Our Aggiornamento Award recipient this year is the Augustine Institute, for it’s impact on parish life through its parish based Next Generation Kiosk.

In 2004, while working at a large software company, Mark Middendorf received an inspiration. After receiving Communion at a weekday Mass, an idea entered his mind, and would never leave. The simple idea was to equip Catholics everywhere to better know and love Our Lord Jesus Christ and our Catholic Faith by providing parishes an attractive Kiosk in the church narthex or vestibule, full of inspiring, faithful media. Soon, Mark and a friend were actively meeting with pastors to pilot the idea. The results were astounding, and with the help of two other faithful men, on the Feast of The Assumption, 2005, Lighthouse Catholic Media and its parish-based Kiosk program was launched. By God’s grace, over the next ten years, this simple idea provided millions of CDs, downloads, and books, through Kiosks in over 5,000 parishes in the United States, alone. In 2015, Lighthouse Catholic Media merged the Augustine Institute, Denver, Colorado, and the Kiosk adoption continued its rise, reaching over 7,500 parishes in the U.S., and in over 150 countries, worldwide.  The Augustine Institute is continuing to innovate in service of parishes committed to the New Evangelization, including a re-engineered Next Generation Kiosk to accommodate more modern media, and integration with another Aggiornamento Award winner, FORMED, as parishes ‘reimagine’ themselves as ‘centers of evangelization’.

Brian Truckenbrod has been involved with Lighthouse Kiosk since its origin, and serves as Senior Director of Mission Expansion at the Augustine Institute.