Play a Game for Lent This Year - Role Play the Gospel

What is Role Play the Gospel and how can you join in on the fun?

Calling All Nerds - are you looking for a new role-playing game that is made by pastors for gamers?

Look no further! 

What is Role Play the Gospel?

Checkpoint Church Guardian @bsurfer09, also known as Hunter Bryn, has partnered with the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church to create Role Play the Gospel.

Alongside a mixture of clergy and laity known as the Pilgrimage Project, Bryn created Role Play the Gospel, in which the player journeys through the book of Mark, including walking with Jesus on His way up to the cross.

“In RP the G, what we will have you do is follow the events of Holy Week.”

Bryn’s goal for this project is to give gamers an idea of what it was like to be in Jerusalem when Jesus was riding in on a donkey and other Holy Week moments.

“The whole idea was to put yourself in the events of Holy Week, use your imagination, not rewrite scripture, but also you’ll get to read through the whole book of Mark during this experience.”

There will be 40 prompts, in which you could do all of them at once or play one prompt a day during the season of Lent. One of the starting prompts will be from whenever Jesus heals Bartimaeus, a man who has been blind since birth. As we see in Mark 10:46-52, Bartimaeus was healed because of his faith 

From there on, the player will be walking with Jesus on His way to the cross; from whenever He rode into Jerusalem on a colt, and they laid out palm branches for the King to whenever Judas betrayed Him. 

Fun for All Ages

However, the player won’t have 100% freedom to do whatever they want; it will be a guided journey through different prompts.

“There will be all kinds of spiritual formation techniques so you can get closer to Christ during the time of Lent.” 

Bryn’s goal is to make Role Play the Gospel as accessible as possible so that anyone from the youngest member of your church to the oldest can play. Often, role-playing games will only be for a certain age, but Bryn hopes that the rules and instructions of this game are easy enough for anyone of any age to read and understand. 

Bryn released this on February 13th but is planning to have it available to play for free online come Lent. Be sure to look out for different Twitch Streamers playing Role Play the Gospel, so you can get a taste of what it will be like. Our very own NerdPastorNate will also be highlighting the game on the Checkpoint Church Twitch stream. 

This will be able to connect with all ages of believers, so they can experience something that hasn’t been done before.

Even better, they have created a Facebook Group specifically for sharing your journey with others taking part in the praxis.

Often churches don’t offer any studies aimed at those in nerd culture. Still, those of us here at Checkpoint give a huge thanks to the numerous creators of this game and the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church for creating something aimed at us gamers and nerds!

If no one else has told you today,

God loves you.
We love you.
You matter.