You open up your phone. Your newest email has new Catholic articles from around the country, an incredible story from someone at a neighboring parish, and a new event in your diocese that feels like it’s right up your alley. Everything you see is both relevant to where you are in life and addressing ideas you’ve been wrestling with in your heart.
But before you get too excited about a new newsletter or blog—this content is coming from your church. Great digital content directly from your parish, diocese, and local ministries that helps integrate faith into every part of your life.
This sounds great, right? Connecting easily with Catholic life and parish community is probably on the wish list of you as a parishioner but also a lot of parish and diocesan leaders who want nothing more than to reach more parishioners at a heart level. They want to let you know you are cared for and seen, especially in such a digital world where we spend most of our lives online. But it’s not always this simple—or it hasn’t been in the past.
This is where the power of Tilma comes in—a digital platform created to forge meaningful connections between a parish and its people in a culture now led by digital encounters. Tilma leverages technology to help parishes and dioceses further their people along personal faith journeys through digital interactions and eventually inspiring and equipping people to be on mission in their communities. The Tilma Platform is not just another piece of technology but a holistic ministry system.
And in a time where so many are leaving the Church, believing it’s not relevant to their lives, the Church no longer needs another piece of technology to help accomplish one or two goals, but it has to actually step in and meet people where they’re at.
So how does this work?
The Tilma platform holds a rich library of articles, videos, workshops, and events from across a diocese as well as curated from other Catholic creators in North America. The variety of content speaks to the different needs, life stages, questions, and interests of people as they engage with Tilma’s ecosystem. These resources become the ministry steps to push someone deeper in their journey with faith.
So let’s say you sign up for a marriage workshop on your parish website, which is built on the Tilma Platform. This information helps your parish leadership know a little bit more about you—that you’ve been married for one year and attend this parish. You can now sign up to get emails made just for you, filled with articles for young couples, upcoming events for young families, and homilies that inspire people to be leaders in their marriage.
You can go into your profile and choose specific interests like the Knights of Columbus or prayer ministry to make sure you also get updates on new events or opportunities related to this in your diocese.
No matter where someone engages on Tilma—whether on their parish site or on a community site—they receive what resonates with their needs and can continue to discover more of what God has planned for them. Eventually, the journey online connects them to real opportunities outside the tool itself, like finding a mentor, counselor, local event, etc.
But it goes beyond just great content and connections for the individual. Tilma empowers leaders in a diocese by giving them new ways to connect with parishioners and unite the efforts of ministries, apostolates, and an entire diocese. It empowers those on the ground, managing the Tilma tools, by providing incredibly user-friendly features and relieving the stress of being agile in technology or resourcing fresh on their own. And it empowers priests with new opportunities to care for their parishioners and ensure no one falls through the cracks. Tilma’s purpose is to help equip every part of the Church to thrive in the 21st century.
And when each individual layperson and leader in a diocese is discovering more of their faith and how best to serve one another, the result is a Church energized, connected, and on mission for God.
If you’re interested in joining this movement across our Church and seeing your diocese transformed, you can learn more at tilmaplatform.com.
Tilma Parish | Personalized Parish Communication
Article written by the Team at Glass Canvas.
