Second Life missionaries
If you thought Second Life was little more than a debauched place for people who like to experiment with cyber-sex, then think again. The most tech-savvy evangelical church in the US - Lifechurch.tv - has just opened a “campus” inside the virtual world.
“We purchased an island (16 virtual acres of real estate) and have worked with both in-house and outside developers to develop the property,” writes Bobby Gruenewald, a pastor at LifeChurch.tv, which also has nine real-life campuses.
It’s not Life Church’s first foray into the “participatory web”. They already webcast all their Sunday services, provide chat tools for online attendees, and regularly organise “MySpace missions”, where believers pray together before logging on to the social networking site to persuade friends to become evangelicals. So going into Second Life seems like a natural next-step.
The virtual church has been built to resemble the real campuses as much as possible and Gruenewald hopes […]
Original post by http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/03/second-life-missionaries.html