Christian Gamers Alliance Vision Statement - A Draft

[Tek7]

I've long had it in my head and on my heart to write a vision statement for the CGA to concisely explain what we, as a community, seek to accomplish.

I have pages of notes and threads dating back to 2007 to use as references points and I have good intentions, but focus and time are harder to come by. Rather than wait for the perfect moment to sit and write and polish a vision statement, I thought it better to post a high-level overview of my vision for the CGA and invite others to participate in the conversation.

Here are the 4 most pressing bullet points:

1. We want to represent Christ in a way that brings glory to Him.

"So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." 1 Corinthians 10:31, ESV

2. We want to help Christian gamers connect and form and strengthen friendships.

"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." Proverbs 27:17, ESV

3. While I maintain that online public channels are ill-suited to discussing controversial topics, we want to provide moderated spaces (forums for asynchronous communication, Discord or other platforms in the future for synchronous communication) for helpful and civil conversation. This will require a group of community members committed to moderating conversations with tact and civility.

"Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person." Colossians 4:6, ESV

4. We want to help promote Christian gaming groups, Christian gaming web sites, and Christian game developers.

That's a start.

 

[Krissa Lox]

Apologies for such a late response to this. While I genuinely support what you want to do here, no amount of thought or prayer I put into it ended up giving me anything positively constructive to add at the time, until an experience I had today of being really shocked at a serious and intelligent Christian somewhere else saying something ridiculously stupid and wrong about other Christians.

Of course, there's nothing new or rare about someone saying something stupid or wrong on the internet, but this particular instance just felt like such a "Grieving the Holy Spirit" level of wrongness that it just absolutely floored me and felt like it might offer some relevant insights for the discussion here.

Basically in the midst of a discussion about completely different things, someone casually asserted that a third of evangelicals these days reject the divinity of Christ, as if it were some sort of objective and universally known fact. Like what????

I mean, I - like probably a lot of Christian gamers - don't exactly spend a lot of time around evangelicals because they tend to not have positive views of gaming, but I'm pretty sure the divinity of Christ remains an important foundational tenet for them. And just because their particular denominational convictions lead them to different lifestyle choices than I'm inclined to make, doesn't make them any less worthy of love and respect as my fellow brethren in Christ, and certainly isn't any grounds to think of them as having any lesser dedication to Jesus than me or any other denomination or individuals. The Bible's pretty explicit that while we are all one body in Christ, the body is made up of many diverse members all fashioned and equipped for differing purposes that are all vital and important for serving the Lord as a whole.

So it really struck me, how does someone even come up with an idea like that, let alone start casually tossing it out as if it were some kind of popularly accepted and undeniable fact? It made me wonder if there was something going on in the higher echelons of church-world, like some kind of interdenominational turf war or something that I didn't know about, or if evangelism really meant something very different than what I thought it did. So I looked up the definition and multiple statements of faith but didn't see anything unexpected to warrant any such extreme judgement. Best I could figure was it might be a case of someone who spends more of their social time with people online than in the real world and then erroneously makes judgements about other types of people based on non-representative outliers they come across, which is almost always not going to be good in a general sense, but even worse for groups with more tech-adverse beliefs and lifestyles (like evangelism) where what bit of vocal minority does do much participation in online groups is more likely to be a pretty significant deviation from most rather than fairly representative of the whole.

So, some relevant takeaways that I thought might be pertinent here:

-- Statements of Belief/Mission/Vision/etc really serve a valuable purpose, and are not just formal relics of unnecessary legalism or busywork. Even if for the most part they just sit around gathering dust most of the time, their establishment and presence is still important as something objectively concrete a group's leadership can point to if questions come up at some point debating if some individual's behavior (or someone else's impression thereof) is really representative of or acceptable to the group as a whole.

-- As more of the general world population moves online for an increasing amount of their work, recreation, and socialization, not all established churches are going to be equally suited to moving online with them. Which is okay - after all, a lot of agricultural era Christian communities continue to thrive to this day even without electricity or computers, much less internet - but also could cause some temporary problems of fragmentation and restructuring that get awkward or difficult to deal with, especially for smaller and less-resourced groups. As a result, the experience of smaller groups might be more like wandering in the wilderness for a while instead of having a clear vision to build or work for until the restructuring process is more complete. But trusting the Lord in continuing on without a clear vision for the future is just as much an act of faith as going forward with one.

-- With the current state of the world, there might be too much of a Tower of Babel effect going on, where too many people don't share the same experience of reality or the same language to constructively discuss it to be able to have a lot of meaningful conversations with each other, in which case effective civil moderation might be an unachievable goal no matter how much we might want it or are willing to invest in it. Like with the Tower of Babel, sometimes the Lord's will is to not want something to build up at a particular place and time because He has other priorities to focus on instead.

-- The internet is not reality, and interactions that happen on the internet shouldn't be extrapolated as being a fair and accurate representation of any particular person or group's real-world situation or walk with Christ. It can be a great blessing however we can use it to support real-world goals and needs, but, unless God gives some kind of specific instruction or equipping otherwise, it can't be considered an adequate replacement for real-world responsibilities and needs, so we need to remain mindful not to fall into putting too much pressure on ourselves or others in that regard.

I don't know if any of that will turn out to be helpful, but it's the first thing I've felt as being substantial enough to post here.