SURFERS from around the world logged in to the first 3D church service in cyberspace yesterday to sing a hymn, listen to a Gospel reading and hear a sermon from the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres.

I joined a congregation of 25 other worshippers sitting in a virtual Romanesque structure, complete with hard wooden pews, seven stations of the cross, pulpit, sanctuary, crypt and online collection plate.

The church, launched at the Christian Resources Exhibition in Esher, Surrey, can take 25 people, who can shout, talk or whisper to each other. They can enter the pulpit and preach if it is empty, kneel at the altar or visit the crypt to scrutinise the noticeboards, including an advertisement for online snogging on Channel 4’s “kissing tree”.

One thing they can’t do is swear. When one anonymous “avatar” — as virtual representations of real-life people are known — began swearing he was instantly sent to virtual Hell by a churchwarden with his “smite button”.

Personally, I found that, after 44 years of deference, it was heaven being able to wear a low-cut T-shirt and tight blue jeans to church, and even better to be able to type in “zzzzzzzzzzz” as the bishop preached (even though it was a good sermon).

But the service didn’t start with quite the efficiency of most I’ve been to. As he began, the minister, the Rev Jeremy Clines, turned to the wall and vanished into thin air after his computer in York, where he is chaplain of St John’s College, crashed, leaving the bishop to take the service.

The bishop took as his text a passage from the Gospel reading for the day, making a comparison between the internet and the nets of the fisherman Peter. “Jesus said to Simon: ‘Put out into the deep and let down the nets for a catch,’ ” he said, in speech bubbles emanating from his cartoon character in the pulpit. This done, the disciples enclosed such a multitude of fish that their nets were close to breaking.

“ ‘Put out into the deep.’ It is a command of Jesus Christ that we set out into the cyber ocean aware that the spirit of God is already brooding over the face of the deep,” the bishop said. “To our generation has been entrusted a new sphere of communication.” It was the job of the churches and of Christians to cast good and positive messages into the web, to equal and counter the negativity,” he said. One character, Darrell, confessed to being the creator. He works for specialmoves, the interactive design company that constructed the site for the Ship of Fools online Christian magazine and the Methodist Church.

There will be an online service every Sunday but the church will remain open around the clock for anyone to visit, pray or even hold an impromptu service of their own with other online worshippers.

To visit the cyber chapel, go to www.churchoffools.com

• Details of the first online church to be included in the formal structures of the Church of England were unveiled yesterday at the Christian Resources Exhibition.

  The i-church, part of the Diocese of Oxford, will go fully live at the beginning of July with a congregation expected to be drawn from all over the world.

  To participate, visit www.i-church.org
  
  SEARCHING FOR GOD ONLINE
  

• The Do-It-Yourself-Deity at www.philosophers.co.uk offers a novel way of testing an individual’s faith. In a quiz called “What is God?”, web users answer a series of questions to test the plausibility of different conceptions of God.
  
  Is an online church a poor substitute for the real thing?

  Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

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