FamilyLife Today®

Jonathan Ober: If they start talking about a game, they start talking about Roblox or VR Chat or whatever it might be, tell me about it. Sit down with them. You may not understand it all, but that's when you need to say, "Okay, what is a portal?" and get them to define that.

And "What are you doing in this world? What are you doing in this game?" Be curious, be understanding, and then there are some boundaries you need to set.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Today, we're going to be talking about gaming with purpose. Is that possible, do you think?

Dave Wilson: Yes, definitely. Our kids do it and they love it.

Ann Wilson: Do they do it with a purpose?

Dave Wilson: Fun, pleasure. There's probably a bigger purpose Frank and Jonathan are going to take us into today. It's going to be a great conversation.

Ann Wilson: And maybe you're thinking, "I'm not a gamer, this doesn't relate to me," but we can all make a dent where we're sent because God's given us passions and things we love, and we can always bring the gospel into those areas.

Dave Wilson: That's what these guys are doing and it's pretty exciting. Let's go.

Frank Kulgowski: It's an untapped world for the gospel.

Jonathan Ober: A people group.

Frank Kulgowski: You can reach people in East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe. We've gotten into conversations all over the world. Because of time zones, people tend to be on a little more at night.

Jonathan Ober: More times than I care to admit, I feel like I've been there to save someone. I remember a conversation recently when I asked somebody how they're doing and they were like, "Not great." I said, "Okay, can you share a little bit?" Sometimes there's trepidation like they don't want to get into all the details, but more times than not someone is willing to share what's going on in their life because there is that anonymity of being an avatar. You're not near me, you're maybe across the globe.

This person was like, "I'm just having a rough day, my girlfriend just broke up with me, I think I want to end my life." That has happened more times than I care to count where the suicidal tendencies, the depression, and the loneliness come out. I talked to that person and said, "I can't be there with you, but I can be here for you." As we were talking, I said, "Is there someone that can come sit in the room with you?" He said, "Not for a while." I said, "Okay, I will stay with you as long as I can."

I went over my lunch break. I got to share about FamilyLife and what we do here and how we reach families, blended families, and marriages, and talked about anything. I shared a little bit about video games and some of the games I like to play and they shared about some of the stuff they like to play. I truly believe that by the end of that, as I remember taking my headset off, I was in tears for what God did. I was in a space by myself and met this person.

After that conversation, being able to pray with them, knowing that by the end of those two hours they were not at that point thinking of that, they were very thankful that I shared with them and talked to them and I got to pray with them. So when you ask why do you do this, I think it's for those moments where somebody says, "I don't want to be here anymore," and I'm like, "I'm going to be here so that you're still here," and I continue to pray over them and pray with them.

We've connected with people in our Discord where we've been able to build relationships that are longer than just that fifteen-minute or hour-long or two-hour-long conversation. That's why. They're not going to step into a church, at least right now in their life. They may never hear the gospel if we don't go and share it.

Dave Wilson: With that guy, do you end up staying in touch?

Jonathan Ober: If that relationship seems to hit it off and there is a bond there, sometimes I'll just ask them, "Is it okay if we become friends?" You can friend somebody, I can click on their avatar and ask them to be my friend.

Dave Wilson: It's like Facebook.

Jonathan Ober: Similar. You can high-five them and become a friend. Every time I go on, if they're online, I will see them in my sidebar with my friends just like you would on Facebook. I can see when they're there and I can actually join them if they're in a place that says "join" and I'll just click on join and a portal will show up and I'll zap over to where they're at.

Ann Wilson: I'm thinking of the conversations I've had over the years of people that are very judgmental when it comes to this kind of life, like, "What kind of person would get on this? They have no life." I'll tell you who would get on that kind of thing: Jesus to save souls. He would go anywhere to rescue his lost children. So I look at that and I think, how many did you say? 33 million are on Roblox?

Frank Kulgowski: The numbers I heard from my friend Bruce is 380 million monthly active users. Every month, over 380 million are coming onto Roblox playing. And not all of them are on headsets; many use phones or tablets. There are just that many people.

Ann Wilson: It's an untapped world for the gospel of Jesus. If it's your thing, we have a son who was a total gamer into all of that. He loved that world. Instead of poo-pooing it, saying things like, "Get a life," you're thinking, "No, this could become a part of your life that could be redemptive for the gospel."

Frank Kulgowski: I remember a leader a number of years ago in the digital space within Cru said, "We go where people are at." If there are a lot of people there, we don't necessarily want to leave them in the same place in the same way, but you go and you share. A lot of it is listening, empathizing, asking questions, and showing care for their soul. We want to go in these spaces and it's always on. Anytime, "Okay, let's pray and go."

Dave Wilson: When you said that, I thought we do that ministry-wise in any other venue. If there's a Super Bowl, we try to be there. The Olympics. Cru and FamilyLife have people on site to be light and to seek out opportunities to be Jesus. Nobody's thought about this world. This is bigger than all those worlds.

Frank Kulgowski: It's really big. I will mention one other thing. The platform VR Chat is one of them, and Roblox is another. If we go into VR Chat, we have a conversation and it's really good. "I'd love to see you, you come here very often, maybe we can connect. By the way, do you use Discord?"

That's another tool, a platform we can go. A lot of them do. I take my headset up and say, "I'd love to hear," and then I type it in. They're like, "Yeah sure, my name is dot dot dot." I type it in, put my headset back down, and after that I will send them a friend request on Discord.

Then you're connected anytime. You don't have to be in the world. You can text them, you can send them a video, you can listen, you can do video chat. We try to couple that in-person in the virtual space with the strategy and then we can be, for many people we've met, it's VR and Discord and you're talking and then inviting them to the community. It's been really cool how God has started to build this out.

Ann Wilson: Do you ever try to bridge it then for them to find a church or community in real life?

Jonathan Ober: That is a goal: to connect them with other believers in their communities. The hard thing is because they are from all over the world, I've got to know someone in that area. That's where having the Discord is a stepping stone because they may find somebody else on there who is a believer and is going to church. They're like, "Oh we're just a town away." I know there have been people I've had conversations with that got plugged into our Discord that then found a church to go to.

Frank Kulgowski: As Jonathan mentioned, we want to connect them to physical reality, the church, a place where they can get a hug. There is a story my friend Jeff and I were in a spaceship world. It was kind of noisy and we're like, "There's a lot of commotion and it's harder to get in conversation."

Ann Wilson: The spaceship was loud?

Frank Kulgowski: The people were loud inside the spaceship. I don't remember the rumbling of the spaceship as much.

Dave Wilson: When you say loud, are people talking or is it all texting?

Jonathan Ober: It's all talking. People are talking.

Dave Wilson: In your own voice?

Jonathan Ober: In your own voice. Some people will modulate their voice where it might be synthesized or sound different.

Dave Wilson: So you're in a room that's loud.

Frank Kulgowski: It can be. Same thing with if I'm closer to you, your voice is louder, if I go back... it's all spatial audio. We're in this part of the spaceship, there's a bunch of people and there's this 3D drawing they're drawing. We're like, "Maybe let's go over this corridor." We walked over and we saw an avatar that looked like a female avatar. Jeff and I just went in and were like, "Hey, how are you doing?" and she started speaking to us.

We said, "My friend and I come from a church, we like to..." "Church? Really, church?" We said, "Yeah." She was from East Asia.

Ann Wilson: But they're speaking English?

Frank Kulgowski: And she's speaking English with an accent and we could understand her. She was like, "I want to go to church," because she's in East Asia and it's... We said, "Guess what? You can go to church right now if you want to." Twenty seconds later, I counted actually, twenty seconds, we're in a church.

What we didn't notice was like, "Hey, Jeff and Frank and this other woman," and there's a fourth person. We're like, "Welcome." This fourth person actually said, "Oh, hi. I heard your conversation. I was curious about church and I zipped through the portal just before it closed and I came in and I was just curious." We got to know him. He's a really great kid. He ends up being a student here in the U.S. and just got to know him more.

We said, "Hey, you want to come back to this church on Sunday when they have a service?" He came. It was so cool to have him there. The next week they had a fellowship time and they have a virtual campfire and a virtual park and the church was going to gather and he came and he loved it. Eventually, we got to know him more and he got to know us and we spend time in virtual reality and Discord and then he wrote me in Discord and said, "I want to let you know I'm a Christian."

We connected him with his local Cru movement there at his school through Discord. He's connected now with people right around him.

Dave Wilson: When you were sharing that story, some people would say, "Oh, you're replacing the church, you're a barrier to church rather than a pathway." You would say it's a pathway.

Frank Kulgowski: It's a pathway. You're always leading them to the real world, the physical world.

Jonathan Ober: I'll share a little bit. This might be an abridged version as far as how I got to here. I've been playing video games since I was little. My stepdad and I played the Legend of Zelda game. We would go into our own little save files and play through the game and share notes in a little notebook back and forth. That was my first foray into video gaming and that has continued in a lot of different ways. I've pretty much had every video game system that came out. I've played a lot of video games, I'm even reviewing video games and now I'm also streaming on Twitch playing video games and people are coming and watching.

What I mean by a pathway is that there was a time probably about a year ago now I played a video game. In all this, too, one of the other side quests I'm on is I run a video game club at a local college in Pennsylvania where I'm from. I have anywhere from fifteen to twenty students coming to our club nights on Mondays and Thursdays playing video games together.

Dave Wilson: They're coming into a building.

Jonathan Ober: They're coming into a physical building. Crazy that they come to do this. They come and play video games. They'll play together; sometimes they're playing their own game, and sometimes they're playing a group game of four to eight players.

In that time and in what I was sharing about streaming games on Twitch, I had some students coming and watching me play games. I was playing a game one time about a woodsman who had recently lost his wife and the game takes you through the first year of that loss. You go through him going through grief and doing his everyday tasks: imagine having to garden and cut trees down and take care of the homestead and all the repairs. Through that, he has these flashbacks of when his wife was alive and with them and the joy that she brought. So you go through these ups and downs of his life.

As I'm playing this game, I'm sharing about a very personal part of my life and that was... I started talking about video gaming and my stepdad and the way that he and I bonded over video games. He passed away several years ago; it's probably been eight or ten years now. As I was playing this game talking about loss of this woodsman to his wife, I was sharing and I had a couple of students that were on my stream watching and texting in the chat. I started sharing about the feelings that I went through and even today, some of the stuff that I remember and grieve over. I have two teenage daughters that he will never see graduate.

I'm sharing that and one of my students, Chris, came to me later and he said, "The way that you shared about your relationship with Jesus made me realize that I need to get back to church." He's one of many students. I was taking anywhere from three to five guys to our church on Sunday mornings. We have a Church Bros Discord and I will send out a message saying, "Hey, who needs a ride to church?" So I pick these guys up and take them to church and that's a small part of how all this comes together.

One of the things I've shared over the last year several times is that the Venn diagram of who I am is quickly becoming a circle. It's that love of Jesus, love of video games, and making sure that others know about Jesus. In the past, those circles barely touched. I lived a separate life of a Christian, I lived a separate life of a video gamer, and I wasn't really sharing the gospel with others.

Over the last two years now of being a part of video game outreach, being a part of this advisor position with these young men and young women in our club, I've been able to build relationships with these students. I'm with them two days a week at least because we hold other tournaments and other events. I'm sharing and streaming online. I'm not afraid to pray for people when I'm streaming. In the last two years, those pieces of that Venn diagram have become a circle that overlaps.

Ann Wilson: And isn't that the goal for all of us? I think about you, Dave, you've done that your whole life. You're a pastor, but even if you weren't, your whole life one of your joys and fun is sports. Another one's music and you've always used that to draw people into the gospel, the kingdom.

Dave Wilson: It's my portal. You walk in, even in working with pro athletes it's, "Am I a football player who's a Christian or am I a Christian who plays football?" I'm a Christian first and everything else I do is an extension of that. So you're a Christian who's a gamer and you bring Jesus everywhere you go.

FamilyLife's strategy is making an impact on your corner of the world. That's your corner. I always say make a dent where you're sent. Wherever you are is where you're sent. And what are your passions? So whatever portal you're walking into, you are sent to make a dent, meaning an impact, in whatever way it be.

This conversation could end up there, it may not. I'm just going to float around this world and see where God's going to attach me to somebody that maybe has a need where I am the answer that brings Jesus, right?

Ann Wilson: My mind is blown. Some parents are thinking, "My kid's in some room," and now they might go, "There's a Christian probably in that room who's there on purpose with a prayer to use me, God."

Frank Kulgowski: And if there's not a person in that room that's a Christian that maybe will share with them, they can be that person. Their kid or the mom and dad, they could be going into these spaces and saying, "How can we bring Jesus to this game or this world or this portal?" Let your light shine.

Dave Wilson: What would you say to the parents whose kids are gaming and right now they're like, "I don't like this. This is something I don't want them doing"?

Ann Wilson: I didn't. I'd be like, "What are you guys doing? You're wasting your life, you're wasting your time." Talk to that parent. How would you give them another perspective?

Jonathan Ober: It goes back to communication. As families, we need to make sure we're communicating because that's a huge lack generally speaking that we're not talking to each other. But then I think as a parent, you really need to think, "Why does my son or daughter enjoy this?" That's the question: be curious. Tell me about this world, tell me what you love about it.

If they start talking about a game, they start talking about Roblox or VR Chat or whatever it might be—there are tens of thousands of games out there—tell me about it. Sit down with them. You may not understand it all, but that's when you need to say, "Okay, what is a portal?" and get them to define that. "What are you doing in this world? What are you doing in this game?" Get them to define it and understand. Be curious and be understanding.

Then there are some boundaries you need to set. If grades start slipping or if it seems like they're just spending all their time and their chores aren't getting done, obviously communicate. At our house, one of the rules is you need to read a book as long as you're going to play a video game.

Dave Wilson: I like that.

Jonathan Ober: Unfortunately, that means we spent a lot of money on books and a fair amount of money on video games, but it has turned into a conversation piece. When you're going to play this game, what are your goals or what is your intent? What game are you playing? If you're going in there and you don't have a plan, that's not going to fly. So you set boundaries and set responsibilities.

But I think if you have a child that is playing or a young student that is playing, show them this podcast and say, "Hey, these guys are going in sharing the love of Jesus. What if you do that or what if we do that together?" That becomes your mission field. Or what if it's while you're in a lobby waiting to start your match, what if you just say, "Hey, what are you learning?"

Then it's, "Well, I'm learning about what Jesus did in sharing the gospel to thousands of people while also feeding them." "Oh, what is that? Tell me about that." Their friends might start getting curious about who Jesus is or other things that are going on in your life like, "How is your family?" and they start sharing about struggles with their mom and dad. Then you know, "This is something I could be praying about."

As a kid with your friends, maybe you're like, "Hey, I could start praying for you." They're like, "Whoa, what is this prayer?" and it just starts conversations. Because your student may be playing with someone that goes to their school, that's an easy in to say, "Hey, come to youth group. Come to church."

Dave Wilson: I think it's easy as parents when we don't really understand that world that they're in, whether gaming or music or whatever, it's easy to be judgmental rather than curious to say, "I want to understand why and what you like about this."

Ann Wilson: I picked up a CD of something our son was listening to and I'm like...

Dave Wilson: I was there, I watched this happen.

Ann Wilson: "This is garbage and we don't listen to this at our house," and I threw it in the trash. Dave gets it out of the trash. He says, "Tell me why you like this music," which I'm like, "I need to be better at this stuff." So enter into our kids' worlds. I love that you guys are entering into a whole world to bring the gospel of Jesus. Well done.

Dave Wilson: Way to go. It's exciting. I think a lot of parents are going to be like, "Wow." Is there anything they need to know as a parent or a place they can go to do this kind of ministry? You need to start a portal where you train parents.

Frank Kulgowski: I will say for parents and others who are inclined to look into this more, the Jesus Film Project has just recently released a Metaverse Ministry Toolkit.

Dave Wilson: Perfect.

Frank Kulgowski: This is a compilation of tips and suggestions on how people—individuals, small groups, churches, parachurches, anybody—can get it free off the website, download it, and look at it. There's one for Roblox and there's one for VR Chat, and they're saying, "This is a little starter guide if you'd like to look into this more." We'll include that on the show notes.

Jonathan Ober: We do have a Cru gaming area where parents can come and get some resources, and they can get plugged into our Discord and talk to us, find us, and maybe even have their students come join. My daughter's in there and she has met several people, one of which she's met in real life, our friend Jeff's daughter. The two of them have done some gaming together. They've met in person, but they've also met virtually.

Dave Wilson: How do they find you?

Jonathan Ober: We have the gaming@cru.org email. We can make sure to link that.

Dave Wilson: But if I'm in this portal, how do I find you specifically?

Jonathan Ober: In VR Chat, you can find me with the name Jober: J-A-Y O-B-E-R.

Frank Kulgowski: And Cool Noodle.

Dave Wilson: Cool Noodle? Really?

Frank Kulgowski: I'm Cool Noodles. You just type it in and it'll show our avatars. I get it. As a parent, it's a battleground, whether it's VR or football or music, and the enemy is also trying to make inroads. Anything could become an idol. But if parents are like, "I'd like to find out more, I'd like to engage with my son or daughter, and be curious about what they like about it," they can reach out to us and we can put specific ways in the show notes.

Dave Wilson: Great. Those show notes are at FamilyLifeToday.com. Thanks, guys.