Minecraft and the Bible
I wonder … can building a bible story in Minecraft help me understand it better?
Having been a minister for over a decade, I’ve written one or two Pentecost Sunday sermons. I’ve done the exegetical work and read lots of commentaries. But I wasn’t prepared for what I learned about the story just now as I joined in the Messy Miners Pentecost build with teenagers and young adults across Victoria and Tasmania.
We began by listening to the story being told in the group, much as we’d hear it at church. Being a Minecraft newbie, I wondered aloud whether the Miners would be able to create the elements of the story: the raging wind, the tongues of fire, the people speaking many languages, the Holy Spirit?
The Miners got to work and began building, discussing creative ways to share different parts of the story. With two minutes to go, one of the crews had a disaster. Playing with their “tongues of fire,” they managed to burn half their building to the ground! Despite sadness at losing their good work, we learned something important: Pentecost is a dangerous experience!
I wondered aloud again: how can we tell this story in Australia, where danger of bushfire is such a regular occurrence?
We moved to the second team’s build. This crew had worked hard to include some portrayals of the Holy Spirit. “What might the Holy Spirit really be like?” we wondered?
They had also considered how they might get the sounds of all of the people speaking in their own languages, but all being understood? They decided it would be far too noisy indeed, and so then decided to portray the difference by spawning a range of different animals: pandas, axolotls, aardvarks, dolphins and llamas to name a few. The builders joked that the noise of all the different animals was already really loud, without even adding the voices of the animals that God created.
Pentecost is a noisy experience!
We wondered together: did God mean to include the ‘voices’ of the whole of God’s creation in the cacophony of Pentecost? Does the Holy Spirit come not only to change the lives of the human participants, but also those of all of God’s creation?
Finally the team of builders unleashed the raging wind into their building! It nearly destroyed the house, let alone the humans and the animals in the room.
Pentecost is a destructive experience!
All of these insights are hard to gain when merely reading the text. But by building the story and then inhabiting the build inside the world of Minecraft, we were able to experience how Pentecost might have really been. Raging wind, tongues of fire, loud voices, no wonder the sceptics thought that the early Christians were behaving like drunks!
Building the story in Minecraft changed our understanding of how we experienced the story. Our team of intelligent and thoughtful teenage theologians wondered about what they experienced, and what it told them about the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world.
I wonder … how might this dangerous, noisy, destructive Pentecost experience disrupt and change the church? How might it, indeed.
