By RAY WADDLE

Writing about religion for daily newspapers year after year, I soon noticed intriguing similarities between the media world and church life.

Their missions share points of contact. Both engage “news” – the challenge of defining it, spreading it. And these days both are preoccupied with their role in society – how to keep their credibility, how to connect with young people.

In the newspaper business, deciding what’s newsworthy is the obvious daily focus. Sometimes I’ve written fast-breaking stories about religious controversy, other times features about intriguing personalities. If it identifies conflict, affects readers’ lives, gives them useful information, addresses their predicament, or stirs minds and hearts, it’s news. The challenge is to appeal to readers in an era of so many distracting media choices.

The church is in the news business too – delivery of the gospel good news. It’s a matter of connecting this news with a world of searchers wandering a world of distractions.

How is the connection made? Early on in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus reveals the dynamic between the good news and the individual. There, Jesus first proclaims the ultimate news story -- the good news of the Reign of God, the nearness of the Kingdom.

This was news to his earliest disciples. It stopped them in their tracks -- brothers Peter and Andrew, brothers James and John of Zebedee. The news, and the newsbearer, were so astonishing that these Galilean fishermen dropped their nets and never looked back.

It was news because something about his words penetrated them to the core. When Jesus declared, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people,” it filled a void they had been carrying inside whether they knew it or not.

It answered their deepest question. What question? Maybe it was, Where is God? Or, Why doesn’t God save us and blast this empire? Or, What am I doing with my life? Whatever it was, each person’s question was answered with life-altering, world-shattering force.

Despite all our 21st century pizzazz, everybody carries the same void as those First-century Judeans. Call it whatever -- the human condition, the taint of sin, the dull ache of alienation, loneliness, dread, restless boredom, nameless annoyance, debilitating guilt or anger, compulsiveness, hopelessness.

This fundamental uneasiness isn’t overcome until a person hears special news that addresses this unsatisfied, perhaps unnamed private and public condition in ways that make sense to each of us. Then we realize it’s the news we’ve been waiting for. Then it’s a homecoming.

These days, many churches and newspapers carry on with a lot of bustle but not much confidence, as if their sense of mission was taken away. Both church and newspaper feel hobbled by the same cultural environment – a climate of suspicion against institutions, a juggernaut of technological change that erodes their traditional influence, or, not least, a lack of poetry and heart.

Some congregations, like some newsrooms, feel out of touch with the community around them. Or they are beset by arrogance, nostalgia, a lack of imagination. Or they hire focus groups and growth specialists to tell them what to do next.

But the basic challenge of the church, like that of the newspaper, is to stay in touch with something old-school: remember that everybody’s walking around wounded for lack of answers to their questions. People need the news. That’s the mission: give answer. But what’s the question?

The questions that inspire good reporting are tried-and-true ones – Where are my taxes going? Who won the game? What happening to my neighborhood? Who’s winning the war? On the religion desk, everyday I assumed people are carrying around certain questions they want more information about: Is the Bible true? What is a miracle? Why so many religions? Does God have messages for me?

Such questions guided my coverage, even though the daily news of journalism causes only a brief sensation until the next day, when the furious process of fact-gathering starts again.

At church, of course, the core questions run to the profoundest depths. They play out on a deeply interior field of inquiry – mysterious, half-articulated, permanent – the life of the soul. The questions are mighty – What’s real? Where do I find courage? How can I love? What do I do now?

These have little do with all those odd church routines – the sameness of the service, the habit of sitting in the same pew year after year, the lack of curiosity about the changing city around them -- patterns that make visitors wonder why there’s a church at all.

But the church is there, smack dab on a public street, and that’s the big story. Its presence announces everyday: we are a sanctuary for reflection, dignity, prayer, action and truth. Whoever you are, you will be greeted here, fed. And you’ll hear a story here that explains why we trouble to gather here and believe -- why for 2,000 years, people keeping gathering, keep believing.

That’s news.