Cru’s missionaries are inside VRChat. The sentence is worth pausing on. Cru is the organization founded as Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 by Bill and Vonette Bright at UCLA — the outfit that put The Four Spiritual Laws tract and the Jesus Film and the decisional-evangelism paradigm into the operating system of American Evangelical missions. Cru renamed itself in 2011. It kept the playbook. The Billy Graham Center Association trained Christians to start conversations in online chat rooms in the 1990s, per the Texas A&M scholar Heidi Campbell. Cru has ventured into video games, and now, every Friday, runs the playbook inside a virtual-reality social platform where millions of people gather to be someone other than who they have to be in the rooms they have to be in.
The documented practice, by Cru’s own description, is the familiar one. Three years of weekly gatherings. Prayer in a Japanese-style penthouse. Then the missionaries pull up their virtual maps and choose a world to enter. The digital strategist who spearheaded the operation, Frank Kuligowski, describes the targeting as a craft — twenty users is the sweet spot, he said, enough activity without chaos. Inside a world, they split up and seek out small groups chatting in quieter corners. They begin casually. “Cool avatar.” “Did you make it?” After some conversation, they gradually turn to religion: “Is faith part of your life at all?” or “I was reading in my Bible earlier today.”
The source material documents what this looks like in practice. A 30-year-old social worker from the Netherlands, who came to VRChat because he prefers anonymity and who uses a small floating cat as his avatar, met the missionaries in a Japanese garden world. “You guys are really calm,” he told them. “Just listening.” He joined the missionaries for several Friday outings and traveled with them to VRChurch. He mentioned, in conversation, that he had begun using oracle cards to make decisions, and a Cru missionary sent him an article on Discord that cited a Bible passage warning against divination. He eventually stopped joining. “It’s nice,” he told the Religion News Service reporter, “having people to talk to about spiritual in-depth things online. It’s pretty rare in VR.” He had not been given spiritual-in-depth things. He had been given a tract with a Discord attachment.
The population the practice is being run against is documented in Cru’s own self-reporting. Geoffrey Powell, a 28-year-old multimedia artist and computer scientist who has spent seven years on the platform and helps Cru members navigate it, characterizes the community as “plagued by loneliness, alcoholism, suicidal ideation and explicit sexual activity, including using the space to share pornography and have virtual group sex.” Stewart Freeman, who logged more than 10,000 hours in VRChat before joining Cru’s Jesus Film Project, came to the platform after a six-year relationship ended and, by his own account, spent nights there from after work until 5 a.m., “juggling relationships with different women in that space, and chasing every way that the space would try and claim that it would have a reason for hope.” VRChat is described in the source as “a platform known for embracing diverse gender identities.” The room is documented as queer. The room is documented as lonely. The room is documented, in many cases, as anonymous because the rooms the seekers came from were not safe for them to be who they are.
The community has noticed. A Reddit thread asking about the “influx” of Christians drew nearly 200 comments. Several commenters raised concerns that missionaries may bring anti-LGBTQ views into VRChat. That is community concern and speculation, not documented Cru policy. The source material does not contain a Cru statement on LGBTQ+ inclusion or exclusion in this outreach, or a documented anti-LGBTQ statement by a named Cru figure. What it does contain is VRChat described as a platform known for embracing diverse gender identities, and Cru missionaries moving into that platform under the standard playbook without any record of how the organization plans to handle the collision.
That collision is the heart of the matter, and the verse I want to read with you is the one Cru has put at the center of its own mission. Matthew 28:19–20. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The grammar in the Greek is worth one pause. The verb “make disciples” — mathēteusate — is the only imperative in the verse. “Go,” “baptizing,” “teaching” are all participles. The structure is: as you are going, as you are baptizing, as you are teaching, make disciples. The single Greek word does not mean get a decision. It means form a learner. It means the long patient work of accompanying someone into the text and the practice until the practice begins to take hold. The captured operation heard a project. The plain language of the verse is a way of being.
The way of being has a model. John 4. Jesus sat down at Jacob’s well at the sixth hour and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. He let the conversation be about water. He let the woman be the theologian. He said what he had to say only after she had arrived at the place where she could receive it. That is what mathēteusate looks like when it is not being executed as a project. Cru’s training manual does not read John 4. Cru’s training manual reads Matthew 28 and hears a Friday-outing targeting protocol, with a sweet spot of twenty users and a Discord attachment ready for the moment someone says the wrong thing about oracle cards. The young Dutchman was not walked through John 4. He was sent an article.
What the column has in front of it, in other words, is not a story about bad missionaries. It is a story about a captured operation whose standard practices — decisional evangelism, the four laws, the tract with a follow-up article on whatever the seeker said wrong — have been transplanted into a room they were not built for, against a population they were not designed for. VRChat has community guidelines. Cru has a stated mission and a doctrinal basis that includes traditional positions on human sexuality. Neither set of institutional documents is on the record in this story, and the absence is part of the story. When an organization moves its standard practices into a population that those practices were not built for — and a population that includes people for whom the organization’s standard positions on sexuality are themselves part of what made the original rooms unsafe — and does not state how it plans to handle the collision, the burden of explanation is on the organization, not on the population.
Campbell put the standard precisely. The worry is the same one that comes up every time a missionary movement crosses a threshold — that the missionaries will “kind of take over and turn it into something it isn’t,” and that they ought to follow “the same kind of rules that apply about adapting to foreign countries.” The captured operation has not read the room. The captured operation has decided the room is the same as the rooms it has already built. The room is not. The room came to be the room that it is, in part, because the people in it had not been well served by the rooms the captured operation had already built.
There is one more thing, and the column wants to honor it. Stewart Freeman’s story, in which a California pastor named Jason Poling read the Bible with him patiently for a long time in a private home world, until Freeman came to a faith he had not had before, is what Matthew 28:19 looks like when it is being done. The chasm is that the Freeman home world is the exception to Cru’s training, not the training itself. The training is the four laws and the tract and the Discord article about divination and the twenty-users-is-the-sweet-spot targeting craft. The exception is what the verse names. The training is what the captured operation has built. Read the verse, and notice which one is happening on Friday.