Recently, I attended a roundtable discussion at the Alban Institute about new/social media and congregational development. One of the people I met there was Andrea Useem, who maintains the magazine-style ReligionWriter blog and covers a wide range of feature topics relating to faith in the world today.
Recently, she attended a service at the Second Life church that’s tied in with JustLife.TV an evangelical church 2.0 mission that’s launching later this year. She likens the service itself to another real-life evangelical service she’d recently attended. In fact, the similarities—and the surprising differences—make up a compelling critique that gives insight on how churches can and should be taking advantage of the platform, rather than building an “in-world” church and hoping people come:
In both cases, I entered a dark theater-like room and sat down in one of the comfy chairs. I stood up and swayed during the Christian-rock praise music. I sat down and listened to the young, handsome male pastor and watched other video interludes featuring hip, casually dressed people who obviously have a passion for their religion. If I was actually a member of an evangelical church, I could see that attending a church service in Second Life might be as relevant and real as attending a brick-and-mortar church.
The Lifechurch experience was actually so much like real-life church that I was a little disappointed. For one thing, I found the sermon — which appeared via live streaming video — to be too long. Thanks to YouTube, I’m used to watching videos with a little bar at the bottom that tells me how much longer the video will run, which gives a feeling of control. In this case, I had no idea how long the sermon was going to be, which contributed to my sense of restlessness. Another thing: The chat function of Second Life makes it possible for people in the congregation to easily communicate, but no one chatted during the sermon. Since sermons are the definition of top-down content, I was surprised there wasn’t a little innovation here, some way to use the interactivity of Second Life.
But here was my big disappointment. After patiently sitting through the sermon (okay, maybe I wasn’t so patient — isn’t being patient anathema to being online?), I was looking forward to chatting with people in the cavernous but furnished church lobby. Unfortunately, the 15 or so people who attended the service disappeared quickly, and I found myself as I usually am in Second Life — wandering around by myself. Compare this to my first-time experience at the Reston Community Church, where several people introduced themselves to me, and one woman even sent me a hand-written note in the mail the next week, saying she hoped we would meet again soon. Since I usually associate evangelical churches with being extremely welcoming to newcomers (after all, they do want to evangelize you), I was surprised to find that element missing in my first-time experience at Lifechurch on Second Life.
You can see her comments, interspersed with other media observations about American Idol and the presidential primary coverage, here.