Church In The Metaverse

So this Easter Sunday I checked out my first church service in the metaverse. I honestly had no idea what to expect, but I was intrigued by what I saw on Life Church’s website.

“At Life.Church, we will do anything short of sin to reach people who don’t know Christ. To reach people no one is reaching, we’ll do things no one is doing.” (life.church/metaverse)

I have a lot of respect for this church because they’ve always blazed the trail in using technology to spread God’s love. Many of you have probably used The Bible App, which is published by YouVersion, also known as Life.Church. They launched just as the Appstore went live, and last year hit half a billion downloads.

HALF A BILLION DOWNLOADS!

The service I attended on Sunday had maybe half a dozen attendants, clearly a humble beginning for a church with such a broad footprint. But I feel that’s exactly why God has used them, because they’re willing to take risks and go places that other churches aren’t, before it’s obvious.

The worship and sermon experience wasn’t too different from a live Youtube stream, but after service I felt the real benefit of this format. A pastor walked up to me and said hi, in audio, just like a real live service. I told him I was blessed by the service and all the great work his church was doing. He told me about ways that I could get plugged into the church and after a really pleasant few minutes I told him I’d be back. Then as I went to check out the board with all the life groups, another pastor came up and we had an even more interesting conversation. We exchanged contact and he suggested we jump on a Zoom call. I did him one better and told him I’d visit him in Oklahoma, maybe even next week.

The internet is filled with articles written by believers knocking the Metaverse. “It distracts people from God. It pulls people away from fellowship with real people. It will lead to the mark of the beast.” Every new technology has drawn this kind of criticism from believers throughout history, until every believer realizes they have to get with the program. I look forward to seeing all the amazing spaces that the church creates in the metaverse to bring a greater revelation of God’s love.

Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command.”

God & Crypto

Isaiah 44:22 “Return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

For the last few days I’ve been roaming around NFT LA, a conference full of thousands of crypto fanatics and creatives. Speakers included Andrew Yang, Steve Aoki, Macy Gray, Charlie Sheen, Mark Cuban, and a whole bunch of others. A friend of mine recently said to me that he’d been skeptical about crypto for a long time. “But now I’m convinced it’s here to stay. There are too many smart people spending too much time building too many cool products for this whole thing to go away.” I would tend to agree, and I think the NFT craze of last year helped propel crypto and blockchain technology to a much broader audience through pop culture.

More than once during the conference, I saw something that looked spiritual. One of the display booths said “PRAISE”, and I half expected to see a Hillsong NFT. Upon further inspection it had nothing to do with worship music at all. Another sign advertised “FAITH TRIBE”, which ended up being a very much secular (and decentralized) fashion line. Crypto is a movement that mimics a lot of spiritual overtones, so on one hand these headfakes are somewhat expected. But I know that some religious leaders might point out that crypto distracts people from what’s really important. I don’t entirely disagree, but the same could be said about lots of good things like food, or education, or even ministry itself.

While God can call us to seasons of fasting, I don’t think the distractive nature of crypto (or food, or any other good thing) requires us to disengage from these activities entirely. My personal belief is that God is already in crypto, just as he’s in great food and great art and the whole world besides. He’s already won the battle, so my role is just to come into alignment with what He’s ALREADY done. And for me, in this space, a big part of that is furthering the dialogue and helping more believers get involved in this space.

So I’ve been blessed to come and share about “God & Crypto” on April 16th at 10am Singapore time at Digital Mission Ventures. I’d like to thank SC Lim from DMV for organizing. I’ll also be joining two other panelists who are the real experts here. Jason Lee is the COO of the Algorand Foundation, and Broderick Elisha is the Founder of Mission Dao. Encourage all who are able to join us!

Lord, thank you for blessing us with this amazing world you have created. Sometimes it’s so good that we get distracted and forget where it came from. Sometimes we get so focused on the gift, we forget about the giver. But we thank you for redeeming us and every nook and cranny of this fallen world that we call home. In your son’s name, Amen.

Ukraine's Enemy

Matthew 5:44 “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

One of my favorite classical pieces to play growing up was the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st string quartet. Both Leo Tolstoy and Helen Keller are said to have been brought to tears when first hearing it. I had always found it incredibly powerful, but never cried over it… until the other day.

My wife @Elaine Kim helped to organize a benefit concert to support Ukrainian refugees at @Trehaus. We made a donation and brought our boys to watch the musicians play with great gusto and technical prowess. Many of them have family back in the Ukraine, and were clearly experiencing a deep range of emotions that they channeled into their performance. But then just before the encore, their ringleader came up and took things to a whole new level.

“We’d like to thank you so much for coming to support us today. It is a very difficult situation we are facing, and to know that you stand with us means so much. Until now you’ve heard us playing pieces written by Ukrainian composers, but for this last piece we want to play something written by a Russian composer. While war can often cause hate, we want to honor our enemy and we look forward to the day we can stand with them side by side in peace.”

Man I just lost it. As they got to playing I couldn’t help but think of what Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 5. Honoring your enemies is an impossible standard to live up to, but every now and then one can find incredible hope in seeing someone live out the call.

Lord, we thank you for inspiration. We ask for an end to the conflict and protection for all those affected. In Jesus’ most mighty name, Amen.