However the community that has been created in SL is very real, supportive, and caring. It is the people that make it so, not the avatars.

If people really desire to receive the sacraments in SL it can be seen as a cry in the darkness.

If anything, the church in SL should encourage individuals to find a local church where they can receive the sacrament, even if they do not attend regularly.

We should help raise awareness in individual churches to be familiar and welcoming of individual people who attend virtual churches and welcome them as an extension of the worldwide Anglican communion.

However I do believe it would be possible for a person to receive a blessing through their avatar in SL.

VK

I’m concerned that we’re being loose and fast with the whole concept of sacramentality. It has to do with the fundamental nature of the incarnation. Christ became flesh. While He is the WORD (LOGOS) - which is a powerful tool for communication and breaking down barriers of distance (geographical and chronological) - it is the sheer physicality of Jesus (the scandal of his particularity) that is the stumbling block.

The sacraments key in on this because they are physical signs that integrate our whole life into God. To simply physically receive them does no good (we simply press the teeth, as Augustine said). And their spiritual / intellectual / emotional benefit is inseparably tied to receiving them physically.

To look elsewhere is to tread perilously into the Docetic and dualistic waters of heresy, and to impose a generalized ahistoricity on the Church’s ministry.

Respectfully,
CLL+

Apologies for not posting a substantial response or two.. I fly out to the UK in a couple of days and it has been a rather hectic time in preparation.

I will post sometime next week from the UK.

God bless,

Rev Mark

Thanks Mark for alerting us to this paper; I would have wished you had by now placed your own position here also. Thanks also for the personal invitation to respond - my response was too large for a comment and is placed here:

http://www.liturgy.co.nz/blog/virtual-eucharist/1078

Wilfried alludes to my response - but some readers here may not have found it. Over 7,000 people have read my post in the last couple of days - so it is clearly a relevant topic. Thanks for the thoughtful, thought-provoking comments both here and on my site. There is also some related humour at:
http://www.liturgy.co.nz/blog/church-internet/1090

Blessings

Bosco
http://www.liturgy.co.nz
@liturgy: http://twitter.com/liturgy

As far as our own congregation, I think we’re often too enthusiastic to be finding the “sacred” everywhere, and not attentive enough to relevant scriptural, theological (thinking maybe Rudolf Otto - but I’m no expert here), and even anthropological (such as Mircea Eliade) considerations regarding what the sacred is, and entails. But as Anglicans and as Christians, of course, our first concern, and only authority from God, are Scriptural concerns, in which we need more grounding.

and in the “suggested policy,” for “real children Christ” insert “real children of Christ.”

I suggest that the Cathedral Leadership Team consider that the discussion regarding “virtual sacraments” is closed, though we can go further on this blog.

One of the things in the past which has helped me a great deal in convincing people of the “seriousness” of what we were doing and that we were careful of not falling into gnosticism or empty roleplay was the fact that we have no virtual sacraments, and that we are against the policy of having virtual sacraments.

There is a complex theology of the eucharist which hasn’t yet been mentioned here, but is a very, very good reason for even avoiding discussion of virtual sacraments in a casual manner - i.e., without certain discussional markers and guidelines clearly in place. I had wanted to explain this but will not have the time.

This amounts, I think, to a very clear sense that we should not be involved in the virtual sacraments. I did not bring this up initially because it is somewhat complex, and really all I needed to do in this context was refute Prof. Fiddes’s arguments, which I believe I have in the first post above, and Bosco Peters has also very eloquently added his own refutation.

The very fact that we can not have virtual sacraments means that we do not need to have the aspiration of being, as it is sometimes expressed, “a full expression of church.” We may look like a “church,” but instead we are a kind of “gathering” or “community,” with purposes of ministry, and one of our intentions should be in helping those who do not have church communities, to find them when they are ready for this. And to help people toward this end, when they are not yet ready. It’s like a marking on a map, showing us that we belong to the church … but that we should not place ourselves on the same level of importance or authority as a church parish, we are something different. We can not, for example, invite people to consider our “church” amongst the many possible churches they might make their home church. So really we are more of a “para-church” type organization.

Simply telling people that this is part of our theology, and that it is informed by the example of the sacraments being “off the chart” of possibilities for ourselves, shows people that we have a clearer sense of our “place” as a ministry and that we are not involved in making wild claims or disrupting worship as we know it. And that we’re not like the “tv churches” with which so many churches have had problems - when their members have their first allegiance (and first priority in donations) to the TV Church of Pastor BillyBob, who is Doing Such Wonderful Things for All Those People. We are not gnostics. We are about praying with, and helping real people, and not some strange “very complex and mystical” phantasmagorial “energy” to which we impute divine characteristics. And we pray to God, and not some sort of spiritual effluence emmanating from our computer monitors, or a synergy which we suppose to be located in a virtual three-dimensional model hosted somewhere in California.

This has been powerful in assuring many people - believers in Second Life, who do not wish to pray in Second Life because they are afraid of “roleplay,” and people outside of Second Life, who are reluctant to explore a calling inside of Second Life - that the good that we are doing, outweighs the potential danger, and that we are well-informed and discerning about the dangers.

A Catholic friend of mine never prayed in Second Life, because he associated it with roleplay. I told him the above thoughts concerning the sacraments. He thought about it, I think, because a few days later he joined me in prayer, and prayed himself, as well. So if you are looking for something that’s an effective teaching - I believe this is. I haven’t gotten him to pray at the Cathedral yet, but I do hope the day comes that he does.

So I’d suggest the Leadership Team adopt a policy something like this, inspired by Gareth’s thoughts.

“We do not believe that the sacraments have a place in Second Life. This does not mean, however, that God is not working through the medium of Second Life, nor that His presence is not with us when we gather. To the contrary, we believe that God’s presence is with us when we come together in Second Life, and that what Christ tells us in Matthew 18:20 also applies to gatherings of real children Christ (not avatars) when they authentically come together in Second Life.”

I like Gareth’s vocabulary of the sacramental, but I left it out explicitly in the above. The reason being these:

- people in reformed / evangelical traditions frequently have an underinformed appreciation of the sacramental. They can be scared off by this word, associating it with uninformed liturgism: i.e., sacred poetry in services without much meaning but supposedly very profound and magic-like gestures and words. But we need more of such people, so let’s not scare them off. Once they are with us, hopefully they can gain more of an appreciation for the sacramental.

- people with very high church tendencies also may be skeptical by what we mean with the “sacramental” since frequently use of this word is combined with things they highly dislike - e.g., use of liturgy for promoting political purposes, or dubious “reforms” of the liturgy. And we do want people with very high church tendencies to worship with us as well and not feel alienated. [I suppose you can tell from this and the above that I really think we should be aiming at the classical sense of “broad church.”]

- it’s good to help educate and transform people, and not simply preach to them what they already believe in fully; we need to preach and educate on topics where our faith is weak, rather than “preaching to the choir” and gaining friends by vehemently expressing our belief in what they find Oh So Important. This type of behavior is called “preaching to the choir,” and is a bit “fundamentalistic.” It’s what Christ spoke of when he warned us of preaching those things which peoples’ “ears are itching to hear.”

We can express more or less the same thing with the words used above (though they surely do not capture the full spectrum of things we associate with “sacramental”), which I think state our vision nicely, and also are not likely to miscommunicate our intentions or unnecessarily alienate people or make them feel unwelcome. I also believe the above words capture the most important aspect of our common beliefs in what we are doing when we come together in Second Life.

It also makes clear another point: are we “together” and “gathered” when our avatars are together? We aren’t always, if we are away from our keyboards, or our minds are actively present, no matter what kind of actions our avatar at that moment might be displaying, and even though, at that moment, it is clear that the avatars are together.

However, we ARE together when we are focused and praying together. And this is much, much more than just a meeting of avatars.

I’ll be away from this site for a week or more so if I don’t address remarks please don’t take it to my being uninterested.

As a natural ‘reflector’, I can get far too bogged down in thinking about things and never get any further with them. So I value people who actually get out there an do things. However, there does have to be space for reflection and learning as well - and we shouldn’t just leave it to the ‘professionals’ but think about our own practice.

I’m fascinated by the range of views here and encouraged to see that people are indeed reflecting as well as doing.

I hate being a damper on enthusiasm, I really do! It’s just good when that enthusiasm is a bit informed, really … I have the feeling that many of us are rather barging into all of this without much knowledge, and sadly, that includes most of what I’ve seen at the Saturday Discussion group. The enthusiasm is definitely there, but there’s often a lot missing.

Maybe our mission is just moving too fast so we are missing our core purposes here. This has been a big criticism of a lot of the “emergent church” phenomenon. Maybe we have to have less services, discussions, and Bible studies, but make sure that when we do these things, we’re doing them well, and that our purposes are in line with what the Communion teaches. I think we might have been doing something we so often accuse the megachurches of: focusing on numbers, and missing content.

Here’s an article I wrote a while back on the problem of the “emergent church” phenomenon - http://bit.ly/84oz5
‘Is “emergent” a synonym for dodging the most challenging and controversial questions in theology with simplistic answers, in the hopes of attracting followers and being “relevant” by avoiding the difficult, or is it a movement toward more spiritual depth through recovering the theological insights and practices of previous ages?’