Texas church to host Minecraft Easter egg hunt game

As churches across the country change their plans for Easter Sunday in response to the coronavirus, a Texas congregation will launch its Easter egg hunt into the digital world.

Tate Springs Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas will be hosting an Easter Egg Hunt on a custom Minecraft game on Easter Sunday, which falls on April 12.

Jared Wellman, senior pastor of Tate Springs, told the Christian Post that the digital Easter egg hunt event is a way to better engage young children with the church’s online services.

“I’ve noticed that as we’ve moved to online streaming services, the content isn’t necessarily appealing to young children,” Wellman explained. “I thought to myself, ‘We have to get the kids involved in some way, especially at Easter. Of course, it’s difficult without the traditional egg hunt that we were going to offer.

Wellman said he spoke about the issue with Tate Springs family pastor Curtis James and that he, along with his ministerial team, responded with the Minecraft egg hunt.

“Our ultimate goal in everything we do is to show and share the message of Jesus,” Wellman said. “As a church, having a virtual egg hunt for the purpose of having a virtual egg hunt would be no different from just asking children to play a video game, and that’s not why we exist as a church. “

“So we created a registration form for the event to collect email addresses so that we can do our best to track attendees electronically to ensure they have access not only to the private server. at Easter, but to the explicit message of the resurrection of Jesus.

In an interview with CP, James said he thinks the Minecraft game is “a great place to give kids the chance to come together and build things together as well as a gathering place for our Easter activity. “.

“The server can be configured to avoid some of the scariest aspects of the game. Although the game does not have extremely scary components, there are monsters and your character can be injured by falling, and so on. James explained. “In the server setup, you can turn off these features to make it an open building world like a giant sandbox.”

“Minecraft as a game is all about making things from scratch, so that you can do whatever you want with them in the game, so creating the atmosphere you want is just about bringing people into the world and bringing them into the world. let go on a project. “

James is hoping other congregations will consider emulating their use of Minecraft, telling CP that other resources are available on his church’s website here.

“This event gives us the opportunity to connect with people who would not normally come to our church, and to share Christ with them to follow up and meet their needs,” said James.

“Our church is a place where families love to come together and live life, and we would like others to experience this blessing.”