The virtual church: are online games the new ground for mission to a ‘lost’ generation?
The call on the Church to go out to all corners of the world (including the online) and to fulfil the Great Commission has a higher place than ever for a generation that is quickly walking away from faith, writes Alice Cheeseman
This article is the third in a series sharing perspectives from young Christians about being young Christians.
13th December: On my daily doomscroll of Twitter, I saw a large image boasting the statistic ‘21 billion hours of content was watched on Twitch in 2022.’ This was a sizeable increase of 2.4 billion hours viewed when compared with the 2020 figure of 18.6 billion hours of Twitch content being consumed.
As a certified nerd and habitual gamer, I am always pleasantly surprised to see the interest the world has over video games – considering the stereotypical idea formed by traditional media that it is for children and ‘basement dwellers’. However, each year the fascination towards video games grows at a rapid pace. It could possibly be due to the chance of escapism from the world, or the opportunity to belong to a community without having to leave the safety of a desk/couch, but the world is quickly paying attention. In 2022, the global video game industry was estimated to be worth $196.8 billion.
More interestingly, the most common age for those gaming in the UK?
16–24 years old.
Boasting an average of 88 per cent from the study claiming the title ‘gamer’.
The increased interest in the virtual world is not just for the 16-24 year old gamers, however. We’ve already seen the church begin to engage with the social media boom, with the slow expansion into the virtual world due to Covid: churches cautiously tip-toeing onto YouTube and Facebook Live, streaming their services so their congregations can tune in and engage whilst socially distanced. Most of us have watched services online since 2020, whether out of curiosity of how ‘other churches’ do Church, or out of a genuine necessity to stay connected to the church community.
Hybrid services are the new lingo, stream decks and OBS are the new must-haves of the church streaming world.
If you compare the general growth of live-streaming platforms and the rise of video games to the statistics of church attendance, we find a challenging correlation. Recently, during the Baptist Union Council (October 2022), the Young Adults Round Table (YART) noted that the Baptist Union is ‘losing young adults from Baptist churches three times faster than older members. Participation from 2015 until the pandemic (2019) had dropped by 2000; since 2021 another 2000 had left, meaning we now have 6662 young adults in our churches. If we take these trends, we will have around 100 young adults by 2030. Even if the decline stopped and we maintained our current position – in 40 years’ time, all our activity and attendance would be reduced by 86 per cent.’
Comparing the respective growth and reduction in these two areas could imply that the Church is going to die out all due to video games. However, a more helpful view is that video games and streaming platforms may contain the key to reaching a new corner of the world, and an age bracket that the Church for far too long has been forsaking and yet has desperately been wishing to connect to.
The Church - in all her glory - is famous for one specific thing that we may be sleeping on in this digital revolution passing under our noses: mission. The Church goes into local communities with the ‘Knit and Natter’ groups and ‘Messy Church’, and runs group after group to reach out to the local community.
However, the Church doesn’t seem to know how to reach the disinterested youth and young adults, who are far too aware of the Church’s failures both past and present. They tend to see a commonality between the stigma of ‘Church’ with its unfortunate stereotypes and mass media new stories, and some of the villains that they face on their screens.
But the Church has a message that the gaming world echoes, of justice and mercy, of compassion and sacrifice.
And still, the pioneering missional landscape seems based in the tangible and not interested in the virtual. People in that space are the loneliest, most desperate for love, and for someone to tell them the good news, yet still the majority of the Church seemingly passes them by. Empty pews and youth groups eagerly wait for teenagers and young adults to leave the comfort of their houses, and to come into a new environment, where they find themselves surrounded by unfamiliar iconography and song lyrics that proclaim the power of the blood of a deity and a god’s glory. To most gamers, this feels much more familiar to them in their online lives where they slay gods and create worlds, than a living, vibrant and real faith which has more of an eternal significance.
Getting online to do “mission” is more pivotal than ever, as the world is less and less reliant on the tangible and material which the Church traditionally clings to, and are instead turning to the virtual, with the rise in NFTs, crypto, and identities being built on likes and retweets. The call on the Church to go out to all corners of the world (including the online) and to fulfil the Great Commission has a higher place than ever for a generation that is quickly walking away from faith.
This is part of a short series sharing perspectives from young Christians about being young Christians:
The authors hope to encourage older generations in our churches to understand the challenges and embrace the opportunities of welcoming young adults into community
If you are interested in exploring more about young people in church, they recommend these resources:
Alice Cheeseman is 25 years old, and a qualified youth worker. She grew up in a Methodist Church run by her family and, whilst always believing in God, came to personal faith at age 10, and was baptised in the local non-denominational church at age 17.
She spends the majority of her time between her admin job in a local hospital, half made crochet projects, and volunteering for a vast array of teams over two churches.
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Baptist Times, 15/02/2023