About God’s Park

Who We Are

We are Catholic partners who aim to bring faith formation programs in dialogue with the emerging digital culture. We are great listeners who find valuable messages in sound bytes and fiber optics. We are game buffs, leveraging on game mechanics as a way to learn and pass on the faith. We are a group of smart creatives able to produce catechetically livewire digital materials as well as digitize and/or gamify existing catechetical materials for faith formation. We are trailblazers, paving the path and proclaiming the Gospel message to the ‘peripheries of human existence’ (Pope Francis), especially to the digital natives of our times.

Vision

God’s Park aims to assist the Catholic Church in transitioning to the digital age in the field of faith formation.

Mission Statement

In the spirit of Pope Francis as the bridge-builder (Pontifex), God’s Park hopes to be of service to the U.S. and beyond in providing a ‘bridge’ between traditional approaches to faith formation and the digital platform.

Our Core Convictions

We have a deep and keen understanding of the crisis of catechesis in the Catholic world today, as manifested in the growing dissatisfaction of children towards faith formation.
We believe that the young or the ‘digital natives’ have a stake in their own formation, and that engaging them in their native tongue is key to encountering Christ who speaks in their terms.
We believe with Pope Francis that the digital technology is ‘a gift from God’, and that the digital reservoir is home to rich Christian traditions & artifacts waiting to be tapped.
We are committed catechists, passionate researchers and contemporary missionaries, leveraging on virtual potentials, educational games and interactive mechanics as effective tools to learn and pass on the faith.

Discovery of God’s Park

God’s Park started as a growing inspiration from two striking moments in my life. The first moment is indelibly inked in my memory. While working on an animation project on my desktop computer, a mom with triplets entered my office. I stood up to talk to Mom, and to my amazement, her triplets slowly walked past right us, as if hypnotized by the computer screen, and the spunkiest of the three went directly for the mouse, and started clicking. Those four year old kiddos sure knew what they were doing! The second moment came at a liturgy, and the Gospel echoed Jesus’ own words: ‘Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’ (Matthew 19:14).

These two moments stand as counter-narratives to the current state of religious formation for children. First, U.S. statistics show the children’s declining interest towards traditional classroom catechesis and religious education. Second, we as a Church have failed to acknowledge the full impact of the four revolutions that hit the kids in their lifetime, namely, the computer revolution, the mass media revolution, the mobile revolution, and the game revolution. In both situations, there is the failure to recognize the very language that our children – the digital natives – speak and communicate with.