Pastor
Mullins.

Pastor David Mullins is the founder and leading pastor of Vision Church, one of the longest-running ministries operating in virtual worlds. A native of Los Angeles, California, he is widely known as the Voice of the Metaverse Church Movement  a title earned through nearly two decades of groundbreaking firsts, including leading one of the earliest virtual ministries to livestream services in video format. He is regarded as a steady and resourceful leader whose ministry has weathered nearly two decades of change in the digital landscape moving platforms, rebuilding congregations, and expanding reach, all without losing sight of the church’s calling.

Pastor Mullins planted Vision Church’s first congregation in There.com in July 2007. Under his leadership the church grew quickly, soon reaching the platform’s avatar capacity limits for virtual gathering spaces. When There.com announced its closure, he led the church’s relocation to the virtual world of Kaneva in mid 2009, completing the move ahead of the shutdown and ensuring the congregation never lost its home. That follwoing year, he guided Vision Church in leading the largest relief fund ever raised in the metaverse for the 2010 Haiti earthquake, with other virtual churches joining the effort, and was appointed leader of the Virtual World Leadership Council (V.L.C.), a recognition of his standing among virtual church leadership.

Also in 2010, Pastor Mullins led in creating The Virtual Covenant of Faith & Unity, bringing together ministries, pastors, and leaders from other religious backgrounds around a shared agreement for how faith communities would coexist and cooperate within virtual worlds.

That same year, Pastor Mullins led Vision Church in becoming the first virtual church ministry to broadcast Sunday services on television. The broadcast ran for nearly two years before Pastor Mullins made the decision to redirect those resources into the church’s own web livestreaming infrastructure an early bet on direct-to-congregation digital ministry that would come to define the next era of virtual church.

Later that year, Pastor Mullins undertook the most ambitious project of his ministry to date: The Praise Campus. Despite public skepticism from other churches and clergy who doubted such a project could be completed, he broke ground in December 2010 and delivered the campus ahead of schedule and under budget. The finished campus anchored by a 300-seat cathedral with full HD media capability, a Family Center housing a youth ministry and the Christian theater, Fellowship hall, and a public park for community and youth events was named by 3D Faith Magazine as the largest worship campus ever built in a virtual world at that time. Pastor Mullins went on to host the inaugural V.L.C. conference, an annual gathering that continued throughout Kaneva’s existence. During this period, he led four services every Sunday to reach as many members of his growing congregation as possible.

In November 2012, Pastor Mullins expanded Vision Church into Second Life, running services across multiple virtual worlds simultaneously. The following year, he led a coalition of churches in withdrawing from a one-sided publishing contract with a virtual world owned by another religious organization one that dictated what content churches were and weren’t permitted to publish, while carrying steep fees and taking a significant percentage of every transaction churches conducted. The move drew criticism from other pastors at the time, but it ultimately freed many congregations from both the financial burden and the publishing restrictions, and many of the same leaders who initially opposed the decision later came to see it as the right one. In 2014, he led Vision Church’s full transition into Second Life, where the church continues to serve its congregation today alongside a presence in other virtual worlds.

Pastor Mullins currently serves on more than ten boards across the virtual world and metaverse space and is widely regarded among platform owners and creators, who frequently turn to him for insight on virtual worlds and the evolving metaverse landscape. He has been invited to speak with numerous virtual world owners and founders, including Christopher Klaus, founder of Kaneva, Will Harvey, founder of There.com, and David Rush, founder of Smallworld, among others. He also serves as the religious leader for the Metaverse Council and is a founding member of the Virtual Leadership Council.

Pastor Mullins’ contributions to humanitarian and ministry causes have earned him numerous awards and honors over the years, including the Grid Leaders Man of the Year Award (2009); the 3D Faith Award (2010), naming him the Most Prominent Religious Leader of the Year in recognition of his work funding the largest Christian university in the metaverse, leading Vision Church’s continued growth, and creating The Virtual Covenant of Faith & Unity; the Abri Kaneva Lifetime Award (2010); the Walton Humanitarian Award (2010) for raising the largest amount of relief funds in the metaverse following the Haiti earthquake; the Prophetic Voice Award (2011); the IMVU Christian Award (2012); the OpenSim Visionary Leaders Award (2015); the Vside Honorary Humanitarian Award (2016); the Virtual Theocracy Award for Honor of the Year (2016); the Capalini Acknowledgment Award (2019), presented in Second Life in recognition of his enduring commitment to community and his work building a church home for those seeking faith in virtual spaces; and the Virtual Leadership Council Platinum Lifetime Award (2020).

In 2020, Pastor Mullins founded the Mullins Foundation. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the foundation initially provided loans to virtual churches, which over time grew into outright donations to help online churches and Christian programs survive the challenges of the pandemic.

Pastor Mullins has continued to expand the foundation’s work in the years since. He developed an innovative five-point system to help churches plan and budget effectively for sustained success in the metaverse, and having seen firsthand the heavy weekly and monthly costs Vision Church faced operating in Second Life has worked to provide free media and worship resources so that pastors and churches across the metaverse don’t have to bear those costs alone. He has also been a vocal advocate and leader for building a comprehensive, cross-platform database of metaverse churches, along with deeper data on how virtual congregations grow, where they struggle, and where they thrive resources he believes are essential to helping the broader virtual church community succeed. In 2020, he hosted the first Leadership Legacy Conference, bringing together insights on running, leading, and expanding a church presence in the metaverse, with additional conferences to follow.

In September 2023, VR News profiled Pastor Mullins in a feature titled “Pastor Mullins: A Trailblazer in Shaping Church Metaverse History,” in which he discussed the foundation’s ongoing initiatives and announced plans to relaunch Vision Church alongside his foundation’s continued mission.

Pastor Mullins still leads Vision Church and the Mullins Foundation today. He currently serves on a board helping plan a new-age, next-generation metaverse world, and both Vision Church and the Mullins Foundation plan to relocate their headquarters campuses to that world in 2028 a move intended to be their final home and the place where they set permanent roots.

At the very heart of Pastor Mullins is a single desire: to reach as many people as he possibly can and bring them to Christ. He believes virtual worlds and the metaverse are a powerful way to meet people where they already are.