnaires with one hundred eighty one (181) youth and in-depth interview with sixteen (16) people aged 13-35 years in Pakele Parish. Findings showed that many of the young people in this setup use smart phones, which is a possible sign for evangelization. And WhatsApp is so far the most popular Social Network Site (SNS) used by the young people. However, they keep shifting from one site to another depending on their feelings which makes them to look for what gratifies their feelings, hence, avoiding that which is hard but necessary; and eventually, it has resulted into mischievous behaviours among them. The real gap the study, therefore, identified is lack of serious integrity and commitment to the use of social media for evangelization among the youth of Pakele Parish. Hence, there is need to seriously educate the youth on the value of integrity which has so far defeated their pursuit, as a way of helping them to positively use social media for effective evangelization. This is a civic duty and it demands that we lay off our egos, the researcher concluded