Say hello to JulieAnnRose - an IMVU Bible study leader

JulieAnnRose will be joining us one of these weeks (she works every other week). She's particularly interesting since she's been holding a Bible study in IMVU. IMVU is sort of a virtual world area that mostly happens in chatboxes - you get an avatar that you can customize, and can invite people to chat with you - but you can't really walk around or build things - you can create "areas" for people to meet, but motion is limited to animations.

I had a very interesting talk with her last night together with ZoeRose. I was quite impressed with her thinking on ministry in general. JulieAnnRose sees her place in ministry as helping and nourishing others with her Bible study, and not so much evangelism - but she's connected with people who do go out and do evangelism, and she helps bring them together for encouragement and Bible study.

Unfortunately I won't be able to join her Bible study - it's at 4AM my time! But I may be able to visit once.

Strangely enough, it does seem that whole "subcultures" are building around these different virtual world platforms. At one point as I was talking with her, she was chatting with some of her IMVU friends, telling them about what was up with us in Second Life. She told me her friends ... well, didn't particularly like Second Life ... hehe, understandable enough. Though from our talk it sounds like some of things that I dislike about Second Life are also present in IMVU ...

I'm quite excited about how we'll all be able to exchange thoughts with JulieAnnRose about doing Christ's work in virtual worlds, and seeing what we can learn in comparing & contrasting what God is doing in these similar, but yet very different, places.