New media
To St. Pixels flock the internet faithful
By Heidi Dawley
Apr 24, 2007, 01:05

Each week nearly two million people tune into Britain’s Radio 4 to hear “Sunday Worship,” an ages-old program that broadcasts a service each week from a different church. But just over a week ago listeners tuned in to hear something rather new.

The service was coming from a very different sort of church, one lacking a street address and a building, even a choir. Hosting the service was St. Pixels.

St. Pixels, as the name implies, is a virtual church, existing only in cyberspace, and its debut on Radio 4 was a first for the BBC.

“Church online is really quite out on the frontier. The bringing together of technology and theology is an incredibly interesting dynamic at the moment,” observes Steven Goddard, one of the people behind the creation of St. Pixels.

Goddard believes such online ventures help make religion more accessible, and that may be just the sort of boost online religion needs these days.

Traffic data suggests religion sites aren't seeing the surges in traffic of the past, and some may actually be losing visitors, as other destinations grab a bigger chunk. Traffic to the religion category in the U.S. was down 23 percent this March versus March 2006 as a percentage of total internet visits, according to Hitwise, the web tracking firm (see charts, below). Says LeeAnn Prescott, Hitwise's research director: "Part of it is the growth in social networking."

St. Pixels was officially launched about a year ago by the team behind the British Christian webzine Ship of Fools, with funding from the Methodist church, and thus began the first online services. The aim is to create a fully 3D community. So far the church has amassed about 1,800 registered members and gets about 600 daily visitors.

Attending a service at St. Pixels is quite a different proposition. Those entering the church to worship first create a cartoon avatar for themselves, choosing things like what nose they’d like, their hairstyle and the clothing. They also create an online name.

They can then attend services, where, as in a traditional church, there are prayers, sermons and hymns led by members, some of whom are ordained. Afterwards, the congregation usually retires to the site’s bar together.

One of the values of the live service is that it taps into the same sense of community, and the need for community, behind the growth of the social networking sites.

Goddard believes there are only a small number of virtual churches like St. Pixels at the moment, including a few on the 3D community Second Life, but he sees others emerging, saying, "Undoubtedly we will see more of these churches.”

For St. Pixels, the Radio 4 broadcast was a big event, both as an opportunity to make itself known to the world and for its members to actually meet. 

Ultimately, since avatars and web sites don’t work too well on radio, St. Pixels had to find a real church for the day, and it even lined up a choir to sing the hymns. About 25 key members of the church turned up for the event, including one who flew in all the way from the U.S.
 
“We love to be on the cusp of new things and we like to experiment the whole time," says Goddard. "This was a great opportunity to meet each other and to just take the risk.”

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended April 15, the top five parent companies were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online for the 11th straight week. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and AOL Media Network for the second straight week.

Experian Group Limited, last week’s No. 2, was the top advertiser with 7.59 million impressions generated, ahead of No. 2 NexTag at 7.5 million. With 28.9 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, more than quadrupling No. 2 MySpace at 5.92 million.

Sessions per person per week were up from last week to 16, with domains visited per person even at 38. Average PC time per person per week was up slightly to 17 hours and 29 minutes.