Bye bye St. Pixels

I was reading in IDEA, the magazine of the Evangelical Alliance, that some millennials (in their article people now aged 18 to 37)  have been badly hurt by church. My experience with internet church St Pixels is that an earlier generation also left for that reason.

Last Sunday, 22 November, St Pixels, the Internet church, held its last service.

Started in 2003 as the Church of Fools by the Ship of Fools as a 3D experiment by the Christian website Ship of Fools, as a three month experiment in being church on line, it continued, without the visuals first as a forum and chat room (where services were held) then with its own software for and finally as a Facebook app. Last Sunday the Facebook  app closed.

The eleven years it was running have been a wild ride. At times it felt that we did not know what we were doing and at others we didn’t. The experimental nature of the church made it unpredictable and exciting.

In the early days there was talk among those involved of reaching gamers. But they never came and a 3D environment was too expensive to run. Instead of reaching young people, with one or two exceptions, most were older. But there were still those who came who had been hurt by church. The anonymity of the internet made it a safer place to be. That is where St Pixels worked, in helping hurting people back to faith.

I remember having the St P’s empty chatroom open in a a tab on the computer while I was doing other things, waiting for the comforting  bong that meant someone was in. Interesting conversations were had, ranging from the infantile to the profound. It was here that I discovered that God does not use only those who are good at something, but those who are there and available to be used. I would not have been used otherwise.

It was also here that I started blogging.

So bye bye St Pixels, you will be missed