Metaverse and the Christian life part 1: An inkblot test

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post sharing my frustrations about doing church on Zoom. "Why is it so hard to explain why physical is better than virtual?" If I could sum up my problem in a nutshell, it would that we all agree on the basic idea. "Physical things are better than virtual". Almost all of us would rather be having a coffee with a friend in a real cafe than drinking homemade Nespresso over a Zoom chat with someone behind a computer screen. 

But it's hard to articulate why. We struggle to explain something that we already know by instinct. "Because physical is just better!" doesn't really tell you more information. 

My friend replied to my post asking me a question, "What do you think or how does it apply to ministries trying to reach those in the Metaverse?" The Metaverse, for those who missed it, is an ambitious new initiative by Mark Zuckerberg to take the idea of social media to the next stage of evolution. Instead of connecting all of us through a bunch of social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, Zuckerberg wants to transform his product into a full-immersion virtual world. "It will be an embodied internet", he says. Think of it like The Matrix, but the two worlds work together and you can freely cross between the Matrix and the real world as you need to.

It's difficult to unpack all the ways that this idea would transform society, but it's worthwhile to point out a couple. People who have already gotten used to working from home because of the pandemic can make this a permanent thing. Imagine living in your dream home in a small rural community away from the dirt and pollution of a big urban center, but being able to "teleport to Wall Street" the instant you put on your VR headset in your home office. A few weeks ago, a couple made headlines by conducting their wedding entirely in virtual reality. Imagine being able to get dressed for a wedding with just a few clicks rather than messing around with getting the length of your double Windsor exactly right. 

Unsurprisingly, forward-thinking people in ministry immediately started salivating at the possibilities. "This could be Zoom service, but perfected". What if we were able to worship God with your church every Sunday from the comfort of your own home, but without all the inconveniences and limitations of our current technology? Imagine being able to put on a VR headset and find yourself sitting in "real" pews in a 3D panoramic image of your church hall. Imagine being able to sing together without lag making it sound like a ear-rending cacophany. Imagine the Lord's Supper, but perfected online: Every Friday afternoon, an Amazon drone drops off a "communion package" consisting of a wafer and shotglass of grape juice. You hold onto it Sunday, and then at service you put on your headset and share the same exact body and blood of Christ that your church members are having. That's physical reality perfect in the virtual. Every sense is truly engaged. Sight? Tick. Sound? Tick. Smell, taste, and touch? Tick, tick, tick. 

"What do you think of the Metaverse?" I think that's a question that's basically asking, "What do you think of this inkblot?" It ends up telling you more about yourself than about the inkblot. My friend, bless his heart, has always been an innovator. He's comfortable thinking outside the box, and he thinks fast. He's always two steps ahead of me, be it in life or in ministry. He lives with one foot in the world of possibility. 

By contrast I am a sloth. I am a conservative (not politically but ideologically). One of the cornerstones of conservatism is conservation. It's a personality trait. By disposition I am slower to embrace new ideas and more reluctant to do away with the status quo. The young and active criticize conservatives for being set in old ways and impeding progress, but I think that's an unfair criticism. I have no problem with progress. But I have a big problem with moving so fast that we don't fully think through the implications and we end up doing a lot of damage and breaking a lot of things. If you want to move from Uber to Menulog, fine. I won't put up a fight. But when it comes to a society-altering media technology? Sure, let's try stuff, but let's do it carefully, with fear and trembling. 

You can't uninvent stuff. Every innovation is a pandora's box. We will never go back to a world that doesn't know how to turn nuclear energy into a city-destroying bomb.* Every action has consequences, and we can only foresee a small fraction of them. Another pastor, when thinking about the implications of the Metaverse for church life, compared it to the invention of the motor vehicle. He put it this way:

"Henry Ford didn’t set out to create megachurches. But before the advent of the personal vehicle, most Christians seeking a church faced a simple denominational decision: do you attend the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Catholic church around the corner? With a vehicle, Christians could suddenly attend whichever church had the best children’s ministry programming, youth activities, and rock ’n’ roll Sunday morning worship—as long as it was within 10 to 30 minutes of driving. We became consumers because we could be consumers...."

We're finite beings embedded within a single moment in history. We can only see so far ahead through the fog of uncertainty. When I am traveling through a fog, I prefer not to sprint. Sure, I'd like to get somewhere; and there's something to be said about avoiding paralysis. But wouldn't it be extraordinary hubris to barrel ahead without any concern for how fundamentally we might alter our world and ourselves? Stay tuned. 

*unless, I suppose, we actually have a war with nuclear bombs. A quote that's often attributed to Albert Einstein: "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."