The Catechism as a podcast
No time to read? You don’t enjoy paging through a book nor do you feel like installing the Catechism app on your mobile device? No problem! Starting in January 2016 you can listen to the Catechism.
“Starting in January 2016 a weekly podcast will be published on Fridays with the Catechism in Questions and Answers. These podcasts run about six minutes and can be subscribed to free of charge from a podcast distributor via your smartphone,” Bishop Manfred Bruns explains. He is the project co-ordinator of the Working Group Instructions for Ministers and has been working on this project on behalf of the New Apostolic Church International for several months with other brothers and sisters.
Podcasts are audio files that can be subscribed to and downloaded on any MP3 player, smartphone, or tablet and played. Several podcast distributors also allow for streaming on a website. Once the podcast has been subscribed to, it will regularly check for and download new files in the series for you.
The target group for this new media offer are all members, but especially the youth and ministers, who generally like to be well-informed even when they are on the go. “These Catechism podcasts are also ideal for members who have difficulty reading,” Bishop Bruns says.
Finding narrators
The podcast is based on the Catechism in Questions and Answers that was published in September 2015. Reader-friendliness was paramount in this new version of the Catechism. The 13 topics of the Catechism were divided into a large number of questions and answers, 750 to be exact. And these consecutive questions and answers were used to create the new podcast.
“We did a kind of casting and found two sisters who were prepared to help out on a voluntary basis and narrate the questions. For the answers we managed to find a brother who, as an actor, has had professional voice training,” the project coordinator reports. The recording and the editing were done by the audio-visual team of the New Apostolic Church in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany).
German-language podcasts only for now
From an international perspective there is one disadvantage. The podcasts are currently available in the German language only. A concept for other languages has been developed. On account of the complexity of the matter, however, the project is going to be tested in one language. If the offer is well received, other languages may follow.
Stay tuned!
Those who stay tuned and listen to all the podcasts will know everything there is to know about the Catechism by the end of 2016. The short podcasts are “food for thought on matters of faith”, Bishop Bruns says.
Distributing teaching contents in podcasts is a fairly new form of media use. Whether there will be further projects has not been decided. “We will analyze the user data to see whether podcasts are an ideal medium for instruction and training in Church matters and disseminating information.”
Free download starting January 2016
You can download the Catechism as a podcast starting January 2016. Information from the podcast distributor will follow shortly. Until then the Catechism can continue to be explored on the websites of the New Apostolic Church nak.org and nacworld.net.
In addition to this, the New Apostolic Church also offers the two versions of the Catechism as a free app:
1. The long version of the Catechism for iOS and for Android.
2. Catechism in Questions and Answers for iOS and for Android.
