Services at the First Church of Cyberspace

May 15, 2004
RELIGION JOURNAL

By BARNABY J. FEDER

Richard Chartres, Anglican bishop of London, is not used to having congregants wandering around in front of him swearing as he preaches. Then again, he does not normally transform himself into a three-dimensional computer image in an imaginary sanctuary as he did Tuesday to deliver a sermon to animated representations of churchgoers.

But such is life — virtual life, that is — at www.shipoffools.com, an experiment in interactive worship over the Internet. The experiment began with a demonstration at a religious products trade show highlighted by Bishop Chartres's sermon.

People separated by vast distances routinely play in imaginary 3-D worlds and sometimes work in them. Church of Fools aims over the next three months to explore whether they can also regularly worship in them.

Visitors who log on to a vaguely Romanesque church control the speech and movement of on-screen figures known as avatars. Acting through the avatars, visitors can kneel in prayer, talk or whisper in text messages, extend a hand in blessing or raise both arms in ecstatic praise. They can also sit in pews or gather for conversation in a crypt equipped not only with chairs but with a "holy water" water cooler and vending machines as well. Starting tomorrow, they will also hear a sermon at least once a week, from a variety of priests and ministers.

A smattering of churches already provide Webcasts of Sunday services or sites that allow visitors to construct a personalized worship service out of online devotional components. And religious chat rooms allow people to share online prayers or other spiritual activities. But the Church of Fools is the first site to make religion the focus of the kind of interactive role-playing common in multiplayer combat games or Web fantasy worlds.

"We're as curious as anyone to see how it works," said Simon Jenkins, co-editor of Shipoffools.com, the British online publishing group that came up with the concept.

Ship of Fools is best known for hijinks like "The Ark," a takeoff on the television show "Survivor" in which 12 biblical figures competed to avoid being voted off Noah's Ark. But Mr. Jenkins said the Church of Fools was a serious effort to develop an alternative form of Christian worship for people who find the bricks-and-mortar world of religion off-putting. The project is being underwritten in part by the Methodist Church of Great Britain.

Official Sunday services start tomorrow at 4 p.m., Eastern time, with Stephen Tomkins, an author of religious biographies, delivering the sermon. That time slot was chosen to avoid conflicts with traditional services both in the United States, which Ship of Fools said was home to about 60 percent of the 80,000 to 100,000 visitors it got to its Web site each month, and in Britain.

One challenge will be to minimize the rants, insults and barnyard humor that characterize so many public Internet meeting places.

"We have a slightly Old Testament way of dealing with abusive people," Mr. Jenkins said. Budget restrictions prevented the programmers from developing a code that would send miscreants up in flames, he said, but they can be ejected with a keystroke by the site's moderators. Electronic smiting was the fate of the avatar named Anonymous who disrupted Bishop Chartres's sermon.

Still, a substantial part of the early avatar chatter on the site has ricocheted between aggressively irreverent and incomprehensible. Ship of Fools is looking into filtering software that might automatically convert foul language to "amen" or "hallelujah," Mr. Jenkins said. But the Church of Fools is open 24 hours a day, and Ship of Fools lacks the resources to monitor behavior continuously between scheduled services. So in an early response to bad behavior, Ship of Fools has simply cut off the ability of unauthorized avatars to occupy the pulpit and turned off a "shout" feature that had allowed visitors to address everyone at once.

Lack of resources has also affected the worship experience that the Church of Fools is offering. Only some 20 avatars can operate in the church in normal circumstances, although 10 more can be squeezed in for special occasions. In addition, however, the site can handle about 500 ghost visitors, who cannot see one another or interact with the avatars, and its developers hope to be able to expand its capabilities.

"You can't have 5,000 people in there moving around, but you'd like that many watching," said Darrell Wilkins, founder of Specialmoves, the production company in London that built the site for Ship of Fools.

Ship of Fools is scrambling to find additional financial support. Mr. Jenkins hopes advertisers will step forward to claim everything from the vending machines in the basement to the stained-glass window over the altar.

Ideally the advertiser "would be a craft union like one of the Middle Ages guilds or a missionary organization," Mr. Jenkins said of his vision for the window. The image would look suitable, but when a visitor clicked on it, the window would function as a hyperlink taking the visitor to the organization's Web site.

Clearly, interactive virtual services cannot work as carbon copies of regular church services. Based on her experience playing Paul on "The Ark," during which she conducted a service for her biblical shipmates, the Rev. Katherine Anne Carlson, an Episcopal minister at the Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, Md., said that to avoid overwhelming the screen with type, interactive sermons would need to be kept to about 500 words, perhaps a quarter the length of her standard sermons. "Maybe it will be worship like haiku," said Ms. Carlson, who is hoping to preach at the Church of Fools.

Because visitors controlling avatars cannot type as fast as words are sung or spoken, participants at Tuesday's demonstration service posted snippets as the hymn was sung and the Lord's Prayer delivered. Some who logged on lived as far away as Australia.

"They weren't all posting in English," Mr. Jenkins said. "I found that moving."