Virtual Evangelism with Peter Hammond

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Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, with my trusty—well, maybe not so trusty—sidekick here,

Pastor Jim Osmond. How are you? I'm good. Glad to be back here. I should actually pronounce that Jim Osmond, right?

Isn't that— Yeah, no. There's no D at the end. Oh, okay. You're not related to the—

Now I can't even remember the Osmond kids on the TV show when I was a kid.

Donny and Marie. Donny and Marie. There you go. You can sing like them, right? No, I sing more like the

Jackson 5. We're not going to ask for any kind of—

You don't want an addition. I see our guest in the background praying, please no.

So before we get started, some things to update folks with. We are running a Christmas sale on the book

What Do We Believe? If you'd like to get that at half off, if you need some Christmas gifts, you just have that person, you don't know what to buy for them, go to strivingforeternity .org.

When you purchase the book What Do We Believe? for as many copies as you purchase, we will give you half off with the coupon code

CHRISTMAS21. So CHRISTMAS21 is the coupon, and we have been seeing orders coming in.

We're going to try to make sure those get out real quick so that you can get that in time, hopefully to give as Christmas gifts.

And if you just want to give them as gifts, you can do that too. We're perfectly fine with you just giving those books away if you want to.

So that is one thing. The other thing I want to encourage you guys, go to strivingforeternity .org. Check out an article that Justin Pierce has written about the debate that I did on Apologetics Live.

The debate was, basically the topic was

Calvinism is useless and dangerous. If you haven't seen that debate, well, okay, it's over three hours long and quite interesting to say the least.

It's always fun to debate a person who wants to debate, he wanted to debate Calvinism, and he wanted this topic, and yet he didn't know the definition of Calvinism.

It was quite interesting, quite funny for the Calvinists who were watching, who saw what I was doing, where we revealed he's actually a

Calvinist. It's fun debating a Calvinist on Calvinism, but he didn't know he's a Calvinist.

So that was quite entertaining. But there is an article written by Justin Pierce called Why in the World Are You Debating R .A.

Fuentes? That's the guy I debated. And so I encourage you to go and read that article. Check that out.

It's going to go over what the debate was, but it reveals something about this guy that is, he's really making a name for himself in the

Philippines. And people were very upset that I was willing to debate him because they thought it would give him credibility.

And we said, no, Justin wrote this article, and we're going to make sure that's the first article anyone in the

Philippines will ever see when they go searching for him. And right now, it is trending. Right now, the post -debate we did is actually the number one thing that was, when you search for this guy's ministry.

So if you guys get a chance to take a look at it, read it, share it, that will help us to make sure that anyone that's looking for this guy online will find that article that Justin wrote and kind of be warned of him.

So just check that out if you could. I forgot to check, Jim, if we have any recent reviews, so I'll have to look into that.

But we're still running the, if folks want to get a copy of Person of Interest by J.

Warner Wallace, that is still available. You just have to write a review for us. Give us a review at lovethepodcast .com

slash rap report, rap with two Ps. And so write us a review. We'll check that out, and we will pick a winner.

And I should say the Christmas sale runs through till the end of the year, actually. So you can even buy those books that I mentioned earlier after Christmas.

So let's get to the topic today, Jim. I first got to say, so our guest is

Peter Hammond. He's going to have a very interesting ministry. Now, he goes to your church, Jim, so you actually, both you and a fellow friend of ours had asked me a couple times, like, you really got to talk to this guy about what he's doing with evangelism.

I had already spoken to Peter when I was out at your church. And folks, first off, I just want to tell you one thing with Peter, that as we get through this, when you talk about a guy who's got dedication,

I'm going to ask you, Peter, but when I came out to the church the first time, how long of a drive did you have one way to get to church?

How long was your ride? Peter Hammond Yeah, we were driving an hour and a half from Montana to get to Idaho. Okay, so an hour and a half, one way.

And when I met you, you said you were doing that three times a week. Jim Yes, I think

I got up to four sometimes. John Yeah, so when folks, those of you who complain about a 15 or 20 minute drive, and, you know, that may be too much, can't handle it.

He was taking his, with his young children, three hours a day, three to four days a week, just to get to a good church.

What are you willing to do to be in a good church? And he recently moved, so he's closer to the church.

Peter Well, yeah, it's quite the praise of God, because we're not just closer, we're two minutes away, and it's,

I can walk to church now. God is that kind of good. It was just such a blessing for us. John You know what the real dilemma is with that, though?

That also means that you're only two minutes away from Jim Osmond's house. Or maybe, well, depending on the direction, you might be two minutes or six minutes.

But yeah. So, Peter, you know,

I was impressed when I first met you, your desire to evangelize, but really, how you're going about evangelism, and, you know, and the ministry you've created.

Now, Jim, we figured, let you, you're more, you're familiar with it. I want to let you kind of introduce

Peter and the ministry he's doing, and then we'll get into some interview with him.

Yeah, so Peter started attending church at Kootenai several years ago, back prior to us moving into our new building in 2018.

And he was attending a church in Montana and had some issues there, came over to Kootenai for a while, went back to Montana to try and help that church work through some of those issues, and then eventually landed back at Kootenai and traveled the hour and a half that you mentioned back to Kootenai every week, sometimes twice or three times a week, depending on what was going on.

And he has, he's, Peter's the one who handles our streaming service. So, if you watch

Kootenai Church web, church services streamed online on Twitch or YouTube, Peter is the one behind the scenes who sets up the cameras.

His technical abilities have been a huge blessing to the church, and that is a great ministry that he runs for us from the sound booth each and every

Sunday. And there's a few little projects that Peter is involved in that I kind of want to mention maybe later on in the podcast associated with the streaming service for people who are interested in it.

But we have, I have observed in Peter an ability to communicate the gospel, a faithfulness, a zeal for it.

He is, he is always, he's like great comfort walking around with gospel tracks everywhere. He talks to people about the gospel, he shares the gospel with his neighbors and with people walking by and people who just, and we had some people working here at the church upstairs putting in windows, and they were unbelievers, and Peter stopped by, and they were just contractors, workers.

And I told him what was going on upstairs, and he said, I'm going to go share the gospel with them. So he zipped right upstairs and started a gospel conversation with them.

So he has the zeal, and he does it way of the master style, law before grace, just as I've trained other people to do.

And now actually Peter has been training a group from our church to present the gospel on Sunday afternoons.

They meet together, he's taken them through way of the master and had them practicing, starting another class in the spring.

So it's a huge blessing. That's his ministry and his gift. But the way he has gone about it has been incredibly unique.

And so Peter, if we bring you on now to kind of talk a little bit about that, when you first started this ministry, you were just known as the missionary gamer, right?

And so what platform did you start on with this evangelistic ministry of yours? We actually started on PlayStation.

So it was several years ago. It's a console -based system, but it was really started out of necessity.

As you mentioned earlier, we were driving an hour and a half to get to Kootenay because we were literally in the middle of nowhere,

Montana. Actually, we were just to the left of nowhere, but we had a great view. And as we were there, the town we were in has its population is 256, 250 less now because we've left.

But after coming to know our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, this has been nine years ago and realizing what a wonderful opportunity we have to participate in the saving work that God does in people's lives by sharing this good news.

I was really encouraged to be able to do that in the environment I was in and very rapidly ran out of people who

I hadn't already spoken to the gospel about. The local town gas pump was a great place to meet people and share the gospel with them.

And after a while, I would hand them a track and they would say, yeah, you've already given me two, and they'd hand it back. And so I had to start asking the question, well, how can

I start connecting with more people who haven't necessarily heard the gospel yet? And I used to be terribly addicted to video games, and God freed me from that.

I was so thankful because it really is a synthetic drug.

It's right up there with alcohol and other drugs, and it's designed to just suck your time away.

And there is there is a certain level of it that's good. You can just play a game. But as you guys know, it doesn't take much for something that's a hobby to all of a sudden turn into something that really, really sucks your life away and becomes an escape.

And that's unfortunately what happens with a lot of people with it. And that was me. And one of my worst weeks,

I remember I clocked it. It was 105 hours was spent in gaming. Yeah.

And just so when you started doing evangelism in that environment, you that was not because you were already there and addicted to it.

The Lord had delivered you from that. You kind of went back into that environment almost as a missionary to that mission field, correct?

Yeah, that's what it after he freed me from it for several years. And I was in Montana. I started asking a question, you know, after going through Ray Comfort's Living Waters Way of the

Master training, you know, is it possible to use this technology to be able to share the gospel with people?

And in short order, I answered that question. A game cut came out called Fallout. We had a

PlayStation in our basement and we hooked it up. And because of the technology, much like this was

Zoom, where you have the audio that's able to connect with people all over the world from their homes.

That's what you have with video games. You also have presence and the ability to do emotes and to be able to give things to people and stuff.

So there's an interaction that is very good to be able to set up a rapport with somebody and then share the gospel with them.

And in short order, I realized it is a successful platform when used properly. And that was, there's some nuances to it, you know, in the real world, when you're sharing the gospel with somebody, you don't have to worry about a zombie coming up and trying to attack you or something.

Well, you know, one thing with that for people may not realize is, you know, for people that don't play the online games and don't realize the friendships that can get developed over that is

I actually know people who the first time they met was at a wedding, their own wedding, couple that got married.

And half the people that attended were people they only knew online in games and they came to the wedding.

And so they had built these relationships because like you, this is their pre -save days, they were,

I mean, literally their honeymoon, they spent their honeymoon three straight days of doing nothing but playing online games.

They had food ordered in, they didn't sleep. That was their honeymoon. I think of other things I would do on my honeymoon, but that talks to the addiction of it, but it also talks about the relationships, all of their relationships they had were online.

And they met people for the first time, and that might seem really foreign to people, but for those that may sound foreign, how many of us can say we know everybody that we're friends with on Facebook or Twitter or these other things?

These are online relationships as well. And a lot of people are very close, sharing very intimate things with people they've never actually met because of the technology.

And there's also a shared experience that is much like you'd imagine going camping or going hunting with somebody or going on a bike ride.

With games, you have this shared opportunity to go through some kind of experience that draws you closer together.

You're able to help each other. You're able to go through failures together and learn together. And so there's some very positive aspects about the technology when it's used rightly that are great.

And I have some great relationships with people online. In fact, one of the people who's been in my ministry now for the better part of three years,

James Sons, we met through the game three years ago, and he was actively working with my ministry.

And I had never actually met him until just this last year when he came to the conference that we had at the church. Peter, so for people who might not be able to picture what you mean when you talk about sharing the gospel in a gaming environment, a lot of people, maybe particularly from my generation, when we talk about a gaming environment, they're thinking of, you know, digital avatars on the screen and the no communication with anybody else.

And that's not what you're talking about. I've seen some of the video clips, and Andrew could probably link to some of those in the show description or even edit them into the video at some point.

I'm going to put those in the show notes. Yeah, you're in a digital environment where there's actually, you have your avatar there having a conversation with somebody else's avatar.

So you are visually, you're there in a digital environment with somebody else.

But audibly, you're connecting up with people who are all over the world who come into this gaming environment, the room or the server, whatever that is, they come in there, you're playing against them, and you're actually having conversations with them, correct?

Yeah, and I think that's where the name video game is really a misnomer.

Now, it undercuts what's actually going on. It's a multimedia communication system, where you have physical presence, you have the ability to interact, you have all of the connections that you'd imagine in the real world, with the exception of being able to actually eat real food, or be able to give them a hug.

But the opportunity to interact with them in a way that is very personal, you're able to gesture, you're able to move around, you're able to give them things that show a certain level of embracing of them as a real person, where when you're thinking of Pong or something like that, it's not the same thing.

And you're not necessarily playing against them either, you're playing with them. And that was one of the things that I really appreciated in these multiplayer environments was using them as an opportunity to build that camaraderie, that rapport with them by playing against the game.

And that was a great opportunity to build those relationships that then were very fruitful to be able to lead into the gospel.

So then you're in some of these environments where you're with all these people from all over the world, people of various ages too.

And then you're just striking a gospel conversations with them as if they were sitting in your living room. Yeah, and that's one of the things that's very powerful is you're able to connect with them all over the world.

I was able to share the gospel with Muslims in Morocco. And in Morocco, if you mention the name of Jesus Christ, they can actually arrest you.

I was very surprised to hear that. And then all throughout Europe and Australia and all these different places where I'm in the middle of nowhere,

Montana, and I'm able to actually connect with them for the gospel. It's a very interesting environment because you have that very personal connection, like you were saying, but you also have the fact that you do realize you're in a virtual world.

So as you're in the middle of witnessing to them, there are some nuances. For example, you're not usually witnessing to somebody in the real world and just have them disappear because the internet connection goes down.

Usually you don't have to stop and engage with a robot who's attacking you and then get back to the gospel.

So there are some nuances to it, but largely it is very much like witnessing to somebody in the real world. In fact, most of Ray Comfort's videos

I would watch and train from, and they were directly applicable to sharing the gospel in the virtual world.

DrMR And when you're in that virtual world, then you started off with some of those evangelistic encounters.

And then how did that morph into other things like Bible studies and things of that nature? DrMR Yeah, so the value of the one -on -one, of course, is always our primary focus.

But as Ray Comfort shows in his videos, and I know Andrew knows as well, is you're not necessarily just witnessing to the person you're speaking with.

It's that crowd that forms and wants to listen to that you get in the outside world. In games, that's not necessarily going to happen as much.

And so there's a whole streaming platform for streaming games live. And I was able to plug into that.

It's called Twitch. And through that process, not only was I able to witness one -on -one with a person and maybe anybody else who was able to hear in the game, but also people come into the

Twitch platform, and they would watch me sharing the gospel with people through the game.

And it was a great opportunity to have that quantification of effort and get that where you're sharing with one person, but now you have this other person who's seeing it.

They're hearing the gospel as well. And they're actually able to interact with you through Twitch, too. So that's pretty cool. DrMR And so you would be having these gospel conversations in the

PlayStation Fallout world, that conversation that is being live -streamed into this gaming community, and people are coming in and out of that channel like you would come in and out of a

YouTube channel and watching this live stream of your gospel presentation. DrMR And they're interacting.

They can actually interact and send you text while you're live -streaming. So that gives yet another opportunity of communication.

DrMR And let me just say this, because there's... DrMR Sorry, Andrew. I was just going to say, then you're just addressing some of those questions or objections as you're reading them come up on the feed there in the very environment.

So you're really playing to two different audiences at the same time. Yeah, because that's what I wanted to bring up is the fact that, you know, for me, my generation, and Peter, you're a little bit younger than me, you know, for us, when

Pong came out on Atari, that was a big deal. And so for some folks that are hearing what you're saying, it is a foreign world what you're talking about.

Now, I know that this electronic gaming is a huge industry.

People don't realize my nephew, there's a game he played very well, he was a top -ranked player.

And my son actually was like, my son was the one telling me like, we got to get a camera on him to video it. I'm like, why?

He goes, he could be making six figures, if not more with the way I'm like, from what?

And this is a kid at the time wasn't even in high school. And my son's like, oh, yeah, there's guys that are as good as him that are making seven figures.

And I'm like, but he's not even in high school. And what it is, is there's this whole thing with the electronic gaming, it's actually its own sport, as I've discovered.

I mean, some of the big companies are getting behind it. You know, I know like a company like AT &T is putting hundreds of millions of dollars into this, because they're seeing how much they're going to get from it.

People rent like arenas, and they all sit around and play video games. And it's all interactive, but they communicate.

It is something that for like my generation is really hard for us to understand some of what you're saying.

That's why I bring it to things like social media, because this is what for many people they don't realize, is there is a social media aspect to it.

I worked with a developer, and I'm going to date myself, and those who understand video games will understand this, but I worked on a project with a developer who was writing the original chat for the game

Doom. Now that sets it back. But that was the first time you actually had a chat in a game.

And they came to us, we were working at Bell Laboratories at the time, and they came to us to say, how do we do this? How do we get chat in there?

This has come so far from that. And so let me ask it this way, because we're jumping into the evangelism.

Can you bridge the gap for people that their experience of a video game is playing chess or things like that online where they don't realize how immersive it really is nowadays?

Well, and there's an opportunity to capitalize on what we now experience because of COVID where a lot of people now have moved to Zoom calls.

So much like we're in a Zoom call right now, that's the technology. I mean, we have audio, we have video, we have presence.

Those are all the same things that are happening in the game. It just happens to be that there's a storytelling aspect about that obviously is not the context here.

So when we look at bridging that gap, it really is just a communication platform.

It is much like you'd imagine a multi -call. It's much like a Zoom meeting.

It's much like this. But you have that presence. You have the ability to say, hey, why don't you come over here? Let me show you something.

And you're able to move throughout the world together. And that gives you a great opportunity to create those relationships like you were talking about earlier where they're your friends.

You've had these shared experiences. You've gone through difficulties together, and that brings you closer. And the power of gaming to do that,

I think is great. And especially today with the way the technology goes, people understand it's really getting more and more into the storytelling.

And that's the big marketing pitch right now is how can you use this to tell a story and gather people into that story and communicate worldviews?

And that's a powerful statement because you're talking about audio, visual, sound. I mean, the amount of multimedia backing up that storytelling is profound.

And so this is beyond just throwing flannel graphs up when it comes to being able to communicate and largely, as we were talking earlier, a large amount of kids.

And that was something that I was really unprepared for because going through, obviously, Ray Comfort's videos, he's on Santa Monica Pier.

People are passing by. He's always getting new people coming in. Well, when you're in a game, I started realizing that after a while, a lot of these were returned people that are already shared the gospel with.

I'm like, no, I've shared it with you already. I need to get more people in here I haven't met yet. And they were needing discipleship.

And that's where, as Jim was talking about earlier, how did this start morphing? I started asking the question, like, okay, what do you do after you share the gospel with somebody?

And that's where we need to talk about, you know, getting them into some sort of biblical, you know, environment to be able to disciple to them, to be able to share with them the word of God in a constructive way.

We used Grace to Use, Fundamentals of the

Faith as a recommendation from Jim. We were grateful for that. And we started teaching through that in the game.

And it worked great. But after a while, we started to realize that the game's storytelling and the direction they were going was not something that was going to be able to be supported long term because it's getting more and more demonic, more and more pornographic.

And so we really had to decide to make a shift in what we were doing. And that's when we started thinking about, can we make our own games that capitalize on this technology?

Tell us then about the new platform that you are working at developing, because you went from sharing the gospel and evangelism in these environments to beginning to disciple some of the people.

In fact, we even have people now who live stream the Kootenai service, who got saved as a result of your online ministry, have been discipled by you.

You've actually met online and read chapters of my book, of all things, to people who are interested. And then you have been involved with discipling and mentoring some of these people that have come to know the

Lord as a result of that online evangelism. And now they join us on a Sunday morning because they're in a locked down country or they're in a church that's nowhere near them and you're in regular correspondence with them.

But now you've kind of moved out of from going into fallout, that environment that you were very familiar with.

Now you've kind of moved to basically the next step, which is creating your own environment. Tell us about that.

Yeah, well, we tried fallout. We tried DayZ. We tried Ark. All of these games have various mechanics about it.

We really liked being able to put up gospel signs, being able to build things, to be able to interact with people that showed maybe a cross or something doing visual storytelling.

But at the end of the day, you're fighting against the game. A lot of them have very foul language. A lot of the games had things in them that were not family friendly,

I did not want to promote. And so about a year ago, actually a year plus now, we started seeing the way the technology was going and seeing how the bar was lowered and lowered and lowered and the power of the technology was accelerated.

And we really started asking the question, can we make our own high quality video games?

And we spent a year doing the research, a specific platform called Unreal Engine, which many people are familiar with is the platform behind Fortnite, very, very popular game right now.

And it's all free. And so using this free platform, we were able to build our own virtual world that is multiplayer with high quality audio, with all of the bells and whistles that they're used to in other games.

But we now control the whole environment. And we're using the premise from, if you're familiar with the

Dead Sea Scrolls, how they were hidden away because of what was happening as Jerusalem was sacked.

We're using that premise and we've built a future world where artificial intelligence has done the same thing, tried to destroy the

Bible because it misread Ecclesiastes and thought, oh, if I get rid of all knowledge, it'll make people happy.

Of course, it didn't work. But we hid away the Bible. It's hidden throughout the land. And they go throughout the land trying to piece together their own copies of scripture.

And it's called Scattered Wisdom. And we've been in development now for three months. And we just had just yesterday, fantastic.

We had our very first live Way of the Master training in the game where we use the same exact training we did at Kootenai Community Church, but we used it in the game and we're tailoring it to how you share the gospel to somebody in games that now we've learned how to do for more than three years.

You know, your game is not too far off from reality. If you know what's going on in China right now, they're actually working to try to have where they can remove anything that they find offensive as a socialist country out of games and things like that.

They're actually using AI to do exactly that. So you may not be too far from reality and give it 10 years.

I hope not. So this is the storyline that you're telling now, Peter. Now you're in control of the storyline.

You're in control of what gets put up in this environment. And who's the target for this new gaming environment?

Are you just targeting Christians? Is there a way that you're luring non -Christians in there that you can begin to share the gospel with them as well?

How are you working through those issues? Well, the platform is free to play. And right now it's out on PC.

It's live. And what we do is we dev all week and then we release a new build each Saturday. And part of the reason why we're doing that is because there's always this desire for gamers to see something new.

And normally they have to wait, you know, year plus for new games to come out. We just decided, you know what? Let's just rev it each week and let them come and join us.

And because of that, there's a groundswell of people who want to see what's going on and they can influence its development.

In fact, I was talking to Andrew earlier about this user -generated content that we have where they can actually make objects and submit them.

And we bring them in and add them to the game. And here's from Genesis 3, 1 through 7, the tempting of Adam and Eve by Satan and the serpent.

So these, this interaction, this real time is a draw. They appreciate that.

We obviously are welcoming of all people and all backgrounds. We have a lot of people who are

Christians who want to be part of it, but also not just last night as part of the Way of the Master training, we had a young lady come in and her name was

Sarah. And she was from a Muslim background, did not know the gospel, wanted to hear more about it.

And through the process of going through the Way of the Master and then role -playing at the end in the game, she was live streaming it on Twitch.

She was able to hear the gospel and also we were able to give her a link to the book of John and she was actively reading it, asking us questions.

And it's, it's this quantification of effort that I'm most encouraged by because we have, we've got the game where we're one -on -one, we have people live stream, we've got people coming in and there's, and then we can post snippets of it to YouTube, which then it gets reused again there as well.

So it, as far as participation right now, it's largely word of mouth, but we're very thankful to have interest in it from Andrew and others.

And we're hoping that it will slowly groundswell and get more and more people involved in it. So the storyline of Scattered Wisdom is a futuristic kind of a dystopia where the books of the

Bible have been scattered. And you and I talked about one thing, and this will be of interest to Andrew as well, and probably a lot of people listening from an apologetics perspective is, as the players go through this storyline of trying to gather up Bible books that have been hidden before the

AI tried to wipe out all remnants of godly philosophy and of scripture, as the participants go through and gather up scripture, they're going to possibly come across multiple manuscripts of the same book.

And those manuscripts might have differences in them. And this kind of opens up an opportunity in the process of telling the storyline of the book for you to do a little bit of teaching about manuscript preservation, manuscript copying, copying mistakes or copyist errors, duplication of manuscripts, how things get brought into the text that weren't there, or whether it's possible for God's Word to be lost.

There's a whole way of teaching about the preservation of manuscripts and the, what would you call it, the tenacity of the manuscript tradition itself, just through that storyline, not just that they've got to overcome these challenges and solve the puzzles to find scripture, but then once they find it, they might have to do the hard work of trying to think through, how do

I tell which one of these is a corrupted copy and which one of them represents the original? Yeah, we're grateful for God Wrote a

Book, which was your Sunday school lesson system, and we're going to be bringing that in and using that as an opportunity for more teaching around how do we know that the

Bible can be trusted? How do we know about the tenacity of God's Word and how we've supernaturally protected it and how we have so many ways to validate it?

It's wonderful to give that assurity to people that, you know what, you can trust the Word of God and here's why, unlike any other book that's ever been done.

And it's a great opportunity, like you said, to use the game to support the teaching and use the teaching to interact with the game.

And all of this is an environment and it's a platform that not just I can use, but other people can use it as well.

We have somebody who's already planning on doing a Bible study yet. One of the joys of my ministry is a young lady from Chile who started out actually as a young man when

I first met her, or a young boy pretending to be. And through the sharing of the gospel, she repented, put her faith and trust in Christ, admitted she got swallowed into this whole transgender agenda that was going on, and embraced the fact of her

God -given gender. And now she's an active part of the ministry where she wants to use chess to be able to teach.

We actually built a full -size chess board in the game so she can push chess pieces around, teach people how to do chess.

And she's in Chile, never met her face -to -face, but a faithful sister in Christ now and has gone through many of your teachings and gone through,

God wrote a book, and she was one of the ones who was very interested in your recent book, God Doesn't Whisper.

And it was a great opportunity to be able to share with her the teachings that you put together there. And again, she comes back, be part of that, witness to others, disciple to others.

God's kingdom growing in the real world, but using the virtual world to present that.

Yeah, so you really have developed an idea for something that almost has no limits to how you could use it.

You're talking about using this gaming environment to teach people textual criticism, evangelism techniques, discipleship, sound doctrine and theology.

You know, any one of those discipleship ideas could be something that the player has to go through and they're going to learn something about theology, apologetics, philosophy, history, church history, et cetera, biblical interpretation, hermeneutics.

You can bring any of those lessons, any of those structures into there and make that part of them needing to learn these tools in order to solve the puzzles in order to make the accomplishments in the game.

And really, it's as diverse and it's as usable as you can for any one of those subject matter.

You can bring all of that in to bear in that environment. Yeah, and the opportunity for visual storytelling is so powerful.

When you pull in all of these technologies, they're building virtual worlds. We have all the reality to work with to be able to tie that to some sort of biblical teaching and be able to use it in a way that it's not possible in the real world.

But now you have this technology at your fingertips where you can create reality out of nothing and tie that back to some sort of biblical either proverbs or some sort of teaching from the

New Testament about how we are to operate in this real world, but we can use a virtual world to teach that because the reality of the other games that they're playing is they are learning a worldview.

They are being taught. And the teaching they're receiving is ghastly. It's wicked. It's perverse.

So one of the things I've, for years, I've worked with a friend of mine, Carl Kirby Jr.,

who has a ministry called It's Not Just a Game. And I think I talked to you about him when you and I first met.

Now, Carl has gone out of his way to show how these games are teaching, just what you said, teaching a worldview.

And you can't say it's by accident. There was a game he showed me that it was a racing game.

You just drive a car and they have billboards flying by. And you can see the billboards. You can see what it'll say.

You know, companies pay for, you know, Coke or whatever. And they pay for it to be in that game. But they discovered that you take some of these games and you slow it down and there's subliminal messages on those billboards that you can't see when you speed it up.

Only when you video it and slowed it down, you'd see messages like God is dead. The Bible is false.

So they do that subliminally. There was a game. You know, Carl showed me a game where the whole idea of the game is that the mother is got to sacrifice.

God tells the mother, you got to sacrifice your only son and the son overhears it. And so at first it's like he has to take away toys and limit them.

And then the game starts with this whole thing where Isaac, you'll get the name.

Isaac finds out his mother has to sacrifice him to please

God after taking all his toys away and all his TV and everything. And then the game starts.

You're Isaac running away from your mother who has a knife to try to kill you so that she can appease

God. And to start the game, you have this couple of minute introduction that's all explaining that.

And the writer of this says he grew up in a Christian home and he's writing this to try to show how

God is wicked and evil. And so that's the idea that you end up having.

Now, what I love, I've been against video games that are like that because of this.

And I mean, there's the addiction aspect that you've mentioned. But here's the thing they're teaching. I mean, and he goes through a whole bunch of games, you know, one where you pretend a guy pretends to be a preacher, but, you know, he gets everyone, all these cowboys to drop their weapons and pick up Bibles.

And when he does, he shoots them all right. And so that's what these have in so many of these games.

But what you have done is take this world that so many people are interested in and take that and create something that,

A, people want to play, because that's one of the things many people have tried this before. Let's create a game for Christians.

And it's for Christians. And the problem is, A, it's like most Christian movies. It's cheesy. So gamers don't want to play those games first off.

But then it's really a game for people that already believe the gospel. So what you've done is taken a game that unbelievers would want to play, but not only do they want to play it, it's actually reinforcing and teaching biblical principles, giving, this is really an apologetic tool that you guys can use to get people to learn the truths that we would go on the streets and defend.

And it tracks back, if you think about when the gospel was first penned, and at the time you had the technological advancement of the day, which was the

Roman road system. And it was designed for war and for commerce. But what did God superintend it for?

To be used by the feet of the apostles to spread the gospel to all of Asia. Well, we have the technological equivalent of that today.

Here's this technology that we can use to spread the gospel to the entire world for no cost.

The ability to do this with almost no overhead that you can do it from your home and safely and yet have an impact with people all over the world,

I think it's a very similar analogy to what we were looking at with the Roman road system. And you're talking about these subliminal stuff.

They're not even bothering anymore. They're full on just making clear announcements. These are games they are building to sell the alternate worldview, demonic, spiritual.

I've got a metaverse advertisement here that I found today looking at some of the opportunities that are out there.

And it says, come be part of this game we're developing called

Solus VR, reinventing spirituality in the digital age. We want to foster a faith -based community, but we're spiritual but not religious.

We want to connect spiritually with traditional and modern cultures, practices and rituals with each other's of all backgrounds.

Everybody's welcome. And this is something they're actively developing right now. So they're, they're, they're, they're letting their agenda be full bore now.

And, and we have to, we have to have counter options for it. Yeah. So Peter, this is to reiterate your ear.

Somebody were to get involved with you and do what you're doing in this environment. And I say this for a lot of people who are, who are probably have heard

Andrew's evangelism training. They see what Andrew has done. They see the open air preaching. They're familiar with Ray Comfort, what he does down at Santa Monica pier.

These are people who can come, who can from the comfort of their own living room without going outside in the cold or the heat without risking physical endangerment from anybody.

They can stand in this online environment and they can do open air preaching. They can share the gospel and, and, and, and interact law before grace, walking people through the gospel with people observing and listening, gathering a crowd of however big it is that they want to work in order to gather.

And they can, they can do what Andrew does open air preaching, but not from a street corner from their couch and do it with safety.

So if there are people that are like, man, I would love to go do what Andrew does, but I'm afraid that I would get shouted down. Or I'm afraid that I wouldn't be in control of the situation.

Or I'm afraid that somebody might physically assault me. You know, you can, you can do this on your couch and you don't have any of those fears.

You can just take the headset off at the end of the day or take the microphone off at the end of the day. And none of these people know where you live.

And yet you've been able to preach the gospel to people really from all over the world. That's your, that's your audience now.

And you don't have to leave your living room. And I think there's, there's a, an element too of that aspect of discipleship and caring for people that this provides that is, is beyond that sort of one -time encounter.

No, they don't know where you live, but they know where they can find you. And in this world, they can come back and you can start building a discipleship with them.

You can pray for them. You can, you can talk to them about the things they're struggling with and, and, and bring them to God's word and help to explain to them, you know,

I understand your, your father left, or I understand you feel like you're alone right now, or I understand you're struggling with these, these things that are happening to you in the world, but, but here's

God's word. And here's what it says to be able to encourage you, to be able to help you understand you have a father in heaven who loves you.

He has always loved you. He will never let you down. And that discipleship, that is what they're hungry for.

And that's what I realized in my, in my ministry, when I was just trying just to share the gospel, I was like, these, these, a lot of them are younger kids.

They need discipleship and they need strong Christians who are willing to, to love them enough to take the time to get to know them and share the gospel with them and then disciple them further.

Yeah. Todd Friel talks about finding a fishing hole and going there over and over, just go to the same fishing hole, be there at the same time on the same day of the week or whatever it is that consistencies.

And you did that online. You used to have like a, you know, you were in, in a certain room or environment every

Thursday at 1pm or every Saturday morning at 9am or whatever. And you'd have kids coming in week after week.

They knew that you were going to be there. And cause you announced it and you were there every week and you would have a lot of repeat audience where you could pick up where you left off.

You know what, what Ray Comfort does out in the street corner. It's a new audience every week. Most of the time you could have some consistency there where you would have the person who was arguing with you about the things of the faith the week before, and they're right back there in the same room and you're picking up right where you left off, having that same gospel conversation.

And these people are coming there willingly. Yes, they're, they're entering into that environment. They know that you're hungry and they're wanting to engage with you.

They want to engage with you and they're hungry for somebody who cares about them. And that's the part that the majority of gaming environments do not have any surface area for them on the, the, the environments are largely, they're just going in and killing each other or running around and stealing from each other and just being deplorable.

And here's an environment where they hear, no, I care about you here. Let me help you. Let's talk about the things that matter.

Let, let me pray for you. That's so powerful to be able to pray for somebody and that they know that they're cared about beyond just their digital persona.

And over time, that has really fostered other people getting involved as well. And we're hopeful that this will be not just, not just a game, but like we were talking earlier about a platform that they can use for any number of discipleship encounters.

Yeah. So you're not the first one probably to think of this. And when you first got into this, you're not the first Christian.

And I'm using that in the loosest possible way to come up with this idea of going into these environments and sharing the gospel and telling people

Jesus loves them. And that is you first started off with Fallout 76 and then later on morphed into Twitch.

When you went into these environments, what other kind of Christian evangelistic presence did you encounter? I thought a lot of people said that they were using this for the glory of God.

And the problem is it's a rubber stamp for them to allow them to embrace a level of addiction and just spending a terrible amount of time on what is largely a wasted effort.

But they thought, oh, if I say Jesus loves you, that's enough to validate the amount of expense and time

I'm putting into basically this video game. So I was asking the question, can you do this?

How do you do it? Now, this person is doing it and that person is doing it. I would go in there. How do you share the gospel with somebody?

How do you do it? Oh, you know, I just, you know, well, you know, we say Jesus loves you. Like, that's it?

Like nothing else? Well, you know, they'll figure it out. No, that's not the gospel. Let's talk about the actual gospel.

And that actually got me a lot of pushback because obviously. So you ended up evangelizing a lot of evangelists in the community.

Yeah. And with Twitch, as I mentioned earlier, there was a texting option where you can text back and forth. And we use

Twitch to live stream the church services. And I was trying to keep up with your references in the in the sermon to the scripture you would you would speak about from the pulpit.

And I was copying and pasting those in. But you were going so fast that I was like, there's got to be a better way to do this.

And so that's because Jim speaks so fast. Yeah, exactly.

He should have been born in Jersey. And people started saying they appreciate the fact of having the biblical references because he was going through them and they would refer back to him.

It was helpful. Well, I actually ended up building an application called Chapter Verse, which was really because I was just lazy.

And it anytime you put in like Genesis one, one, it'll look up and give you the actual text from that from the scripture that you just referred to and pasted in the chat.

And over time, it was it was really just developed for our churches stream. But other people said, hey, well, can we use it on our stream as well?

And over time and a couple other updates, we're now up to 100. I think it was today 159 people are using it on their streams.

And because it's fundamentally the word of God at its core, that's that's all it delivers is the word of God.

These streamers who for a long time got away with just saying, oh, you know, Jesus loves you now have something where we've we've tailored a gospel presentation in that's less than 500 characters.

Jim actually worked on that with me so they can type in explanation point gospel and that'll pop it in there and they can actually read that and be accurate in how they're presenting the gospel to people.

And it's it's been amazing how that's grown into its own ministry as well. That's now what you how you've designed that is so that in the middle of a sermon, like what you do for us on a

Sunday morning for Sunday school or the worship service is that when I reference a scripture or a reference, they pop up on the side of the screen.

They're right there next to the speaker. And it sort of adds the next one on to the bottom. How does it move from bottom to top or whatever it is, but it just keeps going up and scrolling up.

So you could do chapter after chapter, verse after verse in there. And just as many passages you're reading, it just scrolls up with you right on the side.

So you could almost very helpful for people who are watching. So you can almost create your own out of this could come your own church streaming platform for churches to use just with stuff like that, because that's

I mean, look, that is the thing that churches. Yeah, it's a tool and other and other churches do use it. Yeah. Neat.

Yeah, so that was a good that was a good tool that Peter has developed as well. Peter is doing a good job with not only the streaming, but also developing tools to make that easier for churches.

Just the chapter verse. I mean, that's I wish there was a way for you to monetize that and then raise support. I'm just I'm just happy they're using it.

We have we have, like I said, 159 streamers. It delivers about 5000 scriptures a month.

And it's all word of mouth. They'll come into one person stream. But what's that bot? How's it putting the scripture in there?

Oh, what's chapter verse? Well, can I have it? And all I have to do is type join channel and it instantly joins the next person's channel.

And so it's been growing and a large majority of the people are using it today. I've never even met because it's just spreading on its own.

It's absolutely amazing. That's neat. Yeah, it's a great tool. Peter, what do you you're just in the beginning stages of working on godly games.

There's a couple ways that people can get involved and help you out or contribute to you. What what can they do to to be part of that ministry or to at least support you in that?

So first off and foremost, prayer. This is where we're at the front lines of the war here.

This is this is worldview. This is spiritual warfare. This is all the things that we read about in scripture is where the fight is at.

And we need prayer because we haven't quite shown up on the radar yet, but it's starting to happen.

And I know as they become more and more aware that we're we're invading their space they've owned for so long, they're going to push back pretty heavy on us.

So prayer for protection, prayer for provision. And we're grateful for that. Also, for people to get involved in the ministry.

We're not looking for people who love video games. We're looking for people who love the gospel, who love who love other people who need to hear the gospel to be discipled to the technology bar is so low.

Now, you don't even need to join the game. You can just do it from your phone and be involved just in the live stream and be able to pray for people or use chapter verse just from your phone and then being able to actually be involved in the game.

For example, like we're saying, we have a chess ministry. Now we have a soccer field. We have the ability to do these user generated contents and be able to share the word of God through visual representations.

There's also development opportunities. All the software is free. And it's actually a lot of fun to be able to build these things and mountains and cities and vehicles and all this stuff.

It's a giant Lego set just waiting to be assembled into whatever your mind can dream up.

And the ability to teach people that is it's all free. All the training is free. All the technology is free. It's really fun.

So there's an opportunity for people to get involved at that level. And then we just started this month, actually, our

Indiegogo campaign. So on Indiegogo, you can search for scattered wisdom and you'll find our campaign.

And it's the platform where all these other games are getting funded, too. So we're right up there with Demon Slayer and all these different games that are just atrocious and have their worldview that they're purporting.

That's just blood and guts and horror and all that sort of stuff. And I'll have the link to that of where you can support that project in the show notes, because I think that, folks, he's looking to raise money for this.

This is a whole new area for a lot of folks. This is very different. And so we've been able to reach a whole new audience of people that aren't going to church.

They're not out on the streets where they're going to hear the gospel preached by some street evangelist.

They're sitting at home in their virtual reality day in and day out. This is what they're doing.

And so this is a way of trying to reach into where others are not going to be.

And so this is a great opportunity to help out a ministry that's doing something that I don't know any other ministry that's doing what you're doing.

I know a lot that go online, like we've talked about, and try to evangelize and maybe not do such a good job at it, but they think they're trying.

And I mean, I'm interested in the chess one because I'm a chess player, but I'll tell you, I have the chat in chess and I have used that to evangelize to people.

Yeah, you're doing it. You're doing exactly what we're talking about. And I think it's important to sort of set the stage.

This is just the beginning. This is the platform. But as you've heard lately, with Metaverse being a big talk, it's going to go to the virtual reality.

And we've already, our technology is going to port directly into what we see going on with virtual reality as well.

And so as we grow this, it is our desire to have it on phones, to have it on iPads, to have it in virtual reality, and to use this as a platform that grows and is able to be built on top of.

And that's what I've spent the last year researching is how we can actually do that successfully. And I think with looking at where the technology is going, and COVID's had a big part of this,

I mean, God's providential timing, everybody's, a lot of people are stuck at home. And so having this medium to be able to reach people, they are an unreached people group.

And now using this to be able to reach out to them is really a wonderful opportunity. And it's the key here is that you've created an environment where anybody can step into it and reach those people.

And if you are listening to this or watching this, and you've thought to yourself, man, I would love to be able to go out and do what

Andrew does. And I just wish I could leave my home or I'm too old, or I just don't have the physical stamina or the voice to go out and preach on the street corner, or I don't have the tools.

You can step into this environment and there is a ready -made opportunity for you to reach people out there.

This is a venue where anybody now can step in and share the gospel with an unreached world.

And you become an international missionary from the safety, security, and comfort of your own couch. With that also, there is this shared experience opportunity.

If you think of like the virtual Bible camp concept, so you can come in, you can befriend somebody and say, hey, you know, let's go on an adventure.

Let's have this shared experience. And while you're going on that adventure, be able to talk to them, learn about what's going on.

What are they struggling with? Pray for them, build that rapport, disciple them. So it's beyond just that momentary sharing the gospel.

You have the opportunity to set up some long -term relationships with people for the glory of God and to enrich their lives with the presentation of God's word in a way that largely was done at camps and things like that, as you're familiar with,

Jim. So Peter, as people support this and you're able to raise money, what are you raising money for?

How is the money going to be spent? What are you hoping to accomplish through the fundraising campaign? That's a good question,

Jim. Thanks. We've been self -funded now for the last three years, and I'm very, very thankful that God has blessed us with that.

But it's evident now that this really has the potential to start really growing, and we're going to need resources for that.

My faithful brother, James, who has been working from Kentucky, he has a day job. He works into the night to try to build the environment with me.

I'm hoping that we can hire him on full time. That's probably the biggest focus for us there. We're also buying high quality assets you talked about earlier.

This has been tried before, but as you look at the landscape, it's, as I described in the video, it's a dog's breakfast.

It's terrible. Some of the examples that are done, I appreciate the fact that they were trying, but it's not good, and it doesn't show the glory of God in a good light, and it really lowers a lot of people's expectations.

We want to raise the bar. We want to produce something that's, they call it a AAA gaming experience. We're buying high quality assets.

We're making sure that the environment, as you can see, we got beautiful mountains. We have landscapes. We have very good quality materials to be able to make things look very good and very real.

That's something that if you're trying to do things on a shoestring budget, it doesn't turn out very well, and that's, I think, what has held some of the other implementations behind or back that have tried this before.

Having that support is going to be a big part of this, and we're hopeful that we can change the paradigm, and we're training.

So, I'll show other people how to do this. We'll train you how to share the gospel in games. If you don't want to do it here and you want to go somewhere else, just come to the

Way of the Master training that we're doing. We just started Lesson 1 Thursdays from 4 .30.

I think we go to about 6, 6 .30, and we'll be running that for the next eight weeks, and we plan to keep doing that, repeating.

We're going to do the Grace to Use Fundamentals of the Faith again. We're going to do God Wrote a Book. We're going to do

Dave's training on the Five Soles that we just got. So, all of this is going to be incorporated.

It's not just going to be a game platform. It's going to be a discipleship and a training platform to repeat this in other environments.

So, folks, if you want to support this and Peter's able to raise that money, he would help him to sleep at night, sleep better at night.

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SFE when you call them so that they know that you are listening from here and they will continue to support this program.

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So, Peter, I want to thank you for coming on. It was something where, you know, this is, as I said earlier, you know,

I know I've met you. I know your heart. I know what you guys were trying to do. And I think when you first talked to me about this way back when,

I was like, yeah, another cheesy game going to be created. I guess that looked a lot.

I guess that looked a lot. I mean, I remember a brother in the UK who reached out to me and he was trying to do a similar thing with a game that he wanted to create that was kind of like this, it was kind of like you go through, it was a quiz game, like a trivia type game.

And they were going to put things in there where you had to answer trivia of the

Bible. But I was like, but are unbelievers actually going to want to play this? And it was so over the top where you had to have a

Christian understanding of things. And what he ended up doing was creating a whole architecture for chat and other things because that's what his focus was.

But the problem was the game wasn't good enough to bring people in to want to play it.

And then that's the whole problem. And so that's what you've done. It's unique because in the sense where you've not only built the platform, you've built something where people want to come in, but the game is something they want to play.

And what they're doing is exactly what the world is trying to use these games for. Listen, folks, the world has been actively trying to teach our children for years.

They have been using the technology to try to win over the children.

You see this now with the way big tech is working. This has been an attack that's been going on, and many

Christians had a blind eye to it. They're not in the field. They don't play the games. It's just not something they do.

And there are parents who just don't know. One of the things I would love every time that Carl Kirby would do his talk is

I would go stand in the back of the room just so that when he got done and everyone's dismissed,

I can watch the faces as people get up and turn around and their jaw drops. And I'd hear them all as they're walking out going,

I never knew my child or my grandson. I had one person said, I never knew my grandson plays those games.

I never knew that was in there. And people would, okay, we got to get rid of all these games because the kids.

But the problem is, if you don't have someone to replace it with, the kids are not going to switch over.

They're going to keep finding ways to play. So I want you to check out, we're going to give you a ton of things in the show notes.

I'm going to put how you can support the project they're working on right now. I'm going to put into the show notes your

Twitch channel, your YouTube channel, your Twitter, your website. So people can go there, even your

Patreon to offer support. So people can get there, figure out, okay, here's some ways.

Hey, you got kids that are playing games and you give them something else to play that would actually reinforce some of the biblical principles you're teaching them.

So go check out what they're doing. We already have fathers coming in and parents coming in saying, we're so thankful to have a game that we can have our kids play that we don't have to worry about.

And that's for my own kids too. I got my own kids. They play with us as well. So it's a great counter -offering to what the world offers where they can say, oh, here's something

I can actually have my kids play and be encouraged by the fact that they're spending time in it rather than it being like, oh goodness,

I hope they're not going to spend any more time in those games. And I think with that said, if I might, a great transition from just being in an environment that's good is the good news.

And so would that be okay if I launched into sharing with you what our chapter verse says about the good news?

We would hate that on this program. No, definitely don't do that. That was a bit of a rough transition, but hopefully it'll float.

So right now, if you use chapter verse and you type in explanation for a gospel, or you put gospel message anywhere in there, it pops up with this very short, and this is going to be very concise.

And I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on it as far as a message, because it has to be within 500 characters. So it says gospel means good news.

The bad news is we have all sinned and deserve the wrath to come. But Jesus, the Messiah died for our sins, was buried, and then raised on the third day.

According to the scriptures, he ascended into heaven. And right now is seated at the father's right hand.

Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.

The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.

Pretty concise. So folks, check out the show notes with this.

I'm going to put, Peter's going to send me some videos to add in there. Maybe send me a link for chapter verse if, you know, so we can get folks who may want to try to figure that out and use that.

That would be good. So Peter, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. I look forward to getting to see you again whenever your pastor invites me out there to preach again.

So you got to talk to that guy. There's no talking to him. Well, thanks for coming on.

Appreciate it. Folks, go check out the ministry that he's doing and see the show notes to check all the stuff that we have that he's got there.

I'll put all the links in there. And well, folks, that's a wrap. For you,

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