Rebuild and Relaunch - A Short History of MSP Catholic and a Look at Where We Are Going Next

MSP Catholic started at my dining room table after what felt like years of conversations with other local Catholic young adults. I am actively involved or have been involved in a number of Catholic young adult groups in the Twin Cities - Cathedral Young Adults, West Metro Young Adults, Vespers at Lourdes, Abria Young Adults, various sports nights, Catholic Beer Club (which I am one of the organizers of), Emmaus, etc. - and had seen first hand how vibrant, active, and alive our local Catholic community is, but also how disconnected it can be. There are so many things going on and I was still learning about new things after being actively involved for years. How was someone who was new to the area or their faith supposed to get connected?

I wasn’t the only one feeling this. The numerous people that I talked to about this challenge expressed their love of our local community while at the same time sharing how it was challenging to share events or news with so many people spread across such a large geographical area. Ask ten different people about the events, groups, or parishes they attend regularly and you could easily have ten different sets of answers. There are an almost unending number of platforms that messages and events are being shared on. Social media platforms, websites, emails, physical notices on parish bulletin boards, radio broadcasts, and live announcements at the end of Mass are all ways that the local community connects, but there is no single place to find all of that information.

This is actually a beautiful problem to have. Our local community has grown organically over the years and I am blessed to benefit from the hard work that others have put in before me. The many groups and events that exist have grown up to meet a need and help bring people closer to Christ. From community building and social events like Catholic Beer Club and Catholic Softball Group to more solemn and focused times for prayer like Vespers at Lourdes, the ingenuity and faithfulness of our community is everywhere. To be able to centralize access to that vibrant community is exactly what I set out to do with MSP Catholic.

I do want to be very clear that the mission of MSP Catholic is not to take over what the many amazing groups and parishes are already doing in the Archdiocese, but to amplify their work. Our goal is to use digital tools to make it easier to get connected in-person and build community by sharing life with people. 

The first iteration of MSP Catholic came in the fall of 2018. It started as a free Wix website and featured groups, events, and parishes. It also attempted to have featured events, weekly news updates, app recommendations, and more. It was a lot and I quickly realized it wasn’t something that was sustainable. Groups and events came from sources I knew and had to be manually updated every time something changed. Parishes were added as I learned more about them or they reached out. There was no way to know if Mass times changed or confession was moved for that week. It began to dawn on me that maybe others had had similar ideas in the past and realized just how difficult centralizing everything manually could be.

This highlighted both another problem and another path forward - I shouldn’t be doing this on my own. As I said before, our local Catholic community has grown organically. It wasn’t a master plan by the Archdiocese or a few individuals but a lot of normal people answering the Lord’s call. This website was meant to serve the community and to do so, it had to be built by the community. After a few discussions with some local group leaders, I rebuilt the site (on Squarespace this time, for those following along) in the spring of 2019. It still focused on groups, events, and parishes, but set criteria around each category. There was a section for “resources” that I personally found helpful (national blogs, podcasts, apps, books, etc). This was also the first iteration of our locally sourced blog, with a goal of amplifying the voices of Catholic writers who had something to share but couldn’t/didn’t want to run their own site. To keep the content up-to-date, I invited the groups featured on the site to have access to post their events and updates. The idea was that if this was to be the digital hub for Twin Cities Catholics, it had to be updated by the community and not just a single admin.

The blog was the epitome of “by the community, for the community." Local writers (lay people and religious; married and single) shared their thoughts, experiences, and exhortations with Catholics across the Twin Cities. We featured topics based on the liturgical calendar as well as what was going on in the world. Some pieces took 10+ minutes to read while others were quick reflections, but all challenged the reader to stop and think about their faith in regards to their local community. 

With all these great thoughts of community-generated information, high-quality blog posts, and information about active parishes and resources, I thought I had figured out the puzzle to building the digital hub for Twin Cities Catholics. As time went on, I realized I hadn’t. Group leaders and event organizers couldn’t always post on the site because they were busy focusing on their groups and events and still had multiple channels to post in. Parish information was still static and wasn’t researched regularly. The content of the blog posts was awesome (thanks to our highly talented local writers), but the posts themselves were infrequent. I couldn’t just rely on asking people nicely once to post things on the site and just have it be as natural as posting a Facebook event. Writers didn’t just flock to the site without invitation. It started to become unsustainable again. Then COVID hit.

To say that COVID has been a challenge to our local community would be competing for understatement of the year. Our local community was built on people living life together and gathering frequently, all things that were now disrupted due to the pandemic. Where MSP Catholic was concerned, groups weren’t meeting, events weren’t happening, and the site started to look pretty static. This is also when CEND comes into the story. At the time, the non-profit CEND (Center for Evangelization and Discipleship) was just an idea for its founders, yet they had a mission in mind: provide resources to support the faith of Twin Cities Catholic young adults and young families. They were particularly interested in building a centralized digital hub to reach people and share with them all the amazing things going on for Catholics in the Twin Cities. Our partnership can only be described as divine intervention for both sides. CEND got an existing platform and MSP Catholic got the resources to become truly sustainable.

We started working on refocusing the site and solving the problem both organizations had originally set out to solve: connect people, make our vibrant community more accessible, and help provide resources to people throughout their faith journey. Joining CEND was the missing piece to the puzzle and made clear what was going to help the site grow: not just extra resources, but people. People who believe in the mission MSP Catholic set out to accomplish and are willing to share their gifts and talents to make it happen. People who, above all, want to share their faith and bring people closer to Christ. We rebuilt the website (on eCatholic, if you are keeping tabs), revamped our social media presence, refocused the blog, and made it all public earlier this month.

We are relaunching MSP Catholic to expand the digital hub for Twin Cities Catholics. While we are still focused on providing accurate and up-to-date information about groups, events, and parishes in a centralized hub, we are doing that by forming relationships with the organizations featured on the site. The website is just one aspect of MSP Catholic and we want to continue to help grow the local community by learning what is needed. MSP Catholic is a platform that showcases the amazing work of others and to help others discover the vibrant Catholic culture of the Twin Cities. We are focusing on helping groups, events, and parishes reach more people in more meaningful ways, ways that they might not have been able to before. We are formalizing our blog with a team of writers who will be posting weekly long-form articles, a network of contributing authors who will publish their posts throughout the year, and columnists who will be focusing on specific topics monthly. We are evaluating everything from weekly newsletters to video series and more, all to share with the Twin Cities and further the great Catholic culture we have here, get people actively involved in their faith, and provide resources to people as they grow closer to Christ.

Yet, if I’ve learned anything from this saga, it is that this effort needs to be a community effort. CEND brought marketing and digital media pros to MSP Catholic, but we need the gifts and talents of this community to continue to amplify the voices of this community. If you are interested in joining us on this journey, shoot an email to editor@mspcatholic.com and tell us how you’d like to help.