St. Timothy’s Religious Education program was excited to add the SW Plus App and make it an essential part of our program. As the director of Religious Education, I wanted to find a way to bring children and parents together to grow in their faith, and the SW Plus App was the perfect answer! The App was perfect because of its easy access, great programing, and Catholic life view that we would like to promote in our program.

Accessibility is important in our modern age. Many families are on the go and do not have time to fumble around trying to link to a web page. The SW Plus app shows up right on our parish website and has a floating icon. So, as soon as you come to our website, our parish families can simply look for the SW Plus icon, click on it, and then go to the programs they want to watch. So many of our parish families absolutely love it as the SW Plus setup is simple.

My families also love it because of its great programming! I have made the channel part of my Religious Education program because of its programming. Family time is becoming a lost blessing, but because of the quality programming, I am using SW Plus as a tool to help families rediscover this blessing. In my First Communion and Confirmation preparation program, the families must watch at least two programs from the station and then have family discussions about those programs. Through this, the families have ended up watching more than two programs because they enjoy it. They have programs for my youngest brothers and sisters in the Lord with the SW Pals menu.

SW Plus has great and inspiring programs for my middle schoolers with Beats as we absolutely love Marie Miller and artists like her. The app has movies that the families can watch together with inspiring and faith-filled messages which are great for family discussion. There is even news from a Catholic perspective as well as Bible Studies/Lectio Divina programs they can do together with the SW Prayer Channel. There is so much variety that families can constantly choose a new adventure to grow in their faith!

This brings me to the last point which is that the SW Plus application helps to bring a Catholic Life View to our families. In using the app, our families start to form a two-fold habit of having family time in watching the programs as well as having God and our beloved faith as a topic of conversation. These are crucial for our Catholic faith journey because children need to know that they are not alone on this journey to become saints as well as to help the family to grow in their faith.

The goal of our Religious Education program is to help in forming great Catholic families and young men and women who can bring the light of Christ into the world. It also wants to help the children to realize the great blessing of becoming saints and embracing love, goodness, and joy (see Jn. 10:10). The SW Plus App helps to do this in an amazing way and we are so glad to have it as part of our Religious Education program!