1. To Reorient
In short, Our Diocese™ is a tool created for communication, built around our common life in Christ, helping us reorient our technology and habits toward salvation.

2. To Help Translate the Faith Into This Generation
St. Nikolai Velimirovich once said, “We must be super conservative in preserving the Orthodox Faith, and super modern in propagating it.” Our Diocese™ is an effort to do just that.

3. To Be a Respectful Alternative
Our Diocese™ is also created as an alternative to similar tools "freely" available which actually treat people as objects to be consumed not respected, even though they are created in the image of God:

"If something is free, you are the product."
– Richard Serra (1973)

This sentiment has proven true in the past several decades with technological advancements allowing companies and advertisers to observe and capitalize on the movements, preferences, and habits of its users, en masse.

Because of this, many Orthodox Christians are not comfortable being part of major social media. This makes it difficult for priests and parishioners, because there's not one place to communicate with everyone in the church unless everyone happens to be there on Sunday.

Our Diocese™ is a modern communication tool that is provided (financed) by the diocese for use by its parishes, monasteries, clergy, faithful, departments, and ministries. It enables real privacy for its members—there are no advertisers which are part of this platform to watch you. You get to decide with every post whether the world can see it, only members of the site, only your connections, or only the members of the group you are posting in. Your information is not sold to anyone.

4. To Encourage Real Life
Additionally, there is a growing anti-technology sentiment. People want real life, not through a screen. The very purpose of Our Diocese™ is meant to facilitate parish life and in-person interaction, not addiction to news feeds; there are no algorithms or strategies in place to keep you scrolling. The hope is rather that you use Our Diocese™ to coordinate with other parishioners—about baking prosphora, facilitating your homeschool co-op, or carpooling for a monastery retreat—and then actually get together in person.

5. To Help Find, Make, and Keep More Orthodox Friends
In addition to posts and messages on a parish level, Our Diocese™ enables interaction between parishioners and clergy all over the diocese. Campers can join and connect with their friends between summers. Clergy can reach out to other clergy with questions and support. Faithful can find others with similar interests and not have to reinvent the wheel at their own parish when starting a new ministry.

6. To Remove Obstacles to Communication
Our Diocese™ also allows nuance in communication which is becoming more and more important today. Email is a wonderful tool, but each message carries the same level of importance and can feel like an imposition: Decide if it’s urgent or not, read it or delete it, do or don’t do something being asked of you in the email, etc.

Our Diocese™ is different: Non-urgent information to be posted in the parish group and read at leisure. Urgent information like service schedule changes or deaths in the community can be sent via a message to notify everyone immediately.

So instead of people feeling like the priest is emailing them unnecessarily, or the priest debating whether something is worth sending an email, Our Diocese™ gives the priest and people a way to differentiate between urgent and not urgent information. It also allows parishioners to coordinate events on their own without relying on the priest to disseminate information, or hijacking the parish email list and then themselves feel like they’re bothering people.

Hopefully once you start using this tool it will prove effective for your community. If you need an invite, just ask your priest! If you're not part of the diocese but you think your diocese or jurisdiction might benefit from it, please reach out to support@rollacreative.com.

Members of Our Diocese must belong to a parish within the Orthodox Church in America's Diocese of the Midwest. Parish priests are the ones to send out Our Diocese™ invites to their parishioners. So if you're a parishioner in the Midwest needing an invite, just ask your priest!

We understand some may not want to give this information, but in order for adults and minors to use Our Diocese™, we must require it so we can do our best to prevent abuse. Nothing is foolproof, but we can't think of a better way to keep our kids safe than to require this information upon registration. If you have suggestions, please use the Feedback area of the mobile app to provide that.

Also, just because this information is required doesn't mean that it's available to anyone. You have control over who sees it and can hide this information in your profile area after registering by selecting "Only Me".

Yes, with parental approval and supervision. Our Diocese has several safety precautions in place to prevent private interaction between minors and adults.

• Members of Our Diocese™ must belong to a parish within the diocese, and are only sent an invite once they are vetted by their parish priest.
• All members are assigned a profile type by their priest when registering (Youth or Adult).
• While public interaction can take place between everyone, private messages can only be sent between members of the same profile types (age level).

Nevertheless, these precautions are not fool-proof. As for youth using any website or social media app, again parental permission and supervision are very necessary.

It's most helpful if you are able to use an actual photo of yourself. Our Diocese™ is an invite-only, privacy-centric platform meant for helping those in the diocese to get to know each other and communicate easily.

When you don't use an actual photo of yourself, it makes it hard for clergy to invite you to groups, or for anyone to send messages to you.

Last names aren’t shown when sending invites or when messaging (because last names are able to be made private), so if multiple John's or Mary's don’t have an actual photo of themselves, and their last name isn’t visible, then there’s no way of telling who they are when trying to interact with them.

Not using an actual photo of yourself makes the platform difficult to use, and the more difficult it is to use, the less likely that people in the diocese will use it.

For Our Diocese™ to work properly, accounts are per person. There are often groups specifically for men and specifically for women that don’t work if a joint account of a husband and wife is admitted. It also gets confusing when messaging and mentioning members as to who is being messaged or mentioned. To reduce confusion please do not set up joint accounts.