Remember the cartoon vicar? Well, the virtual church is back. A failed 2004 Internet fellowship project has returned in a less visual arrangement. More standardized to a Web format, it is a slim, trim, interactive Web site. Created by UK Christian webzine shipoffools.com, St. Pixels will be sponsored by the Methodist Church of Great Britain.

Gone is the animated congregation and clergy roaming around the Gothic-style cathedral. Instead, a sleek, friar-robe brown page invites visitors to blog and chat with one another. Aside from emoticons, the pages are primarily text and look to resurrect the earlier, visually-oriented experiment.

Is this the new form of Christian community? Thousands of other Christian and church-related blogs and chat-rooms seem to indicate this is a trend. A new Christian version of MySpace.com was also launched in recent weeks, eliminating the undesirables from the regular page and allowing holy posting to proceed. But even this new page joins an already growing list of other, similar Christian alternatives.

The more blogs and chats the merrier. However, unless a virtual community has connections with flesh-and-blood contact, the fellowship can be a bit limited. Virtual friendship is like having a pen pal in a foreign country. You can only get to know someone so much through written words, whether on paper or on-line. Eventually, even eHarmony couples have to meet face to face.

This means that actual churches have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the virtual trend. By providing blog and chat space on their Web sites, they can enable members to have additional contact outside the traditional forms. The easiest way to foster this sort of computer communication may be with the Google Groups feature that allows group e-mail, promoting an open dialogue among Sunday school class members or small groups.

Many church management software systems also allow these sorts of interactions using the database of member e-mails to foster better communication—or at least more than one-way communication.

Even a pastor's blog can be used as a tool to keep in touch with lay members and to keep dialogue going. Is your church virtual? Blog here.