A cloaked figure scurries across the screen, swords flashing. In a lower corner of the display, we see a shot of the gamer running the show. His audience appears as a string of text messages above his head, sporting handles like “tinysnorlax1” and “MarneusThrax.” The gamer is playing for a live audience—a typical day on the streaming platform Twitch, where an average of more than 2.24 million viewers concurrently watch streamers either chat live or play games like Path of Exile, League of Legends, or Minecraft.
But this is different. This is ministry.
The gamer is Dustin Phillips, associate and youth pastor of a small church in Tyler, Texas. Along with ministering to his in-person congregation, Philips also streams from his church office with the wholehearted support of his congregation. To folks like tinysnorlax1, he’s PastorDoostyn.
Right now, he’s playing the ninja-themed action-adventure game Sekiro and explaining how his viewers can learn more about his faith. A chat member has inquired where to get started in learning about Christianity, and PastorDoostyn has advised the person to read through the Gospel of John. “Look at me!” he chuckles over his headset as his character dodges assailants. “I’m just running around … trying not to die and telling people about Jesus.”
And he’s not the only one.
PastorDoostyn is part of a growing phenomenon we might call nerd-culture ministry. Like sports-ministry practitioners, these believers seek to offer the love of Christ on the common ground of shared interests. But instead of soccer goals, it’s The Elder Scrolls. And unlike athletes, this demographic often feels ostracized by the Christian community. “Because of the things that they enjoy,” PastorDoostyn explained, “they feel rejected by the church.”
A growing community of Christian nerds is working to change that.
For Christian streamers like PastorDoostyn, Twitch isn’t just a platform to publish content—it’s a place to build community. AkiAndFam, a family team of streamers (husband, wife, daughter, and son), have been streaming games like Destiny and Final Fantasy since 2019 with the goal to “create a home for people who don’t have one.” They’re honest and real online, both goofing off and sharing about their struggles.
The authenticity of the family’s interactions has created a vulnerable space for viewers too. During one stream, an anonymous chat member expressed recent suicidal thoughts. Aki (dad) and Momma Peach (mom) immediately stopped the game and focused their full attention on the participant, taking time to encourage the person and point the way toward appropriate mental health resources. The viewer left the stream encouraged and remains a thriving member of Aki’s “fam” today.
Nerd-culture ministry requires mental, emotional, and social endurance, not to mention a hefty dose of discernment. “Pastors know this,” explained Christian gamer JateLIVE, who works as a freelancer and streams 40-plus hours a week, “but I don’t think they know it at the level that I do, because I am playing games and talking to people all day.” Streaming requires nonstop conversation—talking with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people at once—on topics that range from Star Wars to mental health, all while trying to simultaneously scale mountains, battle sorcerers, and survive on alien planets.
Not all nerd-culture ministers are streamers. Charles Sadnick is the director of Beneath the Tangles, an anime ministry which “bridges the divide between anime fans and the Christian church.” The ministry’s blog, video, and podcast content celebrates the Japanese style of art and animation, making connections between the gospel and works such as Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist.
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They also host a lively online community in the asynchronous chat platform Discord and even maintain several digital small groups that gather for Scripture study, prayer, and mutual encouragement. “We don’t want to be your church,” Sadnick explained, “but we also realize that we may be the strongest and most frequent Christian influence in your life.”
Then there’s Love Thy Nerd (LTN), which the website says “exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.” In addition to maintaining a content platform and Discord community, LTN also holds regular mission trips to gaming conventions like Gen Con, where the ministry shows up not just to witness but to work.
“One of the really easy things we can do is come in and staff the booth[s], run demos, and help sell [game developers’] products,” said LTN president Bubba Stallcup. He believes these volunteer hours are essential to sharing the gospel with the gaming community. “We need to earn the right to speak this really heavy truth of the love of Jesus, … and they’re going to be far more accepting … if they know that I care about the things they care about.”
“Earning the right,” as Stallcup called it, is essential to evangelism in nerd culture. Church hurt, he said, is the largest challenge his ministry faces: “We as the church have at best marginalized and at worst demonized nerds and nerd culture.”
Some nerd-culture ministers think the fix for that marginalization is to start fresh. Matt Souza pastors XP Church, a fully online “church for gamers.” Like PastorDoostyn, Souza used to serve an in-person congregation in his offline hours. But after several years of pastoring by day and streaming by night, he hit a wall. Gospel presentations would take place in his chat, and he’d direct viewers to join local churches—only to hear someone had been turned away for showing up in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) shirt. “If these gamers can’t find a church that they can go to,” Souza remembered thinking, “I’ll make one for them.”
XP Church isn’t alone. Lux Digital Church is “a digital church expression … created by gamers, for gamers.” Lead pastor Mark Lutz and his team started Lux in hopes of building something to “offer a lot of people who’ve been driven from the church.”
In Frankfurt, Germany, Philipp Bonin and his team have planted Nerch, which holds services both in person and online. Not unlike America’s “Western heritage” churches, Nerch is a plant designed to serve a particular subculture—but attendees are nerds, not cowboys.
The rhythms of XP Church, Lux, and Nerch are familiar: music, preaching, small groups, outreach. But sermons follow the style of a Twitch stream—viewers drop their comments and questions in the chat, and the preacher responds in real time. Small groups observe Bible study and prayer, then play games together afterward, much like an in-person group sticking around for small talk. Lux invites its email subscribers to play D&D with the same posture in which brick-and-mortar congregations hold church softball leagues, and Nerch does outreach at local cosplay conventions.
For many nerds, though, real-world worship still appeals, and Steve Valdez at SavePoint Ministries is here for them. SavePoint steps in where streamers leave off, connecting nerds with churches in their geographic areas. People who’ve had spiritual conversations in Twitch chats can connect with SavePoint and find congregations that are prepared to meet them at the door (and maybe compliment their Star Trek shirts on the way to the coffee bar).
Valdez reports that not being taken seriously by churches is his biggest hurdle, without question. Even when not contending with pastors who “still think that video games are for kids and that Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons are witchcraft,” his calls frequently get brushed off to a youth minister despite the fact that he’s seeking a church home for a married, 30-something father of two.
Not all churches are so leery of their nerdy neighbors, though. Giles Hash of Disciple Gaming, for instance, works with local churches to set up tabletop role-playing game nights on their campuses, not only for youth but also for young adults.
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Nerd-culture ministry has grown deep and wide enough that practitioners are beginning to meet in person for training and mutual encouragement. The Nerd Culture Ministry Summit (now entering its third year) gathers ministers like Hash, Lutz, Stallcup, and JATELive for several days of keynote presentations, breakout groups, and late-night D&D sessions.
Larger, more established parachurch organizations are beginning to pick up nerd-culture ministry tactics as well. The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board held its first virtual reality (VR) mission trip, connecting an American church with an online community in Japan, with plans for in-person follow-ups to come. Jason Martin is a video game designer who volunteers with Youth With A Mission; his current projects include a cozy birdwatching game entitled Look to the Birds, inspired by Matthew 6:26.
Cru is regularly using gaming outreach methods at the college level, and its Jesus Film Project is making inroads into VR thanks to the help of Alexander Lyons, a digital-environment artist and 3D asset creator whose work is being used on platforms such as Roblox and VRChat. For Lyons, the colossal popularity of gaming makes such ministries a veritable necessity: “If gaming is the culture, that’s where we, the church, ought to go!”
And while many lifelong nerds are aging into their 30s and 40s, gaming ministry is still a lively phenomenon among teenagers and students. Brad Hickey, director of gaming at Dordt University, not only runs the campus Gaming Guild but also teaches courses such as “Engaging the World of Gaming,” which equips students to pursue their love of games in concert with their love of Christ. John Merritt, head esports coach at Warner University, is building this Christian university’s esports program with expressly redemptive intent. “To the gamers I’m a gamer,” he said, “that I might save some.” Satellite Gaming is running the ministry playbook in esports, putting on afterschool gaming groups in partnership with public schools.
For these younger players, the fallout from the Satanic Panic is lore, not lived experience. Satellite Gaming’s executive director, Jamie Harris, rarely even bothers using the word nerd with the students he serves, simply because the term isn’t meaningful for them. When the entire football team plays Fortnite, it’s hard to think of gamers as a target for scorn (or swirlies).
For adult nerds, though, past pain remains a barrier to the gospel. “Turn or burn!” protestors are fewer and farther between at Gen Con, but attendees remember when there were more. Nerd-culture ministers are familiar with this pain because they carry it as well. “Church was not fun,” recalls Momma Peach of AkiAndFam. “It was really painful at times. It was really hard. And I walked away from church for a very, very long time.”
In this context, explained Stallcup, a gospel presentation often starts with an apology for how the church has failed nerds and a commitment to do and be better. “It may not be my fault,” said Stallcup, “but it is my problem.”
Jaclyn S. Parrish is a geek and gamer who has written for The Gospel Coalition, Christ and Pop Culture, and Love Thy Nerd. She is working on a book about the theology of fun.
