The Christian church is engaging far less than one per cent of the 70 million people who are active in the virtual world. This means the virtual world is by far the largest unreached people group on planet Earth, says one pastor.
Douglas Estes, a pastor from San Jose, California, has no vested interest in virtual or internet churches – a relatively new phenomenon – but given the large "unreached" population on the internet, he says he has a desire to see healthy churches proliferate "regardless of context".
Although he leads a brick and mortar church - Berryessa Valley Church - Estes defends virtual churches against critics in his new book, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World, maintaining that they are real churches with real people.
He summed up his argument in a recent post on Christianity Today's Out of Ur blog: "People are led to believe that members of online churches all connect to their video-game church as anonymous zombies in a Tron-like world. Supposedly these virtual (fake) Christians never really know each other, it’s all a facade, and that this is the sum and total of a virtual church.
"The real truth is that every virtual church I’ve ever attended has flesh-and-blood people in virtual (real!) community with other flesh-and-blood people whose primary meeting place is in synthetic space."
In recent years, Christians have begun to take on the internet by building church communities in virtual worlds like Second Life and The Sims and launching internet campuses where anyone from around the world can join weekend worship services live on the Web. The growth of virtual worshipping communities, however, has sparked debates on whether such churches are effective and biblical.
A major argument against internet churches is that they lack physical contact, Estes pointed out. But that same argument could be made against megachurches and any other church, for that matter, where people never really touch or come to know each other, he argued.
Virtual churches, critics say, also don't have real community.
