Hands up if you’ve sampled one of these daring new innovations: Wristwatch. Personal computer. Tomato sauce. Sushi. Blue jeans.

The point, of course, is that we don’t recognise these things as innovations. We take them for granted. They’re facts of modern life.

But there was a time, and not so long ago either, when most people hadn’t heard of any of them.

In the early 1960s, an American academic called Everett Rogers came up with what he called the Diffusion of Innovations theory to describe how a successful new innovation makes its way into our lives.

In the first place, he argued, there was a tiny group – one in 40 of the population, he reckoned – who could be categorized as “innovators”.

Then came a group – 13.5 percent of the population, Everett Rogers said – who are, where change and innovation is concerned, the opinion formers in the community. He minted a term to describe them: these folk are, he famously said, “early adopters”.

Me, I’ve never been accused of being early for anything before. But where the web phenomenon of Second Life is concerned, I am – I can’t resist skiting – quite possibly an early adopter. I’ve had a taste of Second Life. I’ve joined the group who gather at the Second Life Anglican Cathedral.

So what’s that like? Well, just on a technical level, I found it a teensy bit frustrating.

To explore Second Life you need a fairly decent PC, with broadband internet. I thought I had adequate gear, but several times, as I was listening to a sermon via computer headset, my computer froze. I had to reboot and relaunch the Second Life software again. By which time, of course, the sermon or the service was half over.

And because I wanted to hear Mark Brown preach, and his weekly services are at 7am on Mondays our time – services are held in SL time, which is Los Angeles time… well, did I mention that I’m not an early riser, either?

Clearly, though, heaps of people don’t have those technical issues, and I suspect the kinds of folk who might be interested in sampling the SLANG Cath (there’s no shortage of jargon in Second Life) are the kinds of folk who would have the right gear to do so. And the pace of digital development is such that these technical kinks will, sooner rather than later, be ironed out, won’t they?

OK. I made my way into the Second Life Cathedral via the relevant page on Mark Brown’s Brownblog:
http://brownblog.info/?page_id=155

And because I’d acquired such computer skills as I have at the Homer Simpson Academy of Higher Learning, I asked for help from a computer-savvy young colleague – thanks, Ben Pearse – to get me going.

Ben helped set me up with an avatar – people who dabble in Second Life must pick who or what they want to be, and how they want to look – and then guided me through an orientation course. This taught me how to move (you do that with the arrow keys) and how to communicate (typed chat is the norm).

The first time I turned up for Second Life Cathedral service, I made my way into the Cathedral, selected an order of service (the words then pop up in a corner of your screen) and stood, inconspicuously I hoped, behind the hindmost row of seats.

I soon shifted, though. I probably had no real reason for my discomfort – it’s just that I’d never stood next to a minotaur named Dexter Darkstone before.

About now, you may be harbouring mild reservations. As in: How weird is that? And it’s true, where Second Life is concerned, there are no shortage of sceptics: One wag has launched a spoof website called: www.getafirstlife.com (subtitled: Your World. Sorry About That.)

But dismissing Second Life as a computer game would be wrong. Computer games typically have a goal, and Second Life doesn’t. At least, no more of a goal than real life – or RL, as it’s called “in world.”

What’s more, Second Life is, as the advertising says, a 3D world “imagined, created and owned by its residents”. The creator, a Californian software outfit called Linden Lab, has given Second Life residents the freedom to shape and develop their world. That sounds vaguely familiar, too…

For what it’s worth, I’ve got no doubt that the Second Life Anglican Cathedral is a genuine outreach to the folk who inhabit that world. Every sermon I heard, all the prayers I read, every encounter I had (most folk I met around the Cathedral look like ‘folk’ rather than ‘furries’) convinced me that I was in an orthodox Christian service, with Christians who wanted to reach out to an unorthodox world.

Bishops Tom Brown (Wellington) and Christopher Hill (Guildford, England) don’t have doubts about that either. They hosted a fringe session on SL Anglican ministry at the Lambeth Conference. Bishop Hill also wrote a piece about it in the July 25 issue of The Church Times: http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=60742

Me? I guess I’m a bit sceptical about the staying power of Second Life itself, and the personal consequences, if it were to fizzle out, would be serious indeed. I mean, I could no longer boast of being an “early adopter”, could I?’

Then again, when I read Matthew 9: 35-38, maybe that’s not something I need to trouble my greying head with:

Then Jesus made a circuit of all the towns and villages… when he looked out over the crowds, his heart broke. So confused and aimless they were, like sheep with no shepherd. “What a huge harvest!” he said to his disciples. “How few workers! On your knees and pray for harvest hands!” (Translation: The Message.)