Why we go to PAX
By Kelly Woods
Every year, tens of thousands of people walk through the doors of PAX Australia underneath two enormous words: Welcome Home.
It could easily be dismissed as clever event branding, but there is something about those words that captures what PAX has become for many of the people who gather there, including a growing group of people connected to the Uniting Church.
When I asked our community why we are committed to going each year, Sarah Bassett named this almost immediately: before you have even properly entered PAX, you are being welcomed home. For Rev Will Nicholas, those words also spoke loudly. Being welcomed home reminds people that they are seen and acknowledged, and that there is a place for them here. You walk through those doors and find yourself surrounded by thousands of people who understand that loving a game, a story or an imaginary world isn’t something you need to grow out of or apologise for. Instead, it is something you can delight in, share with others and find belonging through.
So when we were asked why going to PAX matters for us as members of the Uniting Church, I think part of the answer is actually quite simple. We go because we are gamers, because these are our communities too, and because many of the people who already call the Uniting Church home also find belonging here.
Of course, being an intentional community within PAX creates opportunities for wider connections, building friendships and developing networks. But perhaps more importantly, it’s about recognising that those gathering at PAX are already our people. Because people from across the wider Uniting Church community don’t just attend PAX; they are part of what makes it happen.
There are those connected with our churches who have been part of creating the Pinny Arcade Cookie Brigade. There are people across the Uniting Church who build gaming pieces, work in software and game development, run sessions and campaigns across the weekend, volunteer, create, play and contribute to the enormous ecosystem that makes an event like PAX possible.
We have also noticed that when we share that we have a group of people who go to PAX each year, parents who are part of our traditional church communities have found this quite serendipitous. Some people have watched their young adult children find the models of church they enjoy difficult to engage with, only to discover that members of their wider church community are showing up and hanging out in a place that matters deeply to their children. Even if PAX is a world the parents themselves might not completely understand, seeing their church community enter into that space creates a wider sense of belonging, where the different parts of their lives no longer need to feel quite so separate.
People who might never attend a specifically organised church event suddenly discover that the Church is already present in a place where they feel at home. We aren’t there with a stall asking people to come to us or trying to turn PAX into a church event; we’re simply there alongside them, because they’re already there.
This changes the missional question considerably.
As the Church, we aren’t finding ourselves looking at a gaming community and wondering how we might reach it. Rather, we’re taking seriously the people who are within these spaces and playing week by week.
Rev Chris Booth says that when we take seriously opportunities to play, we create possibilities for new connections and allow ourselves to be more than simply ‘working creatures’. There is something valuable in being creative simply for the sake of being creative, because gaming is not just about ‘playing’, as it’s also deeply spiritual. Games connect us with stories, communities, our past selves and possible future selves. They give us worlds in which to wrestle with questions about who we are and how we understand the world around us.
Sometimes, quite accidentally, they even become places where we do theology.
Last year I went to a PAX session called Lore and Order. It was essentially a session where we looked at Dungeons & Dragons campaigns within a Law & Order style conversation. People brought forward scenarios that had happened during their gameplay and, together, the room debated who was in the right and who was in the wrong.
At one point, the conversation turned to the undead: when someone dies within a fantasy world and becomes something else rather than simply passing on. The particular question being debated was whether this would still apply to a character who, at the time, was in the form of a horse. Suddenly, a room of about 75 people was asking: if a horse died, could it become undead? Eventually, someone put up their hand and asked the question sitting underneath the whole debate: does a horse have a soul?
Nobody had advertised a theological discussion. Nobody had organised a panel on the doctrine of the soul, nor do I think most people in the room realised that we had wandered into a conversation that sat firmly within the realm of theology. We had simply begun with a shared story and followed the questions that emerged from it.
That experience has stayed with me because it says something important about why spaces like PAX matter to us as people of faith. Conversations about meaning, identity, morality, life, death and what it means to be human are already happening here; they just don’t necessarily begin with the language we have traditionally associated with theology.
These experiences help shape what it means to authentically engage in God’s mission.
Too often, when Christians talk about mission, we begin by asking what we can bring somewhere. What can the Church offer this community? How can we reach these people? How can we bring God into this space?
These encounters at PAX remind us that when we talk about participating in God’s mission, our starting point matters. Rather than beginning with what we think the Church needs to bring into a space, perhaps the first thing we need to acknowledge is that God is already here.
Will reminds us that the heart of mission should be less about taking God somewhere and more about discovering what God is already doing. That means we don’t attend PAX as religious outsiders coming to fix, save or colonise the gaming community. We go as participants, accepting the welcome offered to us and paying attention to the creativity, hospitality, cooperation, storytelling, justice-seeking and joy already happening around us.
Sometimes that means finding ourselves discussing whether a fictional horse has a soul. Sometimes it happens while playing a zombie game and talking about life, death and resurrection, as Rev Chris Booth describes, or when biblical stories about fishing unexpectedly find their way into a conversation about Finspan. And sometimes it looks like people literally getting married at PAX in the Cult of the Lamb exhibit, surrounded by friends, family and strangers who also call this place home.
And though getting married at a gaming convention might seem a little obscure to some, this wasn’t an isolated occurrence. Multiple weddings have taken place at PAX, and when I asked our community about what they had noticed there, both Sarah and Will immediately mentioned this as something significant. They are wonderfully strange, playful and to some they might appear a little irreverent, but they are also something worth paying attention to. Two people are locating something significant within a community that matters deeply to them and allowing that community to become part of how they mark a sacred promise to one another.
There is something particularly important about the Church learning to notice moments like this without immediately needing to judge, define or claim them. For a long time, Christian engagement with gaming and geek culture has too often begun from a posture of suspicion, asking what might be dangerous or incompatible with faith rather than becoming curious about the meaning, relationships and experiences people are already creating there. Games and fantasy have been caught up in Christian moral panics, while people’s identities and relationships have at times been described as dangerous or sinful.
For many people within these communities, then, Christianity isn’t something they are encountering for the first time when people from the Church arrive at PAX. Some already know the Church very well, and those experiences haven’t necessarily been good ones. For some women, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people and others whose lives haven’t fitted neatly within a particular Christian expectation, belonging within churches has sometimes felt conditional on hiding.
That history matters for how we choose to be present. Simply turning up and announcing that we’re a different kind of church isn’t enough, because trust isn’t rebuilt through better branding. It grows through relationships in which people discover, over time, that our friendship doesn’t contain a hidden demand that they eventually become like us, and that we are genuinely interested in knowing them rather than seeing them as the object of our mission.
This shift in missional posture becomes increasingly important to understand in wider 21st century Australia. Gatherings, communities and outreach aren’t successful when we connected with the most people or managed to sneak Christianity into enough conversations. Goodness, hope and discipleship look much quieter than that: listening to people’s stories, sharing our own, playing together, respecting boundaries, sitting comfortably alongside belief and doubt, and becoming people others know they can have the strange 11pm theological conversation with.
This is the part that interests me the most, because I don’t only want to see more of the Church at PAX, but I want to see more of PAX in the Church.
PAX creates an enormous temporary community built around participation, where people make things, share stories, play together and teach complete strangers how to play games. They spend hours waiting in queues and somehow make friends along the way, inhabiting worlds different from their own and connecting with people they may otherwise never have met.
None of that makes PAX perfect, but it does make me wonder what we might learn from communities where people are invited to participate before they are expected to believe, conform or completely understand. Will describes his hope as wanting the Church to see what is already happening there: friendships forming across distance and difference, communities woven together through shared stories, identities explored through imagination, and people discovering joy, meaning and belonging through play. Having experienced judgment and dismissal of his own playful identity within the Church, his hope isn’t simply that gaming might become another tool churches learn to use, but that we might learn to look at play itself with greater curiosity and wonder.
I think that’s where my hope sits too. I hope our presence at PAX continues to grow, but not necessarily by becoming bigger, louder or more obviously Christian. Instead, I hope we become better listeners and continue to be present in ways that allow relationships to grow. I hope that when someone from one of our congregations say, ‘My kids are going to PAX’, there are people within their church community who can say, ‘We’ll be there too’. My hope is that the game developer, campaign runner, cosplayer, tabletop player, software developer or parent doesn’t feel as though they have to leave that part of themselves at the church door.
More than anything, I hope we continue creating space for the conversations that begin over games, stories, fictional worlds, undead horses or whatever strange question comes next, while becoming a Church that is a little less anxious about always needing to be the one at the centre with something to teach. Perhaps one of the most missional things we can do is become curious enough to notice what is already happening, to walk through those doors underneath that enormous Welcome Home and, instead of immediately asking what Christianity can bring to this place, recognise that the Church is already here, and that Jesus is already walking amongst this community … and not just as cosplay.
People from our churches are already playing, creating, developing, volunteering, parenting, making friends and finding belonging here. Others may have little or no connection with the Church at all, but they have welcomed us into a community that matters deeply to them.
Perhaps, then, our question doesn’t need to be How do we reach PAX? Instead, we might ask what becomes possible when we keep showing up, paying attention and participating alongside the people who already call this place home.