Virtual Church

Digital Church

 

My church this morning:

 

“One could argue that, just as telecommuting facilities allow employees to work without going to the office… so a phenomenon like the electronic church – now also in on-line form – enables believers to participate in acts of worship and religious devotion without attending a place of worship”. (Jesus in Disneyland, p 65)

I was eager to experience online worship.  I live a very online existence.  While I don’t personally engage too intensely in activities such as Twitter, FaceBook or Reddit, I am what they would call a “lurker”.  I keep up with the people and things that I am interested in via these websites.  For this assignment, I tried out two online “churches”.  The first was more sort of like watching church on TV, but utilized the interactive nature of the internet very well.

LIFECHURCH.TV

Not just an internet ministry, but also broadcast from a central church to satellite churches all over as well.

Hipster Worship Guy

The service began with a few worship songs.  The first song was unfamiliar to me, but there was a link at the bottom of the video where you could download the original song on iTunes if you liked it.  It was tough to engage in “worship” really, because it wasn’t much different for me than looking at YouTube or listening to iTunes while being on FaceBook or something.  The worship was well done, but almost so well done that, as I said, I felt like I was just watching a music video.  The singer sounded very much like the singer from Delerious.  The lyrics were printed at along the bottom of the video to allow you to sing along.

Next were some announcements – nothing too interesting to me as a first timer, but this “stat” jumped out: 1237 People last week made a decision for Christ.  More on this at the end.

The message was called “Necessary Sins: Gossip” – its really weird in that while he’s talking, there is a chat stream right next to the video that is constantly going, so my attention is torn between the message and the chat.  The interesting thing about the chat is that it mostly has absolutely nothing to do with the message being delivered.

 

 

After a few minutes, I realized that there was an option to “turn off” the chat

and instead see the sermon notes (which are printable for you to fill out as you go along) It was nice to turn it off, but found myself getting distracted more easily, so I ended up going back.  There was a lot of Catholic bashing going on by a few individuals and found it tough to not jump in and defend.  There were chatters with a tag of “Host” who sort of repeated the big points and welcomed people, but they didn’t seem to be Mod’s in the sense that they didn’t seem to curtail or block any of the nonsense chat.  They just offered ways to block it out yourself if you were distracted by it.

One thing I noticed during the whole message was that they never cut the camera away from the preacher and showed anyone in the crowd.  For all I could tell, he was on an empty sound stage somewhere doing his message.  The service repeats every 90 minutes, so I have no idea if the one I watched was “live” or previously recorded.

The Sermon boiled down to one sentence: Everything you say must be true, but not everything true must be said.

He also went into great detail about how easy it is to gossip over social media – through Facebook, Twittter and Google+.  Obviously, this is speaking directly to his audience who are obviously tech/internet oriented.

Click here to go to heaven!

The service ended with an altar call.  If you wanted to accept Christ, you could press a button just under the video to acknowledge that, and there was a running counter of how many decisions were being made.  I didn’t click the link, but the guy who did the announcements came on and instructed people to a website called “whatsnextkit.tv” I guess this is where they got their salvation stats from earlier.  I know many protestant churches hang their hats on the number of salvations they get a week/month/hour but this was a little bit of a stretch.  Anyone could be pressing that button.  I suppose anyone could walk the aisle as well, but still, I’m not sure I would count these clicks as hard data.

The mission of the church is pretty cool:

“We will do anything short of sin to reach people for Christ”.  All in all, it was a pretty good service.  It wasn’t just watching a video from home, there was interaction available, and you felt like there were people there watching it with you.   (if you could multitask the message and the chat)

Next, I took a very different route, creating an avatar and entering the world of Second Life.

Second Life

Anglican Cathedral of Second Life

Second Life is very different in that you aren’t just there behind your monitor, your avatar is right there in the virtual world for everyone to see.  You could watch the Lifechurch.tv broadcast and people could never know you were there if you didn’t enter into the chat.  Not here.  

I arrived about 15 minutes early and came into the cathedral.  There were a

couple of people outside, but they didn’t “greet” me or anything, but it may have been because I walked by too fast, I’m not sure.

I sat down in the second pew.  By the time the service started, there were about 10 people there.  I clicked all of their profiles, and most of them were from accounts at least two years old.

The service was very strange for an Anglican “church”.  It started off with a litany of prayers that I did not recognize at all.  There were responses (mostly “Amens” and “Lord Have Mercy”’s that I pretty much missed.  It was weird to try and type in the response at the right time, along with everyone else.  Instead of everyone in the church saying “Amen” all at the same time, the chatbox was filled with individual amen’s.  It loses the feeling of corporate worship, somehow and feels like 10-12 individual worships happening at the same time.

The biggest problem that I found with this was that there was NO SOUND.  I could hear birds chirping and animals twittering outside but it was too quiet.  It was kind of like watching a video game cut scene, but way more boring.  The sermon was printed out one sentence at a time and focused on what is called “Remembrance Day” in England and “Veterans Day” in the US.  It was incredibly boring, and seemed to be very “Wikipedia”-ed.  Even my avatar was bored.  I noticed that everyone else sat perfectly still in their pews, while mine was constantly looking around.

In typical Anglican tradition, the service started a few minutes late, and by the sermon time, the attendance had grown by half.

After the sermon, there was an affirmation of faith, but it was not the Creed, and we did not “say” it, we just “Amen”-d it at the end.  We then moved into a time of prayer, which was similar. There was a time of open prayer as well, which was the most interactive that the service got, but the prayers were very generic – “for my mum”, “for everyone’s health”, “for my husband”, etc.. About this time I was extremely bored and tempted to walk out and go outside and fly around, maybe peek in through the windows or something.  I stuck it out, however, because I wanted to really see how communion would be done.  There was an altar and an altar rail with kneelers and everything all set.  However, at the end of the prayers, the service was over!

I was invited to come sit outside and fellowship with those who were there, so I did.  As the obvious newcomer, I was asked how I thought it went and I tried to be polite, but honest.

 

 

At some point, they realized that I couldn’t hear any voices, and “turned me on” so I could hear them, and that was very interesting.  I wish I had been able to hear the voices during the service.  The lady who led the service, sounded just like Ms. Potts from Beauty and the Beast.

I ended up in conversation with them for a little while and frankly, that was the best part of the experience for me.  They were all from England, and though they couldn’t hear me because I didn’t have a microphone I could type and they just spoke their answers.  They did not have communion because the bishop in charge of this virtual chapel (yes, there is a real life bishop somewhere in charge of this place) wouldn’t allow it.  It seemed to be a point of some contention, as the Anglican Church in England will allow for Communion to be done through the TV, but not the internet.  The lady who led the service made the point that when the priest consecrated the elements “it doesn’t matter if he is a few centimeters or thousands of kilometers away” from them.  I suppose not, though it it is an interesting question.

If I were to have to choose a virtual church, I’m not sure which of these two I would go with.  The preaching was much better at lifechurch.tv, but the sense of community was stronger at the Cathedral in Second Life.  Granted, this was AFTER the service, though this is what you’d find in a real church as well - its not like you’d talk to people during the service. (hopefully)  

 

The edge, I think would go to lifechurch.tv.  They seem to be much more engaged in the internet culture as a whole and are much more likely to be user friendly to a “first-timer”.  If you can navigate the internet even passibly, you can figure out lifechurch.tv.  Second Life was much more complicated.  The Cathedral is in a part of the world that is pretty cut off, and you wouldn’t come by it accidentally.  Chances are also that if you are into Second Life, you’re probably into it for other reasons.  There were WAY more “adult” sections of SL than there were religious. (which could be said about the internet as a whole as well, I suppose.)