Faith and trust

The Christmas holidays are ending and the number of believers will simultaneously dwindle. Sociologists affirm that only 30% of all people that consider themselves religiously faithful attend church services 12 times a year, though 74% of Ukrainians are pious.

The problems with such "virtual" believers are more evident in the big cities, as people living in rural areas traditionally attend church on a regular basis. Residents of the "concrete jungle" either have no time for church or the church is too far from their home. Though urban dwellers liver better than those in the villages, they are less confident in their future and rely more on themselves instead of turning to God. As the famous saying goes, "God helps those that help themselves".

Moreover, urban dwellers have daily access to hundreds of channels of information, which makes it more difficult for the church to hit the target in between these channels. This forces the church to find alternative ways of hitting its target audience, for example audio books, the Internet, radio and TV.

IT church services

In the day and age of advanced information technology, the pastor's Sunday sermon is insufficient, particularly when a congregation uses the Internet instead of going to church. This is the reason that churches today face new challenges, namely using the mass media and new technologies to accomplish their mission.

At the moment practically all churches and religious organizations in Ukraine have their own electronic media sources. The web catalog Religious and Information Service of Ukraine (RISU) alone has approximately 700 official and unofficial or private websites, portals and forums. It is next to impossible to count the number of blogs in which religious subjects are often discussed.

Nontraditional or young religious organizations are the most active users of hitech. Such activity is based not only on the need to form a congregation from scratch, but also on an original way of thinking. Specifically, such organizations feel the need to actively and in some cases aggressively preach their point of view on faith.

Protestant Internet offers the widest range of websites. Besides portals and official sites for churches there are numerous forums and websites for youth, among which are projects for prevention of drug addiction, AIDS and alcoholism, sites with Christian music, literature, etc. Tags for meeting people and making acquaintances in major portals are very popular. Incidentally, the majority of them are private projects.

It is standard practice for many Protestant priests and believers to use the Internet and mobile versions of the Bible.

The church needs PR

As we can see, Ukrainian confessions are active in the media space. The question is "Is the public aware of all this?" It is impossible to find a CD or DVD with educational programs teaching Christian ethics and catechism on retail store shelves. Christian movies, cartoons or computer games are also hard to come by, though there is a demand for them. Generally speaking, the church clergy lack a media education, which has already caught the attention of the elders.