EP206: Metaverse Church 101, or Jeff Takes Over His Own Podcast

All right, you got episode 206 of the Church Digital Podcast. Hey, it's Jeff Reed here, founder of the Church Digital, Digital Church Network, and a whole bunch of other things we'll get to here in just a minute. We're going to get to the deeper stuff, but for right now I want to tell you about some awesome stuff we're doing here at the Church Digital to help churches like yours wrestle and experiment with this idea of a metaverse church.

See, with the Church Digital, we started on this road helping churches figure out how to thrive, grow, and multiply digital, digital only, digital first, so much stuff. But we've really started leaning in in the past couple months into this idea of a metaverse church. What resources? What training? What coaching? How can we help churches that are interested in exploring and testing out the idea of metaverse? Metaverse being virtual reality, augmented reality, a mixed reality. You've got blockchain, you've got crypto, artificial intelligence, machine learning, this whole decentralization that comes as a result of engaging with these Web 3 technologies. Like, it's going to be a fascinating road here in the next ten years culturally. Not even talking about the church, but more interesting is how's the church going to respond to these opportunities when they come? Yeah, so that's going to be fun.

So if you are looking for some help, if you're interested in someone walking with you on this journey, whether it's world building or online courses or cohorts, content, whatever it is, somebody to hold your hand as you're doing the experiment, we at the Church Digital would love to do that. Here's what I'm gonna ask you to do: check out the website metachurch.digital. That's metachurch.digital. Yeah, did a little spin on the church.digital, made it metachurch.digital. And yeah, I may be considering rebranding. I'm not saying that officially. It's just you that's listening right now, you and whoever else is in the nebulous podcast audience out there. Maybe later conversation. But check it out now. It'll redirect to the page of metachurch.digital if you're looking for some help and taking those steps. We at the Church Digital would love to help you with that. Check out the website.

Which actually, all that segue's real good to today's podcast takeover episode. Now, for the past month I've been letting other people take over my podcast. You see, back in January we started—actually, maybe December we started—a podcast network we call it the TCD Podcast Network. Guys like Tom Pounder started it off with TCD Sidekick Podcast, and then we brought on Chesley Lundy and the Mage Pocket Pulpit Podcast, John Pyle, and just we started really platforming other content creators in an effort to give you a more nuanced approach to digital ministry. Let's look at the content angle from Andy Mage, or the practicality of a Tom Pounder, or the strategy component of Chesley, or the soul care, the honestly the heart-wrenching ministry the way that John Pyle leads, or the social media aspects of discipleship in context of the Pocket Pulpit team. And so like, we really just wanted to give you a multiplied approach towards some of this nuance. And I was so gracious to like, you know, take a month off a podcast and start to let them take over my show so that, you know, I, Jeffrey, didn't have to do that much work.

Well, it's time to get back to work, Jeff. Now, you know what? I changed my mind. I'm gonna let one more person take over my podcast this week. Someone has taken over my podcast, and his name is Jeff Reed. Okay, that may have got weird. How can I take over my own podcast? Well, one of the things that I'm doing here is I actually have another role with Leadership Network. If you've heard of it, great. If not, that's on you. Check out leadnet.org—L-E-A-D-N-E-T dot org. Leadership Network's been around for a couple decades, really championing the idea of innovation and research in context of churches, mega church movement. The multi-site movement in many ways came about because of Leadership Network resourcing and helping and training and gathering together for research purposes some of the innovators in those spaces. And I have the honor to work with Leadership Network now towards this idea of metaverse church. Yeah, my title is literally Director of Metaverse Church Next. So let's talk about the next version of church that's going to exist in the metaverse. That's what I do.

And so with research projects that we're working on and as well as blogs and even live shows, that's some of the noise that we're making and some of the attention that we're bringing and starting to gathering together these experts that are doing church in the metaverse. And so the podcast, the live show, is every Wednesday 12:30 p.m. Eastern on Exponential's Hub. And so you can sign up—we'll put a link in the show notes to get connected to that. But essentially it's available virtually almost every Wednesday 12:30 p.m. Eastern: the Metaverse Church Next show.

And so we've had great people on. DJ Soto has been on recently. Jason Polling, lead pastor of Cornerstone Yuba City—Cornerstone VR has been on recently. And we've got a great show, good guest list coming up here very soon. Alan Hirsch. Alan Hirsch is coming on the Metaverse Church Next show to talk about the idea of metaverse church. If you don't know who Alan Hirsch is, once again, that's on you. Google them. You'll find it. You'll be like, "Wow." If you know who Alan Hirsch is, can you believe I got Alan Hirsch to come on my show? Like, okay, all right.

Scene, get back to where we are here. So anyway, look, here's the deal. What I wanted to do for the takeover is let you all have the first episode. I'm going to give it to you right here. Call it Metaverse Church 101: Where Do We Start at the Beginning? And look, check it out. If you love it, come hang out with me Wednesdays 12:30.

We're working on getting the podcast set up so it's this that can be distributed to you all of your podcast listeners, but definitely hang out with me in the live environment. Throw questions, and it's going to be great over on Exponential's Hub.

So for the first episode, here's who we're bringing in for this 101, for this basic ground level conversation. Here's who we're bringing into the conversation. You ready for this? You ready? You ready? I don't think you're ready. Okay, we'll pretend you're ready. We're bringing in Goose. Yeah, you know the guy from Top Gun? No, okay, not the guy from Top Gun. Michael Ustovenece is a metaverse pastor who lives in Fort Lauderdale now. What's interesting is he lives in Fort Lauderdale, but his church is located in California. So Michael Ustovenece works for Cornerstone VR, which is Cornerstone Yuba's Yuba City, which is located in Northern California. So he and his church are located in opposite sides of the country. That's interesting. But he's also a metaverse church pastor. His job is to literally pastor, shepherd, and care for people in the metaverse. That's interesting in itself. He does a lot of world building, which is also interesting. I mean, this is a really fascinating conversation. And why exactly is he named Goose? I don't know if we remember. I don't know if we talked about it in this episode, but that's a fascinating story as well. Maybe for another day.

So hey, look, I want to get you some exposure to this idea of metaverse church and what it can be. And so let's even just address the most practical standpoint here in 2022. Let's talk about this idea of church and virtual reality. So for the Metaverse Church Next podcast takeover episode here of the Church Digital, I'm bringing in Michael Ustovenece and myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital, Digital Church Network, and now Leadership Network, in a conversation that I'm simply calling Metaverse Church 101.

Okay, everybody, here you go.

All right, hey everybody, welcome to the Metaverse Church Next show. This is a new experience, a new show we're doing with Leadership Network: Metaverse Church Next. And my name is Jeff Reed. I'm the host of the show, and it is a pleasure to be here with you. I'm about ready to say a bunch of words, and hopefully they all make sense when they say that, when I say them, when you hear them.

So here with Metaverse Church Next, when we're championing the idea of churches in the metaverse, if we're looking at the church, if we're looking at the church in the metaverse, seeing the opportunities to disciple people in the metaverse, to look at the metaverse as a mission field and even an opportunity to be the church in metaverse spaces. So I've said the word metaverse a bunch of times. We're going to define what that means here, and we'll do it, you know, we'll do it right now. That's cool.

So here with the Metaverse Church Next show—Metaverse Church Next show—it'll get more of a rhythm. This is the first time. Give me a break here. Where we're going with this, man. Look, you've got virtual reality. You've got people wearing headsets like these, walking around in these virtual reality environments. We're going to be talking more about that today. But really, when you look at the metaverse, you're seeing it expanded to other opportunities just beyond virtual reality. You're looking at augmented reality, and Apple's working on a pair of glasses that look just like these where you'll be able to have a mixed reality or what they're calling XR, a mixed reality of augmented and virtual reality coming together.

When you, and this opens up a whole bunch of things with Web 3, 3.0, where you're looking at Bitcoin and how all that's working, blockchain, crypto, AI. Had interesting conversations just even today on the ethics surrounded around artificial intelligence and what we, the church, what our stance needs to be in the next three to five years. And it was an incredible conversation. We're going to have them here on the show probably closer to summer. But there's just a whole opportunity to us to dive into and to better understand how we, the church, need to be part of what's happening here in the metaverse.

So we're going to be diving into this. Just to hear in a little bit, a little bit about myself here, just as we're kicking off. My name is Jeff Reed. Some of you may know me. Awesome. If you don't know me, hey, it's great to meet you here in virtual show land. And so I run an organization around several organizations. One of them is Church Digital, helping establish churches understand how to do digital ministry more effectively. We really get into discipleship and multiplication far more than the streaming aspects of that. But in addition, we do a lot with metaverse. And so actually, just this past week, we did an install for a church that wanted a metaverse campus. So we built a metaverse campus for them and drove up and flew up and did some volunteer training and things like that in the metaverse. So lots of opportunities working with physical space and then there's Digital Church Network, where we work with organic movements and digital church planting and metaverse planting. And we'll get on some of those conversations later. And honestly, I could talk about myself all day, but you all don't want to hear that. You actually want to get into the show and kind of learn here as we're diving into Metaverse 101.

What are some of the basics if we're looking at metaverse church? And so for that conversation, I'm bringing in one of the few people in the country who actually have the job title metaverse pastor. And that's going to be Michael Ustovenece. Or, well, I tell you what, Michael, and I apologize in advance, I will call him Goose half the time because his nickname is Goose. Fun story. Another time we'll talk about it here, maybe towards the end. But Goose, man, well, just set up yourself here a little bit. Tell us your story and tell us kind of what you do.

A church, uh, what your role is there with uh Cornerstone? Yeah, thanks for having me. Um, yeah, so I, yeah, my title is Metaverse Pastor. I started out for many years just as an attorney. That was my trade for about a decade and a half. Technically I still am, but I felt a call to ministry a few years back, entered a more traditional ministry uh at the end of 2017. And um, then all of a sudden COVID hits and we start talking with some folks that are doing some interesting things in VR, and it just so happened that one of the other threads in my life has always been video games. I've always been a gamer, but also a game maker. So I've always been programming from when I was eight years old and my dad brought home an Apple 2E computer. I instantly wanted to know how it worked and instantly, you know, was trying to program with it. So just something I've always done. So about ten years ago I started playing with this really neat piece of software called Unity and making games with it, and was just doing that as part hobby, part business. But lo and behold, it turns out that in order to build worlds in these VR spaces, it's all done in Unity. And so there was this really interesting convergence of the pieces that the Lord had used in my life all sort of coming together to provide this opportunity. When I talked with Pastor Jason at Cornerstone, who one day said, "Hey, you know, I'm looking for a pastor who knows how to make video games." I say, "Well, that's oddly specific uh to my life." And uh, over many months of discussion with my former church and Jason, we decided this is the Lord is in this. It's just too perfect of a setup to pass that up. And so that's been my role for um almost a year now.

So what Michael's doing is he's literally running a church in the metaverse, a physical campus or a virtual representation of a lot of the ministry that's happening in physical space. And we're gonna dive in because there's some nuances. There's some things where physical or IRL, in real life, where IRL ministry it parallels and it looks similar to what happens in the metaverse, but there's areas where it's completely different. And actually, he's mentioned uh Jason Polling a couple times. Jason's going to be our guest on the next show here. We do the show next week Wednesday 12:30 Eastern. So kind of got a one-two punch here as we're talking to really like one of one of the few churches that at this point have taken that step, a physical church and IRL church that's doing metaverse ministry. There are others and there are more and more seem to be coming on each week. But really legacy guys that have been doing this for a while, uh, what we're seeing here out of Cornerstone Yuba City and VR is man, they're the front runners in that.

Well, hey, I mean, let's just even open this up here. Um, what do churches look like in the metaverse? Like, what, so yeah, I just said you're running a campus. What does that even mean? Uh, for us, what it looks like is we've got um AltSpace, which is one of the social apps in VR, and we have a world that's built out that uh, you know, looks like a church, looks a little bit like our church in Yuba City, although not exact. And we've got this, you know, we've got this campus built out and every Sunday we hold services there. Um, whoever's preaching, most weeks it's Pastor Jason that preaches, but he comes in, he preaches two services in the physical church and then he pops the headset on and he comes there as an avatar and preaches a third service in AltSpace. And we have our people who uh call Cornerstone home or our AltSpace campus, they call it home. We've got a lot of people that come in wondering what's going on. Uh, and it very much has all of the elements that you would expect of a physical church. And so we do that in AltSpace. That's again, that's one of the apps on the on in VR that you can do. You can also do it on a desktop browser. But uh, and then we go over to VRChat, which is, it's another social app. Very much, well, it's like AltSpace in the sense that it is an app. It's very different in terms of the feel and the culture over there. But we go over there and we do the same thing. We've got a church that's built out in there. We go in as avatars. We preach uh, we do Q and A, and um, and again we see both of those as churches with um with congregations with a flock that we care for. And there are people that show up there. The people that we have, where they don't have another church. So me and Jason are their pastors. Cornerstone is their church.

He touched on briefly, it's so good, and I want to come back to the fact that you and Jason are those pastors because there's an interesting nuance that you haven't mentioned yet. You and Jason live on opposite sides of the United States. Jason's over on the Pacific side, and you're down over here with me in South Florida in Fort Lauderdale. And so I want to come back to that. But the idea here is with um uh with these platforms, so you've got all VR, you've got a platform called uh VRChat, you've got another platform that's called Rec Room uh, Facebook just came out with one called Horizons. You know, this may not be a true apples to apples comparisons, but I kind of look at them like social media uh networks, their communities, and within the community they attract the type of person. They have some have stronger rules and regulations, some have weaker rules and regulations. And so you're kind of looking at all four of these uh platforms within virtual reality, these communities within virtual reality. And so the majority, to be honest, the majority of churches when they start out start out in this one that's called AltVR. It's run by Microsoft, and I would call it the Facebook uh of uh of these communities. It kind of reaches an older crowd. It's been around for a while. Um, everybody seems to have an account. They may or may not be in there all the time, but everyone's had some experience in AltVR. And then you get into the Rec Room, which is maybe it's a little more like the TikTok crowd. It's attracting a younger crowd because uh Rec Room is based off of um Xbox VR and PlayStation VR. So the gaming kind of tracks the younger. You're more likely to be in Rec Room and get cussed out by a fourteen year old. Like, that's what's going to happen uh in Rec Room because you got fourteen year olds running around with you know unfiltered language dropping F-bombs. Well, welcome to uh Rec Room. The fourteen year old needs Jesus like you need to get in there as the mission field. But that's some of the challenges. And then you've got VRChat, which is like the wild wild west. Um, that has no parental filters. And so you're likely to have a conversation with an avatar who's not wearing any clothes or you know, and I've had people estimate, I don't know that this is the truth, but I've had people in that space tell me that as much as forty to fifty percent of um VRChat traffic are people having virtual sex. So if you're around for like the early AOL days uh with the chat rooms, if you go back that far, it's like, "Hey, you know what, they just moved that over to VR," and that's the thing. So the, and then you've got the Facebook uh Horizons, which honestly is too soon to tell you what this thing's going to be like. It's just come out recently. And so Michael, you're doing it in um, you're running the church, you started in AltVR. Uh, talk to me a little bit here. Like, how did you move over or why did you move over? Because now you're in VRChat, which is, that's an aggressive world. Like, I don't want to oversell this, but it's, I have people telling me no church does not belong in VRChat because of the environment and the people that are in there. But you're basically moving into the red light district and you set up a church in that space. Like, what was the mindset behind that with y'all?

Well, you know, for Cornerstone, a key aspect of going into VRChat was um was something that happened with one of the people that came to AltSpace. So we had a young man who was um absolutely entrenched in the VRChat culture, um, all the things that you were talking about. He's very open about sharing that. And he ended up coming to an AltSpace church service. And through that service and through the relationship that he developed with Pastor Jason, he gave his life to Christ. And when he did that, he turned around and said, "We have to reach the people that I've been running with. Like, they need Jesus really badly." And so um, so he kind of took it upon himself to just start creating the world there. And um, and Cornerstone just kind of wrapped around that vision of this idea that essentially what we had was a native. Like, we, it would be the equivalent of going to you know some mission field and raising up a native that would be able to help us navigate their tribes or their culture and their language and all of that. And so so to have that has been absolutely invaluable. And that was really kind of the motivation where we say like, "Look, like, look at what the Lord's doing. How can we not go there?" And so that's really the motivation. Having that person that was championing that, who was a native, was a big part of that. And now we've got another young lady who came to Christ who is doing the exact same thing with Rec Room. She is a Rec Room native, Rec Room expert builder, came to us as a Satan worshiper, came to our AltSpace campus as someone who came to troll us, came to just cause chaos, found out that we weren't going to respond with hate. We were going to respond with love and acceptance and tell her God loves trolls and so do we. And through the relationships that she built, in particular with one of the ladies at the church, this young lady ended up giving her life to Christ. And then turned around and said, "I'm going to build your church in Rec Room."

So some of it has been vision in terms of uh, you know, as far as Pastor Jason and myself, and saying, "Hey, where else can we go? Let's try and go to these places." But also some of it has been the Lord just opening doors for us. You've told the story, you know, just hear about the Satan worshiper. Um, and so is that, I'm going to ask a question that's future queen of hell, right? In the story, that was her screen name? Was the, she showed up as the future queen of hell was her screen name?

Yeah, and what's interesting is even the trolls need Jesus. And through the relationship of many people, you know, and some of them through your church, that was a nine month, a twelve month, like, how long was that story? Maybe from beginning to end?

Yeah, that's a troll to Jesus. Yeah, it's probably about a nine month process. And so I mean, you're really starting to pull the thread here on the relational aspects of what you can find in these metaverses. And in physical church, we often find that people find Jesus and then they join the community. In digital and really in meta, it's the exact opposite where we're finding that people are finding the community and through the community then they're getting connected to Jesus. You know, I've heard stories of people that weren't saved uh serving on the tech team for a metaverse church, literally running the slide software, the equivalent to the ProPresenter operator in the metaverse, was somebody who didn't even believe in Jesus, but he was friends within the community. And so we're finding more and more of that kind of happen.

Well, let me ask you this. Let's talk about some of the attributes. So you know, you've got your physical type of person. And I would say that who we're reaching in the metaverse doesn't really challenge. It's not like we're competing with it.

Because we're finding really like with the future queen of hell here, it's a different type of person that we're reaching. Like, who are you reaching with your metaverse church? And maybe parallel it to the type of person that Yuba City is reaching there with Cornerstone.

We're certainly reaching people who, outside of a miracle of God, are not going to get up on Sunday and say, "I think I'm going to go to a church today." The vast majority of the people that we're talking to, that's not the thought in their head and it won't be. So that is one, and that spans a really broad range of demographics. You know, from age to culture to race, like there's just a lot of people who are not thinking, "I need to go to church today."

So we talked to a lot of people that are in that spot. We talked to quite a few people who are very vocal about their mental and emotional issues, and they say they may even actually desire to go to a church, but they can't be around crowds for whatever reason. There's a variety of reasons why. Some of them are physical. We have one of our most key leaders, a man who cannot leave his house. He has such physical ailments that he cannot leave his house, but in the metaverse, he's one of our most effective evangelists. He's actually the head of our discipleship right now. We just installed him as head of discipleship because he is so effective at discipleship and bringing in others to get in the discipleship pathway. He won't be able to do that physically.

So we have people who just simply cannot go, even if they wanted to. We have quite a few de-churched people. Quite a few people that I talked to say, "I haven't been to church in twenty years," and they're there. And you can just kind of sense in their voice that they're looking for someone to trust. They know that church is where they should be, but for whatever reason, they have a hurt that they have not been able to get over. And actually, we have helped some of those people get over that.

So we've got that. We have people who go to church. We have people that when they show up, they say, "Hey, we heard something like this in our physical church this morning. Here's how it relates," and they just do physical church and then they come hang out with us too.

And the one narrative I have not yet heard ever is someone that says, "Yeah, I was going to physical church, and then I found you guys and I stopped going there." I've never heard that narrative. That has never happened, as far as I know. Maybe it has, but I've never had that narrative. I've never talked with anybody in that narrative.

We have had people come to VR church, come to our metaverse campuses, and then start going to physical church. We have had that happen. So yeah, so that's, you know, and there's lots of nuances as far as the stories that we hear and some of the other narratives that we encounter, but generally that's kind of some of the big buckets that we encounter.

You know, that physical-digital or physical-meta kind of narrative reminds me a little bit. We did a podcast with you over on Church Digital with you and some of your team, and I remember Angel—I think Angel got baptized in the metaverse. And somebody's probably freaking out on me. Like, I don't mean to be that like, you can baptize in the metaverse, but what was interesting with Angel, she's like, "Yeah, and I hope to get baptized in physical space too." Like, for her, it was a both thing. It wasn't an exclusive thing. You know, I've met some people that think metaverse is exclusive, and I've met people like Angel that see it as both.

And in the ecclesial—I'm not going to argue it. It's funny. I used to try to argue this, but I don't want to argue the ecclesiology of a meta church today here in 2022. I think it'll work itself out in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years as culture accepts more of it and as the strength of the technology defines it.

I think that we, and guys like Michael that are so aggressive in this season, in this space, there's an opportunity to cling to the biblical narrative—what the Bible calls the church to be, what are the functions. Start with Acts two and go from there. But beyond that, it's an experiment. How Michael is interpreting it through Cornerstone VR is going to be different than how DJ Soto is going to read it over for VR Church. She's going to be different than how Stuart's reading it for Lakeland VR. And so like, we all get these different perspectives as we're experimenting with this.

And one of the things honestly I love about guys like Goose and DJ and some of the others is, "Hey, let's not yell at. Let's not be mad at. Let's not stop the innovation. Let's embrace it. Let's recognize it as an experiment and encourage these guys that are going out there and that are being innovative when culture is not."

I mean, I hate to say this, but probably the most controversial thing that I've ever said in a digital environment is, "There can be a metaverse church." Like, on YouTube, I get ten times the number of people yelling at me compared to that. So you know, recognizing that it's an experiment, what are you feeling? Do you feel negative from the outside? And do you feel negative from people within the church? I'd be interested in your perspective there.

So I don't. For a few years, I don't feel negative for a few reasons. There are some of the noise that's now starting to emerge, and it's getting louder and louder. It really is coming from voices that don't really understand what it is. They've got a few minor data points, but they don't really get it. And it's a little bit like—I feel like, for those, you know, you've got kids. I've got four. It's a little bit like hearing someone with no kids telling me how to parent. It's like, "Okay, like, thanks, but you don't know what you're talking about." And that's okay. I know you mean well. So I don't hold it against them, but it's not useful for the people who have taken the time to actually look into it—not necessarily that they're trying to get into metaverse ministry, but try to understand it, to see what is going on and what are the questions that we need to look out for, what are the pitfalls we might need to watch out for.

We value those conversations. Pastor Jason and I are all the time saying, "Okay, let's do this, but wait, is this okay? Like, what about this? What about that?" Like, we're not just going into this saying, "Let's just do whatever and let the chips fall where they may." We are aggressive. We're always saying, "Just pull the trigger, let's go," but we're thinking deeply about the theological implications of some of the things that we are saying. Let's do so.

For the people who have actually looked into this and are offering points and counterpoints, those are super valuable. We love having those conversations. So the noise in that space and the challenges, it really is a matter of kind of filtering it out. But also, for me, the noise to me is positive.

When I was making video games and I was actually publishing them for sale, one of the greatest moments for me was when I found out one of my games was really heavily being pirated—like, people were stealing the game and not paying for it. And I saw that and I said, "You know, I mean, obviously that's not a good thing, but it meant something. Like, that was like a weirdly proud moment."

So, you know, I hear this. I'm not pulling this from Scripture. I'm pulling this from Reggie Jackson. When they asked him, "How does it feel when everybody boos you at opposing stadiums?" and he says, "Fans don't boo nobodies." So if the boos are coming, we're on to something.

We teased this a little bit. You're based in Fort Lauderdale. There's some questions by the way in the chat. Keep them coming. We're going to address some of those at the end. A couple of those are really good, the ones that I'm seeing. But for you, you are a pastor. You live in Fort Lauderdale, and Cornerstone Yuba City is in Northern California, four time zones away. And I know you do that flight. What is that, like a twelve-hour flight? An eight to ten-hour flight feels like it. Yeah. So like, what? But you're pastoring metaverse, so you're working with people. You know, the little bit I know of your core team volunteers, one lives in Georgia, one lives in the Carolinas. Like, you're spread out. Are there challenges with that? Communication, connection issues? Like, what is it for you to work at a church championing a metaverse thing when you're not actually rubbing shoulders physically?

Yeah, it's challenging. I miss, you know, walking in the halls and seeing people and throwing bouncing ideas off of each other and having that sort of connection. I miss that a lot. At the same time, you know, we maintain that it's possible to still have effective ministry through a digital medium. And so far, it has been very effective. I mean, the fruit that has been born from it speaks for itself. And so, you know, I take the challenges and some of the drawbacks of that and just say, "You know, this is just a difficulty that we kind of have to walk through." And in the end, as long as we're being effective, it's not about my happiness necessarily. It's about, "Are we being effective to advance the Gospel?" And that so far has been—I think the fruit has proven that it is being effective. The Lord is working. And so even with the difficulties, we say, "Onward, let's keep going."

We're also figuring it out. When Pastor Jason and I talked initially, and Pastor Roby, my former pastor, had some really great questions in the space, saying, "Hey, but what about this? What about that? What about this?" Like, how are you going to deal with that? And some of them are like, "I don't know. We're going to have to get into it and see and make sure." And so, you know, I just have a multitude of wise voices that speak into the situation and are looking out for me. The elders of Cornerstone are so great about checking in on me, in particular knowing that I'm out on an island, sort of, in terms of staff and in terms of the ministry implications of that. And so they're just very good about making sure that everything is okay.

And frankly, there have been more than a few times where they've reached out, and I was not in a great place. You know, it was kind of in a lonely place. And you know, people in a lonely place don't necessarily have the wherewithal to reach out and say, "I'm lonely." You know, I just kind of sit in it. And so them being proactive, Pastor Jason being proactive, and saying, "How are you doing? How are you doing?" That ultimately is the thing that keeps it all going.

And that really is the essence of metaverse ministry. Like, if you really boil it down to what is the most effective thing in metaverse ministry, it is just letting people talk. Like, just going and saying, "How are you doing?" and being an empathetic listener so that you can respond.

Boil it down. What I just heard you say is the most important thing that you as a metaverse pastor can do is empathetically listen to people. So like, how does that—let's just roll that.

How does that idea influence what you do? So like, you know, your church services, the conversations during the week, unpack and through the lens of empathetically listening, what does it actually mean to pastor somebody in a metaverse church?

Yeah, it means seeing everything as two-way. Everything is two-way communication. It's always a two-way street. And that informs how we do our services. A huge part of our service is Q&A. Like, at the end, I mean, if you look at our service, it would look probably very much like most of the churches in the United States right now, where we have a kind of a pre-service time, we do worship, and then we do a sermon, and we sometimes do communion, and so all of that would generally look the same. But for us, we basically open it up to the audience, to the congregation, whoever's there, and say, "Okay, cool, what questions do you have? Raise your hand and we'll get to it." And it's as bonkers as you might think. We get some amazing insight from our people. We have really seasoned Christians that call Cornerstone home, and they'll come up and they'll add to what we've talked about, or they'll ask a very deep question, a very important question. And that discussion sometimes is the mechanism where people experience their spiritual growth.

But some people just need to be heard. And for the people that have that opportunity to come in and say, "I'm struggling with this," it may not have anything to do with the sermon, but they may come in and just say, "You know, here's what I'm struggling with. Here's what my lifestyle is. Does Jesus still love me? Can I come to Jesus like this?" And it's just like week after week, in both AltSpace and VR Chat, I just step away from that just amazed at some of the transformations that I just hear happening to someone far away, all because we just put some headsets on. It's amazing.

You're trying to be an empathetic listener, and I'm going to hit one of the questions from the audience because they're asking, "How do you read body language?" You know, so much of having a conversation in physical space—I'm pastoring somebody, I'm looking somebody in the eye, they're diverting their attention away from me, they won't look me in the eye. I know something else is going on. I can dig in. Body language—do you have that level? What does it look like? Kind of inferring and understanding when you're having conversations like that in the metaverse?

That's a great question. Obviously, we don't get body language in the same way that we would in the physical space. We certainly don't get any sort of facial recognition or anything like that. So that is, I wouldn't call it a weakness, but it's one aspect of communication that we don't get. It doesn't invalidate it because once you are communicating in this medium enough, you start to understand what other nuances might be happening and start to pick up on it.

You know, the example that Pastor Jason uses all the time is, we would never say that somebody who's visually impaired couldn't be a counselor. We'd never say that. There are very effective people who can't see that can be a counselor. So what about them? If it would invalidate that, to say that this is not a valid way of communicating? Now, again, there are some things that you have to make up for, but there are things that we get that you don't get in the physical space.

And what I think we're going to realize down the road is that psychologists and psychiatrists, or whoever, are going to come into the space and really start to understand what communication in this medium really means. And we're going to realize that there are strengths in this space that you don't get in the physical, and actually start using it appropriately. Where I do believe at some point we're going to get to the spot where somebody in a physical space is going to be communicating or counseling or whatever it may be and say, "You know what, this is going to be better if we do it in VR or XR or whatever it may be."

The anonymity that we've got gives us access to people in an unprecedented way, and that is a strength that has just shown to yield so much fruit. And it really has microwaved relationships. Rather than having to sort of pull information from people that they may not want to give, many people are there to just unburden themselves about things. Many people are there and say, "I feel safe to tell you all of this because you have no idea who I am. You don't even know what continent I live on. If you can't really tell, so I feel safe enough to tell you all of that."

And so that is something we kind of just lean into and say, "I may not be able to tell if you're bored talking to me, but I did just hear about all of your childhood trauma. So let's get to counseling on that." And it's interesting. Even when talking, we had a conversation recently with the church, and it was like, "Don't ask their real names. Don't, because when you ask the real name and they tell you, there's a little bit of that innocence, a little bit of that privacy, a little bit of that openness that goes away because now I know who the person is."

And so it's almost like you don't need it. You do ministry with the person even though they have a handle, even though it's Goose or it's Future Queen of Hell or whatever it is. You don't need to. Whereas in physical, you shake hands, "Hey, I'm Jeff. What's your name?" And it's so natural in physical space to do that. But when you're really looking at metaverse, if you can hold that question, "What's your name?" and start to dive into, "Oh my gosh, the things that open up, the conversations that you can have by listening in these environments," it's beautiful, man.

Thank you for saying that, Michael. So good. Hey, we had talked about another question that I see here. And if there are other questions, feel free to throw them in and we'll address them. We kind of ping-pong around here a little bit. So I know you're—we talked about different platforms that you're on. We talked about, you know, you're in all VR, you're in VR Chat. It sounds like you're exploring Rec Room and starting to build something in that space. But there's the idea of reaching people through gaming, through, you know, some of the MMO games that are out there. I don't think you're doing that now. Have you explored that? Talk to me a little bit about the idea of utilizing some of these gaming platforms.

As I said, I've been a gamer my whole life. That's really the world that I'm most comfortable with. Coming into places like AltSpace and VR Chat, I was slightly surprised to find that it's not as much of a gaming community as I thought. It's much, much more of a social community. That said, we gamers are still here, and there are a lot of vibrant communities around games as well.

And yes, we have looked at a few different games. One MMO that we've sort of thought about was New World, which is the Amazon one. We haven't gotten any traction on that yet. I kind of want to see how it goes. But anytime a new game comes out, we've got eyes on it. Is it a place where we can do some form of ministry? And for me, the big sort of buckets really kind of fall into: are we looking at doing church there, or are we looking to do outreach there?

So far, the most fruit, and the landscape seems mostly designed for outreach. For quite a while now, me and my boy Stone Cargo have been going into Population One, along with a few of our other friends. But week in and week out, we have been going into Population One, which is the VR version of Fortnite—that's kind of the shorthand for it. But we will go in and we will pop open a public lobby. We'll call it Bible Study. Pop One Bible Study, whatever it is. We put Bible Study in it, and we will just play. We'll just play games, we'll play matches, keep going, and people will come in.

A hundred percent of the people that come in think it's a joke. Nobody thinks that it's an actual Bible study. And then about forty-five minutes in, after we have hung out, we've gotten to know each other a little bit, they see that, hey, you know, we like shooting, you like shooting us, and we play the game together. There's a connection. I'll circle everybody up and say, "Okay, it's time for the Bible study." And we will get people that drop out. We will get people that say, "You know, I'm going to stay and I'm going to troll."

So many weeks I will just preach a message with somebody unloading magazine after magazine into me with their MP5, and that's just how it goes. But quite a few people actually have stuck around and have made connections. And we, you know, we send them to Discord, which is kind of our hub. But many times we've had people stop and say, "That's awesome. You could do something like this. This is awesome. Like, yeah, you know, I go to church here, and I never thought about doing ministry in this space. This is great." It's like turning on light bulbs for people.

And then for people they've never heard the gospel, they're the one kid that I still remember. It had to be about thirteen, somewhere in America. You can just tell. And he came up afterwards and he goes, "What were you talking about?" And I said, "Oh, I was, you know, it's from the Bible. You know, like the Bible story of Jesus." He's like, "No, I don't know. I have no idea what you're talking about." I said, "Well, like, okay, if you've seen the cross outside of a church, you know why there's a cross outside of a church, right?" He's like, "No, I've seen a cross. I have no idea."

I guess Jesus dying on the cross meant absolutely nothing to this kid. Just no idea. So I had literally like two minutes to give him the story of the entire Bible, which I, you know, I did my best to. And you know, it was a seed planted. I mean, he didn't just stop and say, "Okay, I want to." In fact, I said, "What do you think?" He goes, "That's a lot to take in." I said, "Yeah, it is. But hey, if you want to, you know, if you want to connect, if you want to ask questions or whatever," and you know, we friend it up and that was it. But it's just about planting those seeds.

Planting seeds. We talk a lot about just planting seeds and using games to do that. It's an amazing opportunity because of that shared connection. The one thing that gaming has always done is that I don't know what I may know nothing about you, but if you play a game I like, at the very least I know I got one thing in common with you. And if you can make that one connection, they just might listen to something else you have to say.

You're going to go plant a church in Cape Town, South Africa. I have no idea why that popped into my head, but let's run with it. You're going to move there. You're going to meet the people. You're going to walk around. You're going to learn the culture. You're going to learn how people think in that space. You're going to find the person of peace, maybe somebody that's friendly to the ideas and may be friendly to God. And so as we look at even video games, I think there's an opportunity to do that. Once again, controversial idea. Somebody out there is probably writing a very angry email. So feel free to send it over. But the heart of this is...

There are, there are, we'll have DJ Soto with VR Church. He's been on in a couple weeks, I think he's week three, and so he's been doing some things. Probably one of the few guys I know that's doing an organized movement into MMO video games where he's doing Rust, he's doing, um, Final Fantasy. I want to say they're doing Black Desert Online. I know some individuals that are doing Black Desert Online. And so like, there's an opportunity, I think, to look at it as a mission field. Now, can you do it as a church? I don't know. But I know you can a mission field. I know there's plenty of people who need Jesus. There's an estimated 24 million people who play Final Fantasy Online each week, um, active each week. And to say that, oh, there's nobody in there that doesn't know Jesus, I suggest probably a large majority of them uh need uh Jesus in their lives. And so would love um the opportunity to even engage and to help churches get in there into even the video game stuff uh as a mission field, even experimenting with it as a church.

Hey, talking about another experiment here, uh, another question came in. Um, kids ministry, and I know we've had this conversation recently. Um, so the context for this, this uh, the question was more about digital, uh, which I I think actually may loosen some of it up. And ma'am, if you want to reach out to me directly, I'm assuming it's a ma'am that may have been a uh misconstrued on my part. I apologize. Whoever you are, if you want to reach out to me, Jeff at the church digital, you can email me directly. We can talk digital on that. But for this question, I would love to unpack um, I would love to. And so Bruce, the producer's like, it was a, it was a man. So sir, I do apologize, seriously, for that. It's not the worst thing I'm gonna do today, believe me. Uh, so but answer this for me. Metaverse kids ministry. What, what, what are some challenges? What are some obstacles? Opportunities? Like, as you've looked at for it for the church, what have you seen uh there with uh with metaverse? Uh, it's complex. The, the, you know, the online, you know, so COPPA is the act that protects the children under 13.

And so technically, if you look at the T's and C's of any of these platforms, you cannot be under 13. There are definitely kids under 13 on these platforms, but that's technically the rule. And so that's the first thing is is like you, you just have to be very, very careful with that. And then even under 18, you know, that. So that 13 to 18 range, also you are still dealing with a minor. So this is where, you know, I've got both my pastor hat and my lawyer hat on when I'm talking to my people. But mostly, the way that we've dealt with it right now is is we have just said, look, we need to be very, very careful about this and use as much of the physical church principles in this space and do not get lax. There is a tendency to think, well, because we're not in the same room physically, we can loosen up our restrictions. We can loosen up what we know are best practices. And I would just say to anybody that's going to enter the space, do not do that. Have huge, wide boundaries over the interactions that you have with kids. That being said, they're going to, you're going to have them, and you won't always know that you're having them. I mean, they're, it's just, it, you just won't know. Um, but you know, just the kind of simple things where it's just like, never have an individual interaction. Always have two people. If you're out, you know, if you're gonna go out evangelizing or if you're gonna, you're gonna have a meeting or something like that, it's just make sure that you've got, you know, you've got two people in the room at all times monitoring that conversation so that you know the child is protected and you know that the person is protected against an allegation that that is false. So we haven't had any issues with that, but it doesn't mean that we don't have, you know, one reason I think it's just because we we try to have really, really um, you know, again, those wide boundaries. But it's, yeah, it, me, mainly that. Now, I, the question probably was more about like, how do we, how do we actually service those kids? But my instantly, my lawyer hat was on. I I think that there are there are going to emerge opportunities for that crowd, for the, for the, for the, for the younger crowd. Um, but because right now it's such a mix, like you got a Rec Room and yes, it's a lot of kids, but there are plenty of adults to play that. So while that, well, the common narrative is that it's for kids, and certainly more often you will see that, there are plenty of adults in there. And so the interactions are just, it can, it can kind of get a little bit strange. And so um, it's not even Rec Room. My point is this. Even Rec Room, which is kind of designed for kids, isn't only kids in there. So like, I love that my kids play uh and I, you know, like my children are, you know, 15 and under. And so but they, they have VRs, but like, they're not going into Rec Room by themselves, or at least I know I'm gonna know exactly what they're doing, and there's no chatting with other people. Like, I have, I have that locked down pretty, pretty well because I know like, there's going to be adults in there. So I think there's something that might emerge that adults stay out of. I, it's, it's, you're just always going to have to be on guard that it's hard to um, it's hard to put that gate up like, is that, that you, you don't have the, the security guard at the front of kids ministry saying like, you can't come in unless you got your tag. We just don't have any way to do that.

Well said. There, there's no bouncer in in metaverse kids. Um, what, what I've seen a couple places do is um, it's student-led movements where it's, it's kids and students utilizing the platform to reach students. And I, I shouldn't say kids. I don't, I don't know, I don't know anybody that's sub 12 uh because of all of the issues uh centered around the the terms and conditions, the T's and C's that aren't lining up that won't let a 12 year old on. But 13 up, there seems to be more gray or more open to it. And so like, you know, there are several. They're the oldest digital church that I know of, it's been running probably 12 or 13 years at this point, and it was started uh by by a guy on a platform called Roblox. He's 22 now. And so if you're really bad at math, he started when he was like 11. And building this Robloxian church. Now, I mean, it, it's, it's a, in a lot of times with these student-led movements, theology's a little over the map. Um, even understanding of discipleship and what this is, it's more mimicking physical instead of really doing something in digital and meta. And so it's um, it's just, it's a little interesting uh but what you're finding specifically with this Daniel Herron, this guy that's been doing it for 12 years for Bloxy and Christians. Um, I mean, he's probably impacted 50, 75,000 people through his, his digital church on this Robloxian platform. My kid spends, I don't know, probably 10 hours a week playing in this Roblox world. And and just going around the different places. And guys like Daniel are being the church and trying to build relationships and disciple in that space. And what's interesting is Daniel's now 22, and Daniel's like, I think I'm aging out of Robloxian Christians. It's time to get somebody else because now I'm the creepy old guy talking with a bunch of little kids, and I don't, I don't want to do that. And so it's, it's just this really interesting paradigm with trying to lead student-led movements in in that space. Uh, there may be obstacles and and I can tell Goose's uh, law hat is a lawyer hat's getting ready to come back on at some point here. But uh, there's definitely challenges in that space to reach a new kid, a new type of person, somebody that you're more familiar with, that you're comfortable with, that that knows you, like, maybe a little safer in that space. But that's, that's often the challenges. How do you embrace the mission field? Um, in that. Hey, well, let's do this. We just, we got a couple minutes left, and I realized, oh man, we didn't, I didn't ask that question. We got to talk about this cord, right? Like, Discord is a major part. If we're really looking at a 101 approach here towards metaverse ministry, what we're doing in platforms like Discord and asynchronous connection. Um, maybe define a little bit here, Michael. What, what Discord is uh, just briefly as we're landing the plane.

So Discord is um, it's really just a chat program. Uh, so you can, you know, you can do text chat. You can also do video. You can do audio. It's really kind of this like holistic solution to communicating digitally. And mainly uh arose for gamers to to link up, you know, playing MMOs and or something like that, where you want to get your guild together. Like that would be one way to do it. And and there are many, many other uses um for Discord. It's, it's, if you know Slack, it's kind of like Slack in that way too. So there's a lot of productivity uh uses for it also as an alternative to Slack. But that's kind of the general idea is is that's, that, that's functionally what you can do. It's a way to communicate either through text, video, or audio, all in one place. Again, it does some more things than that, but that's kind of the nuts and bolts of it. And for us, it's our, it's really our metaverse ministry hub. So we go in and we've got people in our VR, you know, places, not just on Sunday. They will go in and and you know, do events and and hang out and play games, whatever it may be. But 24/7, seven days a week, our Discord server is where we really do the bulk of our ministry. Like, when, when somebody needs prayer, if somebody's struggling, one of our, one of our flock or somebody that we know it needs prayer, like, they're going to go to Discord and say, hey, can somebody pray with me? Um, if somebody's got a theological question, you know, we may not be in VR at that moment. So what do they do? They come over to Discord. We've got our channel, questions about Christianity. They pop it in there, and we've got people that are able to respond and we kick it around. We have a daily Bible reading plan in there, so that somebody, you know, will post Scripture each day, talk about it, and then we just hang out. It's also just the place where our community gets to know each other um, you know, at the pace that they, that they want to to go at. And so some of us will like link up to go play a game, say, hey, you guys want to drop into Pop One? Let's go. Uh, that kind of thing. We have, yeah, and we just, we joke around with each other. We'll post memes. We'll share our art. That's another thing. We've got some amazing artists um in our, in our congregation, and they'll post their art there, and we'll celebrate that. So it, it really ends up being like, I said, I call it like the hub because that, that really is what it, what it, what it, it is. And we have people in there that we pastor, that we, that we counsel, that actually never actually even go into VR. They just don't. They're not, they don't like. Some of them don't even have a headset. So so Discord really is um, is the place where most of the relationships get forged. And it's that, it's, it's kind of like a link to to our VR experiences or in any of the other places that we might do ministry. It's crucial. I had somebody at a metaverse pastor tell me once that uh, the, the, the headsets, that's what we do on Sunday. Um, the Discord is what we do Monday through Saturday. Like, that's, that's the lifeblood of the church. Lives and asynchronously through, you know, devices like the iPhone and things like that. And so incredible opportunities to extend the reach and actually discipleship typically lives more in that asynchronous environments and in the Discord than it does in the actual headsets itself. Uh, and so it's just some, some great opportunities there. Well, hey, uh, Michael, this has been an incredible show. Um, let me ask in the first of its kind. I only offended one person in the show, so I am, I'm proud that we made it through one. And and...

Looking forward to more conversations. I know next week we're gonna have Jason Polling, Michael's literal boss, from Cornerstone Yuba City, and we'll be talking about pastoring, what that looks like, practical steps. He literally went from—this joke doesn't offend, I've said it in front of his face—but he literally didn't even know how to spell VR to running a VR church in less than a year. And so a phenomenal story of multiplication and discipleship and trusting people around you. And so looking forward to him telling the story with Michael and Jason and these guys.

We worked together through a website called metachurch.digital. Basically helping churches like yours figure out how to take these next steps in digital and metaverse ministry. So feel free to check out the website. I think the link should be in the chat: metachurch.digital. Feel free to click on that. You can grab time with me. We can talk in person. But we'd love to hear what you all are thinking, what you all are dreaming about when it comes to the metaverse, and maybe help you figure out what some of those basic steps are now to get you going to the place where you can be multiplying even into a metaverse church.

And on that note, man, we're gonna land the plane. This has been great. So I'll speak up for myself, Jeff, and Goose here as well. Thanks for jumping on Metaverse Church Next here with Leadership Network. Thanks for Expo for hosting this, and we'll see you next week Wednesday 12:30 here at MetaChurch Next. You all have a good day.

Hey, Goose, thanks for doing that episode. Friends, I am excited to talk to you about this. Here at the Church Digital, we are passionate about helping churches like yours explore the metaverse. And once again, through metachurch.digital—M-E-T-A-church dot digital—we want to help churches like yours take some next steps here in recognizing the metaverse as a mission field, as a place where discipleship can happen, and as an opportunity to do church biblically, stable church in the metaverse.

So look at that. Check out the website: metachurch.digital. I want to brag on my friend Goose here for a second. Michael, use the Venice. First off, like, guy has and is an excellent pastor. Has been doing a great job pastoring people in the metaverse. And honestly, there's not that many people who can say that they are pastoring in virtual reality, and Goose, Michael's been doing a great job of that.

Secondly, he has the gift of programming in this platform called Unity. Within this framework, and this Unity framework is what's used to program the metaverse in VR Chat, in Alt VR, and he has done a phenomenal job of coding and world building and developing these environments for Cornerstone VR as well as others. And look, I'm honored. I'm like, "Hey, Goose, man, I got some churches that are asking some questions about maybe looking for a world builder. Are you interested?" And Goose was like, "Yes, yes, I am."

And so look, if you want us to come along and help you develop, build a world, build a church—maybe it's even, "Hey, look, I don't want to do something fully custom, but I gotta have something. Help me get started with something, a more template approach." We got that too. If it's coaching, if it's help, like we as a team working with Jason Polling and others, we are gung-ho to help churches like yours figure out this metaverse thing and learn something from this metaverse experiment here in 2022.

So do this: if you've got any questions on metaverse, I want you to reach out to me. Well, first off, go to the website metachurch.digital. Or, hey, you know what? You've listened to this podcast for this long. I'm gonna give you my cell phone number. You ready for that? 244-484-324-8724. Number four. The church on your telephone. Apple bet. 484-324-8724. Text me. Reach out to me. Holler at me. You can even call me. I rarely answer. Who talks on the phone anymore? I don't. I don't get that anyway. Holler at me. Let's get in touch and let us figure out how we can help you with these metaverse steps.

Hey, guys, this is gonna be the end of season two right here, and we're moving away from the takeovers and we're gonna get back into it right around the corner as we are gonna start to talk about season three and digging into this idea of the digital church network. Oh, there are so many conversations I have been geeking out over the past couple weeks, just dreaming of the conversations and the people that I want to start to dig into and start to learn from as we're talking about maybe a unique approach, but a more decentralized approach to ministry, to what church in the future can look like if we lean into it. And this is not a heretical thing—at least I don't think it is—but maybe today's heresy is tomorrow's orthodoxy. Somebody said that. I'll let you Google that. You can figure that out.

Hey, guys, it's been a great season two. Thank you for this. Thank you, Michael, for jumping on. At this point, dude, I'm just stalling and I gotta hang up.

Hey, this is Jeff. Have a great one. Thanks for joining for the podcasting. We'll see you next time here on the Church Digital Podcast. You have a good day.