Inside the Missionaries Holding Weekly Services in VRChat

In a dimly lit virtual penthouse, ten avatars stand in a circle: a stormtrooper, a large orange cat, and others harder to describe. The cat speaks in the voice of Curt Curtis, a Texas missionary in his 60s, and prays aloud for chances to reach people who need God. The room is digital. The prayer is not.

For about three years, missionaries from the evangelical organization Cru have met every Friday inside VRChat, a social platform where millions of people interact through avatars ranging from anime characters to animals and robots. Users move between thousands of virtual worlds to talk and socialize, and Cru's teams are there to listen and to talk about faith.

The effort began with a question about who was spending time in those spaces, says Frank Kuligowski, the digital strategist who persuaded Cru to buy headsets for its missionaries. Choosing a world is treated as a craft: the teams aim for around 20 people, enough energy to sustain conversation without tipping into chaos.

Once inside, they split up and look for smaller, quieter groups. The opening is casual — a compliment on an avatar, a question about how it was made — before easing toward "Is faith part of your life?" or "I was reading my Bible earlier." Kuligowski recalls a conversation with a woman in China who said she wished she could go to church. He invited her to a virtual one; a fourth user who had been listening joined in. That led to a service, and a link to a real campus ministry.

An old practice in a new room

Cru was founded in 1951 as Campus Crusade for Christ and has long worked with students. Its move into games and virtual reality is newer, but scholars of digital religion say the pattern is not. Organized online evangelism dates to the 1990s, when groups trained Christians to start conversations in chat rooms. "Digital spaces are the new religious frontier for evangelism in many respects," says Heidi Campbell, a professor who studies religion and technology.

Not everyone welcomes it. A VRChat subreddit thread about an "influx" of Christians drew nearly 200 comments. Users named the worlds where missionaries are most active — "sunset bar," "midnight rooftop" — and some raised concerns that proselytizing could import anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes into a platform known for a wide range of gender identities. Campbell notes the recurring criticism of newcomers to any online space: that they try to reshape it rather than adapt to it.

Who does the work

Geoffery Powell, a 28-year-old multimedia artist and computer scientist, came to VRChat for its imaginative possibilities and became Cru's resident technical expert. Seven years on the platform showed him users struggling with loneliness, substance use, suicidal thoughts and sexualized behavior, and he decided to offer help.

Stewart Freeman describes his own reversal. After a difficult breakup he sank into the platform's darker corners, logging thousands of hours. A California pastor, Jason Poling, began visiting his private home world weekly to read scripture with him. Freeman says the sessions changed his life; he left his business, joined Cru's Jesus Film Project and moved to Orlando to work in virtual spaces full time.

Cru's teams say the point is to meet people where they are, even when that is a virtual rooftop at 3 a.m. Whether an online community should be open to that, and who decides, is a question the platform has not settled.