Oct
24
2006
Church of Fools: Is it Aptly Titled?
Want to experience something strange? Go to www.churchoffools.com and visit the internet’s first online interactive “church.” This is more of a chat room than anything else, but you choose a screen name and character and actually walk into a 3-d, interactive church building where you can talk to other visitors. There’s a sermon every Sunday. You can kneel at the altar, shout Hallelujah and cross yourself.
As an internet chat room, the concept is flawless. But as a church? There’s no membership, no communion, no baptism. Just people surfing the web and stopping by a virtual church auditorium. Those who believe it’s really a church (the Methodists who are behind the concept) claim Jesus’ quote that where “two or three are gathered together, He is there in the midst of them.”
Okay… Jesus’ presence is one thing, but does that mean that whereever two or three Christians are together, that there is an official “church” set up? And are people gathered on the internet really “together” in any meaningful sense of the word anyway?