Web 3.0 and the Church

IN 1995, Bob Sabath, then-administrator of Sojourners’ new website, wrote about how the World Wide Web might expand and change faith communities. “This next decade may show that the greatest social impact of the computer is not as an office automation tool, but as a communication tool, as a community-building tool.” Sabath, a founder of Sojourners and now director of web and digital technology, wrote that the web “could become a useful tool for helping us find each other and the resources we need to do the work we feel called to do.”

This was a prescient view on a technology that was only at its early stages. Of course, no one could predict exactly how monumentally transformative that technology would be. Sabath wrote during “Web 1.0,” also known as the “read-only” era. Web 1.0 essentially provided digital brochures (or, for churches, bulletins); it gave users a way to access and read information but minimal opportunities for interaction.

Web 2.0, or the “read-and-write” era, gave people a way to interact with others and generate their own content. Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all represent read-and-write usages, but do so with online forums and web applications. It’s the type of internet most people are familiar with, even if not by name.

The currently developing era of the internet is known as Web 3.0. While definitions vary, decentralization is often a key component of technologies that fall under Web 3.0. Blockchains are one of those technologies, and they enable cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Ether) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs)—the digital art that exploded in popularity over the last year.

Blockchain is essentially a technology that allows for secure, digital transactions of data that are verified on a public, decentralized ledger. Blocks are verified by “mining”—a process of complicated computations that take time and computer energy to complete—“miners” are rewarded with a small piece of the transaction. After the first block is mined, each block that is verified on the chain refers to the previously verified block, making longer blockchains more secure and harder to falsify.

If all that is confusing, that’s okay. The terminology and function of blockchains —like many new technologies—can take time and study to understand. Understanding the purpose of blockchains is easier: transparency, verification, and security. Christians, however, will have to consider how adopting the technology could affect their communities and vulnerable people in and out of the church. How might a more-decentralized digital world impact faith communities built on incarnation? Does deregulation open the door to an increase in the misuse of funds? Can the technology be co-opted by powerful institutions rather than used to further equality?

One result of decentralized networks is to disincentivize hacking, since data is spread across networks rather than one set of servers. Cryptocurrencies are verified by the code of the blockchain; no central authority controls a blockchain, so no server crash could take down a blockchain and no single authority could impede a verified transaction. Sending cryptocurrencies is faster than traditional methods that rely on banks or third parties such as PayPal, and it offers security that doesn’t rely on the power or faithfulness of single entities.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t the only thing that can be sent through a transaction. NFTs are sent through transactions, and their popularity is due to the verifiability of the art’s ownership. Sure, anyone can download the JPG or a GIF of a piece of art, but blockchain can verify the ownership of the original, much like the difference between owning an original painting and owning a print.

Why should Christians care?

IT'S REASONABLE TO ask why Christians ought to care about a technology in its beginning stages of implementation. The lessons from the adoption of Web 2.0, however, offer valuable retrospection. What would a church have done if it had anticipated the ways that community can be nurtured through Facebook? What if the weight and power of livestreaming services through YouTube had been considered in the ’90s and early 2000s? The trend of blockchain suggests it may eventually be a part of the general fabric of life: Even choosing to disengage with blockchain technology could require intentionality.

Brantly Millegan, director of operations for Ethereum Name Service, a company that allows people to register domains on the Ethereum blockchain, first became interested in the technology in 2013, through Bitcoin. His interest grew exponentially, and by 2015 blockchain became his “full-time focus.” Millegan, who also holds degrees in philosophy and Christian theology, told Sojourners that blockchain “has the potential to really transform our world in radical ways.”

For advocates of economic justice, this will mean the ability to circumvent banks and corporations in the pursuit of wealth redistribution. And if it seems unlikely that a technology as new as blockchain would be available to the economically oppressed sooner than banking, Millegan pointed out that many poor communities jumped straight to cellular phones—never having owned a landline. “Blockchain technology puts the whole world in one financial system ... and the barriers to entry are very low. You have some sort of computing device, like a smartphone or a laptop or something, and you have to have access to the internet,” Millegan says. “Although there are still barriers, it’s a much smaller barrier than [whether] a huge corporation decided to set up shop in your town. That is a huge expense and barrier to entry—and it’s something you don’t even control.”

Rev. Zach Courter, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who currently serves a church in Hungary, cites the benefits of speed and verifiability in transaction as a way cryptocurrencies can help the church in its work. “[Cryptocurrencies] can be distributed quite quickly and quite precisely,” Courter says. “If you want to give to a charity in XYZ country, if that organization has a connection with the church and they create their own Bitcoin wallet, that money can be transferred, and you can be assured that it’s there in about 30 minutes ... or even faster if it’s a smaller quantity.” Courter has friends doing disaster-relief work in Latin America, and notes that “some folks are already using cryptocurrency. Instead of having someone buy all the supplies and then [distributing to people in need], they were collecting people’s online wallets and then they’d send them 50 bucks to say, ‘You get whatever you need now.’ And they could do that in minutes, instead of days or weeks.” Platforms such as Stellar have used blockchain to make it easier for immigrants to send remittances back home.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t the only potential area that blockchains might be utilized for a church. Through blockchains, people could hold all their assets digitally and not have to rely on a third party for verification. While NFTs are currently used for digital art, the only thing standing in the way of NFTs being used for verifying ownership of property—even as big as homes—is social convention, Millegan says.

How might the church use it?

DAVID PHELPS, a writer who focuses on Web 3.0 technologies and their social impact, thinks the church could begin utilizing blockchain for better managing its own governance, finances, and more.

Smart contracts, a technology that operates on a blockchain, could help church budgeting. Essentially, smart contracts are programs that run on the blockchain and self-execute. Once the code of a smart contract is written and implemented, it doesn’t need oversight or management. Churches could utilize smart contracts to divide tithes among staff salaries, building maintenance, and other areas of concern. Then, again using smart contracts, funds could automatically distribute to those in the church community who need or utilize them.

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Of course, there are dangers with self-executing contracts. They don’t allow for human discretion, meaning they need to be carefully considered before being implemented. In the broader crypto-community, there have been fiascos, followed by debates, when someone takes advantage of a programming loophole—is it theft, or is it within the parameters set out by the contract? But smart contracts on the blockchain have their advantages. A church’s finances could be public, and their usage wouldn’t have to be mediated in the day to day by individuals. If a church community votes to allocate budgets to certain percentages, smart contracts can ensure that happens. “[We’ve] seen churches do this traditionally, right? When a member of the church is in need, others step in and support,” he says. “Smart contracts are laws. They are the laws of the internet, and [they are] decentralized laws because they are laws that enact themselves. Once you’ve created the smart contract, everything is going to operate that way.”

In more mundane uses, churches could mint their own cryptocurrencies to be used as a voting mechanism—each member could be given a “token” that gave them voting power, and members could then vote with the speed, verifiability, and simplicity of cryptocurrency transactions.

While blockchain technologies may not be at the forefront of ecclesiological concerns today, neither were social media and the World Wide Web in 1995. At some point, it’s likely Christians will have to consider what and how they want to influence the use of blockchains as it relates to property.

In response to Sojourners’ request for comment on blockchains and cryptocurrencies, The Episcopal Church, The United Churches of Christ, and The United Methodist Church all said they do not monitor, use, or accept cryptocurrencies at this time (representatives of each denomination said they were unable to speak for individual congregations).

“I can’t just open up the catechism and find the paragraph on cryptocurrency or blockchain technology,” Millegan says. But he does believe Christians can have a role in helping form the way blockchain is implemented in local and global communities. “There’s this idea of taking the good of this world and baptizing it ... I would encourage all Christians to get involved,” Millegan says. “We are building a new world with blockchain technology right now. We are setting precedents, we are setting values, and the more Christians we have, the more Christian influence there can be in that process.”

Courter is currently working to get his denomination to embrace Bitcoin. Courter wrote an eight-page position paper outlining how the technology could be used to further the denomination’s interests. Courter argues that cryptocurrencies, with their low barrier to entry, are “far more anti-racist, feminist, queer-affirming, and open to people of differing physical abilities than the existing financial system.” He says the church should be studying and educating congregants on blockchain technologies now because the time for discernment is before the technology is widely applied. He says it will take years for churches to figure out how, and if, they should utilize blockchains and cryptocurrencies, so getting out ahead of the technology’s widespread application would have its benefits.

L.M. Sacasas, a tech ethicist and writer, points to a principle used by some Amish communities as an example of how groups can fully consider new technologies. He says the first step is to simply be aware that technology can “alter the fabric of our community.”

“If we think about technology from an exclusively individual frame of reference, that’s already going to hamstring our ability to navigate the kinds of challenges that new technologies may present,” Sacasas says. “The principle we can draw from [the Amish approach] is that they don’t ‘adopt first, ask questions later.’ ... They have something they value—their community, the way of life their community incarnates—and they will privilege that over the adoption of new technology and whatever benefit that technology may ostensibly give them.”

This ethic applies for more than just complicated technologies such as blockchain, Sacasas says. People should consider the way even minor technologies such as clocks and dinner tables alter our sense of self and community. As it relates to digital technology, Sacasas says the Christian emphasis on embodiment speaks strongly to “the goodness of the body and its limits.”

“Technology cannot become an idol,” Sacasas says. “We cannot think that it can do for us what, from a confessional standpoint, only God can do for us.”

What about the environment?

THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION required to “mine” and verify new blocks is significant. For many, headlines about how “Bitcoin consumes ‘more electricity than Argentina’” (from the BBC) and “Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries” (The New York Times) are convincing arguments against the technology amid the environmental crisis.

The energy consumption of a specific blockchain—such as Bitcoin—is possible to estimate because the mining and transacting, which consume identifiable amounts of energy, happen on a public ledger. But those estimates can’t say how that energy is produced. Some blockchain mining is produced using renewable energy, and while estimates vary between 30 to 73 percent, even the low end of the range would be more than the total U.S. energy that comes from renewable resources (which was 20 percent in the year 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration).

The high level of energy consumption comes from the primary method blockchain uses for verification, known as proof-of-work. “In practice, [proof-of-work] has worked extremely well, but it has this problem of spending huge amounts of electricity,” says Millegan.

There are two primary arguments in favor of embracing blockchain, despite the energy consumption. First, proof-of-work is not the only method that could be used for verification. So-called proof-of-stake, which uses negligible amounts of electricity, requires one to take a stake in the native cryptocurrency. Cheating the system would only cheat oneself, and it would require a tremendous effort to make that cheating worth it.

Second, while it’s fair to be concerned about the current energy these cryptocurrencies consume, advocates might ask: How much electricity does our current financial system use? “If you took every single person [involved in finance], all their buildings, all the infrastructure, and added it together, who knows how much electricity that is,” Millegan says. “But we don’t even think of it in those terms. Our current financial system is wasting a lot of electricity.”

Sacasas, who says that he is still working to understand and evaluate blockchain himself, agrees that “if the criticism [of blockchain] is about the carbon footprint, then certainly it would be perfectly legitimate to inquire about the carbon footprint of the existing financial system, etc., [and] how you ultimately measure and compare those things.”

Blockchain and neighbors

THE DECENTRALIZED STRUCTURE of blockchain technology impacts the community that forms around it too. Unlike the Web 2.0 tech boom that was centralized in Silicon Valley, it’s common for Web 3.0 companies and teams to be fully remote. For instance, Millegan’s team at Ethereum Name Service has members in Taiwan, New Zealand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This decentralization can provide opportunities for fairness and opportunity, say many of those working in blockchain. New insights often bring ways of forming community and new ways of imagining the world. When the geocentric model was disproved, Christians learned that they were literally not the center of the universe. Phelps says blockchain might offer new ways to think about ourselves—or even God—and adds that “what I find exciting in blockchain technology” is “the idea that what’s really special in humans is the connections between them.”

Sacasas also wants Christians to consider the way technologies may impact the connection between neighbors. Security doorbells with cameras are often embraced as an enhancement of safety, but their partnership with police departments and the historic use of surveillance to oppress minorities should cause Christians to consider whether they want to aid and abet police in such a way.

“There are certainly many opportunities for Christians to draw on the theological tradition, the moral tradition, and to apply it, reflectively and carefully, to technology,” Sacasas says. “But the first step is just to recognize that technology has this kind of moral valence—which we often don’t immediately recognize."