Mission in the Metaverse
What is the Metaverse? In what ways is Christ incarnate within this new world? Peter Phillips highlights these and other questions as we explore how we do mission in the digital age
I am a digital theologian. I’m fascinated by digital culture, social media, AI and all things tech. I am also a theologian focussing on the New Testament, which means I’m constantly asking: how do we form bridges between the Bible as a formative text for our lives as Christians, and the world which Jesus came to save? How do we do mission in a digital age?
How do we do Mission in the Metaverse?
What’s the Metaverse?
The Metaverse is a kind of new thing and a kind of old thing – fully interactive and operational virtual worlds. It’s being put together as we speak by the five great TechnoGiants of our age – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM for short) – all creating different forms of headgear, interfaces, models and suggesting that we’ll have something ready by 2030.
On the other hand, the Metaverse is already here in Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox, in immersive and collaborative industrial design processes, in massive multiplayer online games, in both virtual and augmented reality.
In many ways, the Metaverse isn’t that new. The word first appears in Neil Stevensen’s 1992 novel Snowcrash. The concept of a realm you enter as an avatar was already there in science fiction before this – Marge Piercy’s excellent novel She, He, and It in 1991 explores AI, robot intelligence and what she called a computer base which you could plug into and work within as an avatar.
And, of course, Neil Cameron’s concept of the Avatar in the film where human beings connect with the Na’avi race – a kind of mind-melding or even a mind-takeover.
Of course, in Avatar we see one of the great benefits of the Metaverse when Jake Scully is able to experience again the joy of sense and feeling through the physicality of the Na’avi body. The Metaverse is a place where we can be set free from the perceived limitations of our frail human bodies and transcend their limits.
Piercy in She, He and It talks of the base as a place where sexuality and race and class are empty categories as people project themselves mentally into the space to work together and socialise. But Piercy’s base seems less physical than some of the metaverses – more a virtual concept, a moulding of minds, a representation of our consciousness within the simulation.
Second Life, an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users, offered a different concept of a world of commerce and interaction and space – where you could attend a rebuilt Anglican Cathedral, or hang out in the bars, or buy skins for your avatar. Churches and spiritual groups met in Second Life and worshipped God there. It was seen as a place of mission and engagement – as well as a place to get people to spend their money buying real estate, buying artefacts, buying upgrades for their avatars. And all of this grew into Ernest Cline’s model of the Oasis in his science fiction novels Ready Player One and Two.
Now we have the Metaverse, coined by Zuckerberg and adopted by the Techno-Giants, GAFAM, just as their major platforms were creaking with age, losing their customers and shrinking in profitability.
Mission in the Metaverse
Matthew 28 is pretty clear – therefore, go, make disciples of all peoples, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you – the Great Commission.
A commission which calls for us to go to people – a centrifugal act. We don’t wait for people to come to us. We go to them. So get onto your computers and get into the new world of the metaverse. When we get there, we are to make the people we meet disciples. So presumably we are to convert them to faith in Jesus as Lord.
Of course, that means building relationships, engaging with public discourse in the new space, earning the attention of those there, and persuading those who listen that Jesus is indeed the saviour of the world. And preferably not using the same methods of colonialisation which the Global North imposed on so many nations.
It’s a centrifugal form of mission – where we go where people are rather than waiting for them to come to us. The kind of thing we see Jesus doing. The kind of thing we see the Holy Spirit encouraging at the gift of the Spirit in Acts 2. The kind of thing we see Paul and his many co-missionaries, women and men, doing as they took the Good News to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the known world.
It's a mission which makes much of the marketplace, or the spaces where people are gathering as a place to do mission. It takes religion into the public space rather than into a private religious space. Jesus is especially keen on walking the roads of Palestine, of meeting people at wells, or on the road, as well as in the synagogues and the Temple. Paul often began in the synagogues, made some people angry and then left for more public places to preach.
Remember John Wesley, who was banned from preaching in Anglican churches and so took to the fields to preach to the Kingswood coal miners in an act which he described as becoming more vile?
Paul is also interesting in that he used proxies for his own physical presence. He sent Phoebe to Rome to explain his letter to the church there. And indeed Priscilla and Aquila seem to have been his advance team sent on ahead to pioneer mission. He apologised to churches when he chose to write a letter in place of his physical presence – but making it clear that presence was enough. He tells Philemon what to do and then warns him he’s going to actually come to his house to stay. You better get on with acting on this letter, Philemon! A kind of biblical hint that not being somewhere in a physical space is actually OK.
Go where the people are – and they are flocking to the Metaverse in all its forms. So go forth!
Problematics?
Let’s start with one of the best possibilities of the Metaverse – as a place where all humanity can be equal. Metaverse and its use of avatars – does it offer a new opportunity to forget the limitations of physicality? God after all looks at the heart, not at the physical expression of our humanity. God loves us unconditionally.
But other people can choose to treat you less well because of your appearance. Because you look different to them. But in some representations of the metaverse, gender, skin colour, age or physical impairments could be rendered invisible and freely selectable, permanently changeable – as in Second Life you make your avatar who you want to be – a human being, an angel, a bipedal fox or an angel or a demon. Does such re-presentation of human beings as avatars allow us to create a new understanding of our shared human identity and unpick the horror of discrimination?
In his critique Simon Reiners, a German theologian, points to the limits placed on avatar already in Meta’s forms of the Metaverse. Will there be opportunity to represent your wheelchair which is part of your persona, the colour of your skin, your gender? Or will all these be swallowed up in stock avatars which need to be modified by expensive expansion packs?
Will the human image be created in the image of GAFAM rather than in the image of God? And more than that, does that mean that the Metaverse’s current fascination with environmentally disastrous bitcoin industry, NFTs and profiteering mean any of us who go there will be forced by our presence to deny our stewardship of God’s creation in favour of the God of Mammon’s desire for the love of all things fiscal?
In the adaptation of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, there is a kind of church which still exists in the future. It rejects transhumanism – the movement towards extending human life indefinitely and argues for a limited lifecycle of 100 years. In fact, it uses euthanasia as a way of enforcing that belief. It’s not a nice picture of the Church. But it does remind us that the Church doesn’t always need to go along with the world…
Secondly, we have already heard how mission has for centuries been tied to colonialism. We can even see remnants of this in Russia’s war with Ukraine, where one excuse is to re-assert the dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church over and against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the more secular governance of the country.
We are much more open now to contextualised mission – where we go and get used to the context, live the lives of those who live there, seek to be embedded in their community, to become one of them. After all, as Petersen’s Message translation puts it, the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.
How do we do this within the metaverse? In what ways is Christ incarnate within this new world? In what ways are incarnate within a realm of virtual and augmented reality? What new forms of mission should we develop to bring Christian faith into this place. Should our models simply mimic the metaverse or should we hold onto Jesus manifesto in Luke 4 or John 3:16 or Paul’s theology of Romans 1-5 and translate these into the land of the Metas?
In his recent book on the Metaverse, Michael Ball, former manager at Amazon, talks of the Metaverse needing to be seen as more than an extension of social media and gaming – a space which interacts within the physical, a synchronization of the virtual and the real.
How might we express our love for Jesus and for all of creation in this new space? How do we worship God, how do we baptise, share in communion, do the good works which we were made for?
In Ball’s synchronization of the virtual and the real, probably in many of the ways we are doing them today.
But how do we create rites and practices for a virtual world? How do we break bread together? How do we affirm the relationship of marriage? How do we bury the dead?
And finally…
We are the midst of a climate emergency. Despite so many in the Global North decrying the impact of human initiated climate change, we cannot ignore the evidence of science. It may mean that we need to think about whether the Metaverse is a place we want to invest in.
The Metaverse will consume huge amounts of energy. It’s connection to bitcoin makes this even worse – an industry which consumes energy like a limitless resource. As we excitedly move towards the Metaverse as a new place of mission, we might want to relisten to the story of Babel where God critiques humanity’s desire to do everything in a co-ordinated way. There may be patterns between the Metaverse and the Tower of Babel – not least in the model of reimaging humanity in the image of GAFAM.
Does our zeal for mission to this new world need to be tempered by the age old wisdom of Isaiah and Micah – asking how this new fangled thing we are creating is in accord with God’s own creation? Whether we are bringing renewal to that creation, where in all we do we are fulfilling what God has commanded – that we act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
Let’s go forth in wisdom to share the Good News of a God who loves all those in the Metaverse. But let’s go forth in God’s wisdom and not just our own.
Image | Martin Sanchez | Unsplash
The Revd Dr Peter Phillips is currently the Programme Director for the MA in Digital Theology and Tutor in Theology at Spurgeons College in London, where he leads the Centre for Digital Theology, Spurgeons College, London
This online only article was commissioned alongside the autumn 2023 edition of Baptists Together magazine, which explores the digital revolution