Over at Think Christian Andy posted about how the online gaming community might become a new mission field as Christians start to form their own guilds and clans within these communities. I agree that online communities are becoming very prevalent and almost as important to some people as real-life communities, but I would hate to see Christian sub-groups form and start to divide “us” from “them.”
I am the the leader for a guild in the game Guild Wars called the Valiant Knights. Unfortunately most of the Christian guilds in this game are not very good and are generally laughed at by the rest of the Guild Wars community. It seems to me that the more effective ministry route is to join a guild that contains unsaved members and build relationships with them there. We don’t need to create more separate sub-groups of Christians — we need to infiltrate the unsaved communities.
Being a youth pastor and sharing about my “career” with other guildmates has offered many great witnessing opportunities. I’m often teased as being the “pizza party man,” even though I have yet to have a pizza party with my youth group. 
I’ve earned their respect over the past 10 months and have had several great opportunities to sit in Teamspeak (voice chat) and talk privately with individuals about what they’re going through in life. It’s becoming very apparent to me that many people play games like this as an escape from real-life struggles, so I agree with Andy that it is an exceptionally needy mission field, especially with the millions who play Guild Wars alone. Instead of forming little groups of Christians, though, I hope to see Christians use these online communities to better learn what it means to be in the world but not of the world (John 17:14-15).
About me: I am married to my beautiful wife, 
December 7th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
yeah man, I totally agree. Never heard of guild wars though…I’m a halo2 guy myself.
I know what you mean about online communities. This being slightly different, but we’ve started a youth blog for our youth group at church where they have to post the passage of the day, and comment on it, and then they go back and forth commenting eachother and posting as to what’s going on in their lives and such. It’s been a very surprising method of building fellowship and community within our group. The deal now is that we have to become outwardly focused. God bless brotha.
December 7th, 2005 at 5:25 pm
That’s cool, Luke. My youth group has an online forum where we talk about stuff, too.
Great way to stay in touch throughout the week.
December 7th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
I found this on-line devotionals for gamers: http://www.gmpodcasting.net/podcast/D4G/
You might want to check it out.
December 8th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
I am always intrigued with unique ways of delivering the gospel message. While I’m sure many don’t want to hear what you have to say on there, it may also be enough of an anonymous environment that you can really break through some stereotypes and make some headway.
It’s nice when God makes the mission field entertaining…I wonder if I can do the same during a game of Battlefield!?!
December 21st, 2005 at 7:57 am
Sorry, Tim, my trackbacks aren’t working. I appreciated your comments, though, and talked about them here: http://www.blogwoods.net/blog/?p=41