Meta Crusade: Planting the Gospel Flag in the Metaverse

Dominic Laureano: All right. I guess they're still getting it up. As soon as I see that first slide, I'm going to get started. But first, I'm going to talk about myself real quick. Here we go. Almost. But I'm going to go ahead and talk about myself real quick. My name is Dominic Lariano. I am a, it was a Canva link. I think Pastor Jeff sent it to you, Flat Cat, or to Cheddar. My name is Pastor Dominic. I've been in the ministry for over 20 years. I was trained by a couple of great revivalists. You wouldn't know their names, but, you know, revivalists are controversial, so I'm not going to say their names. But I will say this. The one thing that they put inside of me was a fire, a fire to preach the gospel, a fire to do God's will. And there was a time in my life when I was very much. on a track to become a doctor um and in the middle of that i lost some vision my my vision began to um disappear i had a hereditary eye disease there we go there it is and what happened in the middle of all that guys um god got a hold of me because i wasn't able to complete i was in my last semester my last yeah i was about to start my last semester last two semesters and uh Yeah, what happened? There's a cartwheel for you. What happened was it became no longer safe for me to handle patients as a physical therapist, as a doctor of physical therapy. So what I did was I humbly bowed out and I prayed and I said, God, if I wasn't on the right path, I need you to put my feet on the right path again. I just wasted eight years of my life in school simultaneously doing ministry here and there. Then I heard the voice of the Lord come and created a sentence inside of my spirit. The sentence sounded a little bit like this as my mind began to interpret what the will of God was. I want a kingdom flag planted in each of the major metaverses. I want you to go back into the digital space like you once were. And I want you to preach the gospel, my gospel there. My kingdom needs to be established in there. I said, yes, Lord. So I began to do a deep dive, did all my research, guys, and I came up with Metacrusade. And then I met up with a couple of friends, and we created this ministry where, and I didn't know anybody was in there. I didn't know DJ Soto was in there. I didn't know there were other things going in there. I was just listening to the Lord obeying God. So for the last year and a half, we've been at this. So let's go ahead and give you a quick, brief video. Are you able to play that video on the next slide?

SPEAKER_01: I don't have the clicker, so whoever has the clicker, click away, my brothers.

SPEAKER_03: All right. So Meta Crusade.

Dominic Laureano: Basically, the idea is that we want as soon as I see the next slide come over, then I'll go ahead and stop. The idea is that the individuals ministering in the crusade form, of course, because you guys know COVID and everything happened. The old crusade form, Billy Graham style crusades, these massive revivals that have happened in the past. Those are. Well, I would say they're not a thing of the past because they still need to happen in real life. IRL is still a real deal. What we wanted to do is we wanted to see that in the metaverse. I mean, we're still limited to 40 people per instance, but technology is coming out so that we can have... multiple servers going we can broadcast several servers so we have potentially um we can we can pack digital rooms with thousands of people and they don't have to leave their houses and they can be ministered to in the old style crusade that was very evangelistic so metacruz metacrusade is hugely evangelistic remember what a crusade is the crusade in the metaverse a crusade in the metaverse for souls that's our goal All right, let's see if we can get that video playing.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I'm not seeing the video playing. Maybe if I can get feedback here. What's up? Yeah, it's just on the next slide. So whoever's in charge. Is that cheddar? Cheese. Bravo, man. Now I can't hear it.

SPEAKER_01: Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Dominic Laureano: hey man it's okay technical issues guys you should have seen what it was like when we first preached in the metaverse we got into a place called rec room and uh they went everywhere declaring that jesus is alive

SPEAKER_05: If you want Jesus in your heart, jump up and down. Hallelujah. Don't deny Jesus before men. Confess him. Pray after me. Pray, dear Lord Jesus, I believe you died for my sins and I believe you rose from the grave and that you have power over sins. Jesus, come into my heart.

SPEAKER_06: there's a pastor in minecraft genuinely talking about jesus i came here for the first time like i never been here before i really liked it i really liked it i like how y'all introduced it i love it i love it lord's house is moving to the metaverse worship communion even baptisms heading to the virtual world

Dominic Laureano: Woo!

SPEAKER_06: All right, guys.

Dominic Laureano: That's Metacrusade. All right.

SPEAKER_06: So, yeah, that's me, Pastor Dominic.

Dominic Laureano: I am the founder and co-founder of Metacrusade. And today I'm going to make this presentation real short because I think we're running out of time. Feel free to get on. still got more slides to go so hopefully we can get that back up there we go okay i'm gonna just trust you cheddar you got it you got it in order all right but please give me a um give me uh somebody get on here and give me a five minute warning before i have to finish okay guys yeah you've got 20 minutes still Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Okay. So this is going to be very short, sweet. I'm going to hopefully leave some time for you guys to ask questions. And I want to create multiplication. I want to start off with, let's move to the next slide. I want to start off with what the Lord said. What was the first command he gave Adam? What was the first command he gave Adam and Eve?

SPEAKER_03: Anybody know?

SPEAKER_01: To be fruitful and multiply you.

Dominic Laureano: Boom! You hit it right on the nose. So being fruitful and multiplying. So listen, there is a multiplication component, right? So that's evangelism. Evangelism, but then there's also the nurturing and the growing, taking care. A lot of the pastors are very... very very passionate about discipleship and it's their whole bag and that's all they talk about all they talk about but what about making the babies you got to make the babies and then grow the babies up okay so what we're very passionate about we do not neglect evangelism i mean uh discipleship all right but we are highly focused on evangelism highly focused and so out of all the ministries here i would say that we are probably the most evangelistic and as far as focus is concerned and the fruit that we have bore so far kind of shows you that now there's there are different roles in the body of christ right and so what we are looking for are people to help us disciple as a whole but we are also still doing discipleship and we love discord we're really doing that very very very much in discord so what is metacrusade we have a vision the vision is to multiply by going to the unreached areas the unreached generation that's gen z guys all right gen z and they are already in the metaverse the biggest problem that we're having right now is filling these metaverse churches um Not yet, guys. Let's go back to the, there we go. Thank you. So I hear like church attendance is dwindling or it's really hard to get people into these metaverse churches. Guys, we're having no problem. Our church services are completely full. Why? And I'm going to tell you why. Because we are going after the people. that are already in there they're already adopted these they're not and i'll show you i'll show you statistics on how much time they're spending in there but what are we doing when we're going in there we're creating we're going into these immersive environments we're focusing on these evangelistic efforts we're getting them to come to these churches in these platforms like minecraft rec room fortnite roblox and vr chat and and our ministries that we're giving them We have entertainment like music. I created AI music, entire Christian AI albums for them to listen to instead of them listening to other things that are filthy for their spirits. And we're also adding in an academy. We've already had our first graduating class. That's the discipleship program. And we're teaching how to do what we call. Metavangelism. We've coined that phrase. We've coined that phrase. Metavangelism. And we're teaching them to become metavangelists in the metaverse. Evangelists in the metaverse. All right, next slide.

SPEAKER_03: Amen, amen.

Dominic Laureano: So let me show you, this next slide is a little video of what our church looks like. Pastor Joel, he did a breakout session. He's in there kind of giving you introductions. So if we could play that video, that'd be great. Appreciate that.

SPEAKER_03: Kind of got to go in and out, back and forth.

Dominic Laureano: I'll warn you when there's a video so that you can step in and out. That's fine. So what we did is we built a church in Rec Room.

SPEAKER_05: Pastor Joel, and what you're witnessing around me is the first ever digital cyber church on the video game Rec Room in the metaverse. Okay, so what this is, is this is where we host our Sunday services every single week. We have a fiery gospel message right from the stage. We preach the full gospel to crowds of 20, 30, 40 at a time. And we give them a chance to make Jesus Lord of their life. We also do prayers. We do digital baptisms. We still recommend getting real water baptized. We also have private prayer rooms as well set up behind our lounge down this magenta lane, down the blue lane that you see over there, down this green lane. And we preach the gospel. We do personal ministry time. And more than anything else, we are creating a community of Jesus-loving youth. across this game rec room. And this is all part of the Meta Crusades vision to have church plants across every single metaverse to reach the nations through digital spaces. And we are so glad to have you join. Hopefully in the future, you'll see more videos from us and you'll learn more and more about how this church service works, how you can be involved. But until then, God bless you. Pastor Joe out.

SPEAKER_06: Praise God.

Dominic Laureano: All right, guys. All right, as the next slide comes up, I'm going to go ahead and just tell you what happened here. We have plans to bring to other conferences, and we wanted to start with some others that weren't really adopted much, or like even VRChat, we're going to start in there. But we found that the fruit was coming from rec room. we had a method to fill the church we were doing these giveaways and it was just awesome seeing all of this harvest we were like dude we're just going to keep throwing the net here and we threw the net again and again and again and people kept coming in so far we've seen we counted them this is actually on a very conservative scale because we couldn't count every single time sometimes the whole altar would come the whole altar would be full Okay. And it would be like, we would go in there and that you saw the altar there. Right. And we would ask everybody, the room is filled with 40 avatars. We had a 40, 40 avatar instance would fill the room and then, and, and we would fill the room and the whole entire place would just be, they're all run to the altar to receive Jesus. And we had to mute the room because it got so loud. And then we turned the mics on. We hear everybody praying. Everybody praying. They would bow their knees and they would receive the Lord right then and there. I don't know what your theology is on that. Some people are so against that prayer. But I'm telling you, it's having an impact in them. So listen, 1,100 plus souls so far. You should see those stats on metacrusade.io. 15,000 original church visits already. Four church performance, three are in production right now. One of them is very, very much produced. Fortnite is the exciting one. Then we also have the weekly services. You saw that room that we have that in. We have Bible studies. And then that custom game in Minecraft, guys, especially with that Minecraft movie coming out, it's going to be packed. And then we're going to host services. We're going to give all kinds of incentives to people coming to the church services. But that game we're actually doing a fundraiser for. We've got to raise $250,000 for that.

SPEAKER_03: All right, next slide.

Dominic Laureano: praise the lord it's another video i want you to see this video before we play this video um as you prepare to play it um cheddar i i want to talk about what happened here i showed you what we're doing inside of our church building but you need to see what we're doing inside the game this is the heart of this entire ministry evangelism meta evangelism evangelism We go in there, pull souls right out of hell. And you're going to see two instances where either Pastor Joel or myself got five or more people to pray and receive the Lord as their Lord and Savior.

SPEAKER_05: this prayer but pray this prayer I believe you died and I believe you rose from the grave I invite you into my heart Jesus be my Lord

Dominic Laureano: Be my Lord.

SPEAKER_05: Be my Savior. Forgive me of all my sins. I turn from my sins. And I ask you to give me your Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.

SPEAKER_05: In Jesus' name. Amen.

SPEAKER_03: I believe that your sacrifice and your blood is enough.

Dominic Laureano: Fill me with your Holy Spirit. I repent of my sins and I ask you to make me born again.

SPEAKER_03: I feel like inside of me now.

SPEAKER_06: I feel happier.

Dominic Laureano: I feel happier. I feel happier. I don't feel black anymore.

SPEAKER_03: That's funny.

Dominic Laureano: All right. So we're going to move on to the next slide. Guys, this is what we're seeing in the metaverse. And I'm going to tell you that last part, that last one that you just saw, that last one, that of me leading that group of people to Jesus, that happened last night.

SPEAKER_03: I wanted to get a fresh clip.

Dominic Laureano: So you can see how easy it is.

SPEAKER_06: It literally only took me 30 minutes.

Dominic Laureano: Maybe 20 minutes. The harvest is ripe. So let's talk about that generation. This is Gen Z and Gen Alpha. We're seeing them come in by the thousands. Hundreds every month. Every day I go in there, and I'm only doing this part-time. Every day I go in there, people are getting saved. I think the most I saw in a single night, maybe it was a couple hours, was 12 people. And I had to talk to them a little bit. I had people curse me out. They started cursing me out. And by the time they were done, they were receiving the Lord as their Savior. So the heart is too hard when the Holy Spirit is there. gen z is the most digital generation we've ever had in existence there is this 71 million of them just in the united states alone another 71 million these are just stats but i'm sure it's more than this 76 of them believed in jesus but they don't even know how to reach him they want to know him more but they feel disconnected from church because they're so plugged into the system They're plugged in, they're jacked in all the time.

SPEAKER_03: They play video games every day, seven to 10 hours a day. They're not unreachable.

Dominic Laureano: It's just a matter of us knowing where they are and going after them. That's what MetaCrusade's mission is, is to go after them in their world. Next slide.

SPEAKER_03: Their world is completely digital. Spending an average of eight, nine hours a day on the screen, they all, all of them have social media.

Dominic Laureano: It's so rare. I bet you can't find a single young person that doesn't have a cell phone or access to social media or that doesn't play video. Some of them play video games. They play video games right through their phone. The good thing about Rec Room, the reason why I like it is because it's multi-platform. So they can go right to their phones and interact with us in the metaverse. I want you to remember this quote. If we are not reaching them there, someone else is. I've seen LGBTQ communities. I've seen communities that magnify demonic stuff. not having it not on my watch the kingdom flag needs to be planted in each of these metaverses guys and you can't just create a christian club you got to get people saved you can't stop evangelizing you got to grow you got to grow what god is you got to use the seeds that god has given you got to grow this thing But you have to do the work. You have to put in the work. You have to put yourself out there and let yourself get rejected. And they'll reject you. They'll curse at you. They'll block you. They'll call you names. You know, I just laugh. And then I'll talk to them about Jesus.

SPEAKER_03: A lot of them end up getting saved at the end. All right, next slide. Let me know when I got two minutes left.

Dominic Laureano: right first thing i need to do i need to define this on this next phase we're just going to shift into this and to helping you grow whatever community you're growing first i'm going to do this with giving you a terminology of this digital world that they live in it's called the metaverse what is the metaverse The metaverse just is an immersive digital environment, just an immersive digital world. How do you access the metaverse? Well, you can access it through a VR headset, and a lot of you are using VR right now. Gaming consoles, Xbox, PlayStation, PCs, and mobile devices. All right? Pretty soon we might be able to put TV on here. But as for right now, the remote controls aren't sophisticated enough for it. They have a TV, you know, maybe through Roku, Roku Metaverse. I don't know. That might be the next one. But I'm going to tell you right now that you don't have to be – if you have a cell phone, you can access Rec Room. You can access some of these metaverses. Anybody can do it. You just can't be intimidated. You have to understand also that metaverse is a broad term. It's not necessarily just something that you can use to identify one platform. It's a broad term. right remember remember this quote guys the metaverse is not a game we're not playing games games are played in there but we're not playing games the metaverse is not a game it's a massive unreached digital nation i'm going to change that it's not just a massive digital unreached nation it's like a digital continent Imagine all the continents. We've got seven continents in the world, okay? There's an eighth continent, and it's digital. It's called the metaverse. And in there, there's many countries. Each one of these platforms, like Fortnite, VRChat, Rec Room, they're all a country, a nation in and of itself. You need to think of it as an unreached continent on the earth. But it's only accessible through digital means. All right, let's move on to the next.

SPEAKER_03: We're going to show you what our focus platforms are. We're looking for by this time next year to be on all of these platforms.

Dominic Laureano: And these are the number of users that are in there, guys. This is a crazy stat. These are crazy statistics. 250 million monthly active users? Why aren't we in there more often? Why aren't we in there more often? 20 million just in Rec Room. Right now, we're seeing such a massive harvest. And then the one that's showing right here, according to the stats, that Rec Room has the lowest attendance. But we're seeing massive harvests. Our next one is we have Minecraft being built. Our next one is Fortnite. I'm going to go in there and start evangelizing. And we're going to start building that up because our room is actually being developed right now. And then the last one is Roblox. We should have that one by the end of the summer. Then we're going to be moving into VR chat. Our Minecraft game is going to attract... We believe millions of people, hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million users in our game. We want to be one of the top 10 games. And we're going to have church on certain days during the Minecraft game. And we're going to give out all kinds of rewards and incentives for those that go to church. We want to turn an entire game into a Christian community. All right. Moving forward. On to the next slide. This is why we need to be going after this generation. Why what we're doing matters. Why you should go into the metaverse and pull these souls right out of hell. I got some quotes for you to help motivate you. Understand that these are quotes that I've made. I came up with these because they're like... resonating in my heart you need to understand that the harvest is virtual but these souls are very real just because you're interacting with an avatar that you know just like this doesn't mean that there's not a real person behind that there's a real person And I've seen people get touched and start crying, fall to their knees. I've seen people go through deliverance. I've seen all kinds of crazy things happen. And they come back to their headset and they're like, oh, man, I just got wrecked by Jesus. That's what we're talking about. God visits them there in their home. Guys, we also need to understand that this is adapting to a new mission field. So you have a heart for souls. But you're stuck pulling in one or two souls a month. evangelizing in in some random street we can do we can do five an hour guys in in rec room if your heart is souls and not just the method if you're attached to souls and not just the method then you'll do this so as jesus walked into town so we walk into log into servers It's the same thing. We're going to a place. How are we doing? Got three minutes left. All right.

SPEAKER_03: Thank you, brother. Let's move on because I'm at the end. Perfect timing. So this is your call to action, my friends. What can you do?

Dominic Laureano: If you want to be part of this digital harvest, you can either start a ministry yourself. could support an existing ministry church plant and the major thing that you want to do is also once you've gotten any of these in place you want to train up people to do the same and let's go to the next slide and that's what we're doing i want to invite you guys to come to metacrusade.io And then I want you to sign up to our newsletter. We're going to be sending you information on how you can support us. We're sending you information on how we can support your ministry, on how we can support your growth. We're going to be having some webinars, some seminars. We're going to do some met evangelism together. We'll bring you in to the metaverse with us and let you shadow us as we evangelize, give you a script if that's what you need, show you how to do follow-up. We will help develop your ministry. We'll even let you have your own service. If you're a qualified minister, we'll let you have your own service in our church just so that you can break it. Break into preaching if that's what you want to do, if that's what you feel called to do. Discipleship, we could really use some help with some discipleship. So if any of you have a passion for training up people and laying a foundation, if you feel like you have a teaching calling, there's opportunities in our Discord to do that with our youth. We're looking to fill up every single time slot possible in the afternoon, in the evening, seven days a week. with amazing things for our community. It's growing fast, guys. And so that's the conclusion of my presentation. What I'd like to do is close with the last few seconds, 30 seconds or one minute I have left with letting you hear. One of our AI songs that I created, it's called Metavangelism. And it's supposed to, we can go to the next clip. You can go ahead and start playing it as soon as you're ready. And it's supposed to encourage people to preach the gospel in the metaverse. So we just listen and I'll come down there and dance around with you guys. I want everyone dancing on this. I want everyone to dance and listen to the lyrics. Turn it up.

SPEAKER_06: show me the way I'll carry on No more looking back No more holding tight To the things that kept me from your light I feel your call I feel your hand Leading me into this promised land I'll be the voice in the darkest night. I'm on this track with courage in my heart. I will always. Jesus, I'm yours. Show me the way. I'm letting go of every chain. Stepping out in faith, breaking through the pain. With your strength, I'll rise above. In the matter of verse, I'll spread your love. Be strong, be brave, you're with me now. In your presence, I take my vow. To go where you lead, to be at the call. For your kingdom, I'll give my all. Into the moment. Thank you guys. God bless y'all.

— departure log decoded via WhisperX, lightly cleaned for reading —