Should Your Church Enter the Metaverse?

TC Carter expected his talk on the metaverse to go out of date. “By the time you get this video, there might be some news that comes out that makes what I say irrelevant,” he told church leaders. His headlines have aged, but his method still works. Before a church decides about a new technology, it should send trusted people to look closely. Those people bring back both the hopeful report and the hard one, and leaders weigh them before God in light of the church’s own calling. This guide practices that method, using his talk as a case study. You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a leadership team over one or two meetings. It includes a history exercise and a scouting assignment your church can run.

A talk that dated, and a method that did not

Carter spoke when NFTs, digital real estate and VR headsets dominated tech news. He spoke to a Jude 3 Project audience, and he opened by celebrating ministry among “Christians of color everywhere.” Then he declined to make anyone’s decision for them. “I’m not here to tell you whether or not you should or shouldn’t engage,” he says. He grounds that refusal in a claim about churches: “The church overall is not monolithic.” Each church, he says, has a distinct calling in its own community.

That claim holds inside Black church life too. A congregation with a century of local memory, a young church plant near a campus, and an African immigrant fellowship may share a city. They will not share the same question, even if they look at the same headset. Each has different members, different resources, and different reasons to trust or distrust a new tool.

Pause and observe: Write down your first instinct about new technology in church life. Do you adopt early, wait and see, or resist? Where did that instinct come from? A leader who knows their default can account for it. A leader who does not will mistake it for discernment.

Reading Numbers 13 before applying it

Carter builds his counsel on Numbers 13. Read Numbers 13:1-33 and 14:6-9 before you look at his application. Numbers is narrative. It describes what Israel did at the edge of Canaan. It gives no procedure for adopting technology, so read the story on its own terms first.

In Numbers 13:1-2, the Lord tells Moses to send men to search out Canaan, the land he is giving to Israel, one leader from each tribe. In verses 17-20, Moses gives them questions. Is the land good or bad? Are the people strong or weak, few or many? Are the cities camps or strongholds? Is the soil rich or poor? He tells them to take courage and bring back fruit. After forty days they return. The land does flow with milk and honey. The people are also strong, and the cities are fortified.

Then the reports split. Numbers 13:30 records: “And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.” The other scouts insist the people are too strong. In 14:6-9, Joshua and Caleb plead with Israel not to rebel or fear, because the Lord is with them.

Notice two things. First, the scouts mostly agree on the facts. The land is fruitful and its people are formidable. They split over what those facts mean, given what God promised. The fearful report gathered accurate information and drew a faithless conclusion. Second, Caleb’s confidence rests on a specific promise. God had said he was giving Israel this land.

That second point marks the limit of the analogy. No church has a promise that a particular technology is its inheritance. Carter uses Canaan as a picture of leaders facing unfamiliar ground, and Moses’s posture fits that picture well. The practice of sending trusted people to look honestly transfers cleanly. The assurance that the land must be taken does not. In Numbers the hopeful report was also the faithful one. A church weighing a new tool cannot assume the more enthusiastic report is the more faithful.

Carter’s two reports

Carter’s “first admonishment” to leaders is to “seek out individuals who can scout it for you,” people who understand technology and can explore it for the church. Because Moses sent many scouts, Carter expects many reports, some celebrating and some warning about “how it’s negative and how this is the beginning of the end.” His instruction: “You must have the ability to take in both reports and lay them before God and say, God, what are you leading me to do?”

His hopeful report is concrete. He describes a church service held in a shared virtual space. He imagines two people in headsets talking as if across a coffee shop table during a hard season. He pictures missionaries appearing in distant places without leaving their families. He treats this as an extension of gathering in person. He speaks of “our physical spaces and churches, which I believe God still wants us to have and I believe still has real value in its community.”

His hard report is just as concrete. He admits that “it’s really yet to be determined how virtual reality impacts the human experience.” He names one danger he considers certain: immersive pornography. He argues it could reshape how people understand sex and intimacy, and that children will meet it young. He cites figures on pornography use among Christian men. Treat those numbers as his claims and verify them before repeating them. His proposed response is honest discipleship, with a place where people can bring shame and guilt to “a space where they don’t feel discarded.” He describes purity as bringing one’s eyes under the authority of Jesus. Read 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 alongside this. Paul tells the Corinthians to flee sexual immorality because their bodies belong to the Lord, who bought them at a price. When a struggle has become compulsive, a trained counselor belongs in that care.

What earlier technologies can teach

Carter reaches for history himself. The metaverse, he says, “feels a lot like when the internet began to popularize in the nineties.” He traces a decade, by his dating, from Google’s arrival to the Bible on a smartphone. Before that change, he argues, a word preached from the pulpit was rarely checked against anything else. His comparison invites a longer one. Churches faced radio and television long before the internet. How a congregation handled those choices is part of its institutional memory, and it may still shape its instincts.

This exercise asks you to recover some of that memory from dated sources rather than from general impressions.

1. Find one dated source. Look for evidence of how your church, denomination or a nearby congregation responded to radio or television. Possibilities include an anniversary booklet, board minutes, a church bulletin, or a newspaper archive. Historically Black congregations and denominations often keep anniversary histories, and many local libraries hold them. If no document exists, interview an older member. Note that memory is a source with limits, and record what they saw directly versus what they heard.
2. Read for the reports. What did leaders hope the new medium would do? What did they fear? Who decided, and whose voices were absent?
3. Read for circumstances. What did access cost, and who controlled it? Did the church own its broadcast, buy time, or stay off the air? Do not assume the answer for Black churches as a group. Find what your source actually says about this congregation.
4. Compare with Carter. Did anyone scout the medium first? Were the hopeful and hard reports both heard? Looking back, which fears came true, which hopes came true, and which mattered less than anyone expected?

Bring your findings to the group. Different sources will likely show different responses, and that diversity is itself evidence for Carter’s claim that churches are not monolithic.

Testing the scouts

Carter asks leaders to weigh reports, and his counsel applies to his own report too.

Who is reporting? Carter says openly that his team helps churches and businesses move their brands and experiences into the metaverse, and he offers himself as a scout. His openness is to his credit. It also teaches a rule: know whether a scout has a stake in the outcome. People who sell a technology, build ministries around it, or have built platforms warning against it all bring something real. Each also has reasons to report in one direction.

What is the claim about a generation? “Somehow the church is always behind as it relates to technology,” Carter says. “If the collective church does not slow down and spend time really recalibrating its relationship to people, technology,” he continues, “then we will lose a generation.” His prescription is to slow down and recalibrate. Ask the young people in your own church which tools shape their lives. A generation contains many kinds of people, and the tools that matter to one nineteen-year-old may mean nothing to another.

How strong is the evidence? Carter links the spread of the internet to declining church membership, then asks whether the correlation is real. “I don’t know. The data seems to suggest it,” he answers. A scout can report a suspicion without calling it proof.

Did the forecasts hold? Carter made at least two testable predictions. He said the metaverse was “three to five years from it being mainstream.” He also pictured a day “when everyone in your church has the tech in their hand.” Find a dated news report or industry figure from the years after his talk and check both forecasts. Then test his warning about immersive pornography, which depended less on any single product. Ask which kind of claim held up better, and why.

A note for those leading a group: The pornography section may be uncomfortable, and some participants carry personal histories with it. Keep discussion on how a church can disciple people well, and say plainly that no one has to disclose anything. If someone does share, receive it quietly and follow up privately.

A scouting assignment for your church

This exercise adapts Moses’s instructions to a technology your people already use. That could be a social platform, an AI tool, livestreaming, or whatever has arrived since Carter spoke. A leadership team can run it over two or three weeks. An individual can run it by interviewing people they trust.

1. Choose one territory. Pick one specific tool your congregation actually uses, and write down why it matters to your people.
2. Send scouts from different places. Ask two or three people to investigate it: someone who uses it daily, someone with technical knowledge, and someone cautious about it. Include at least one person younger than most of your leadership. Ask each whether they gain anything from a particular outcome.
3. Give them Moses’s questions in new form. Is this good or bad for the people who use it, and how? Are its effects strong or weak, widespread or limited? Is it a temporary camp or a fortified city? What fruit does it produce in people’s lives? What dangers will require discipleship?
4. Require fruit. Each scout brings something concrete, such as an example of the tool in use, a conversation with a user, or verified evidence. Opinions alone do not count as a report.
5. Hear every report before discussing any. Then name where the reports agree on facts and where they disagree on meaning.
6. Lay the reports before God. Pray with Carter’s questions: what are you leading us to do, and how do you want us to serve the generations after us? Decide one modest next step. It might be engaging the tool, waiting, or building discipleship around it without adopting it.

Questions for the group

• Carter calls the church “always behind” on technology. Where is your church behind, and in each case is the cause wisdom, avoidance or limited resources? Whose voices were missing when those choices were made?
• Caleb’s confidence rested on God’s promise. What, if anything, could give a church confidence about a technology that has no such promise attached?
• How do you tell a faithful hard report from a fearful one, and a faithful hopeful report from mere enthusiasm?
• Carter values physical gathering and wants to extend community into digital spaces. What can embodied presence do that a screen cannot, and what can digital presence offer someone who cannot be in the room?
• What did your radio or television research reveal about your church’s default instinct? Does that instinct still serve your people?
• What would it take for your church to be a place where someone could bring a struggle with pornography and not feel discarded?

What to carry out of the room

Your church will face another unfamiliar territory soon, and then another. Carter’s counsel has little to do with headsets. It describes a leader who sends people to look and listens to the reports he would rather not hear. That leader does not confuse the loudest voice with the leading of God. Before your next decision about a new tool, ask one question. Who did we actually send to look, and did we let them tell us what they found?