Zachary Forbes, a maths teacher from Whanganui, has started an unusual initiative on videogame streaming service Twitch. Shanti Mathias interviews him.
“The people want First Samuel,” says the man who calls himself Brother Zac. Brown hair, headphones on, a wall behind him, he pauses and reflects on the comments he’s read from his congregation. “Samuel’s got the best circumcision content in the whole Bible,” he adds, not sure if that will sway them. This is what the people he’s ministering to are interested in: questions start flowing in the chat, along with colourful emojis and all-caps reactions. Did Moses write the book of Genesis? What are his thoughts on extra-Biblical text The Book of Enoch?
Zac keeps reading from the chapter of the Bible he has open on his computer screen, highlighting sentences and clicking footnotes while discussing the character of Abraham, a central figure in Genesis. “Abraham is the frickin’ man, he is a wonderful dude.” For anyone even a little bit familiar with the Bible and Christianity, Zac’s casual approach is surprising. But it has to be: he’s speaking in the language of internet gamers, because he’s streaming on Twitch. Mostly used by gamers (although sports and politics content is popular too) and known for its involved comment section and ability for users to donate to streamers, the Amazon-owned platform isn’t a likely space to find engaged users listening to theology.
“The theology section on Twitch has been more fruitful than seven years of mission work,” says Brother Zac, whose full name is Zac Forbes. A maths teacher by training, Forbes has spent the last decade oscillating between teaching maths in New Zealand (and saving money) and working as a missionary in Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines.
Returning to his hometown of Whanganui at the end of last year, needing to renew his teaching registration, Forbes had time to see friends, including someone he’s known since age three. Quintin Crawford, known as Quin69, with nearly a million followers on Twitch, plays popular fantasy games like Diablo III, Path of Exile and World of Warcraft. He describes his fiance as “god tier” and is currently in a feud with Elon Musk after demonstrating that Musk didn’t know how to play a game he had mentioned in an effort to gain credit with gamers.
As a professional, Quin69’s streams are perhaps what you imagine when you think about the content and audience of the Amazon-owned live streaming platform: streams are titled things like “HC ROACH GAMING🚨DRAFT DAY, SURELY I WILL GET PICKED🚨PRE-BIS FARM!🚨PROFESSIONS🚨ENDGAME DUNGEONS GETTING ALL LOOT🚨ⁿᵒ DRAMA!!” and terms like “gooner”(slang for someone who masturbates) and “LOLW” (an exaggerated form of “lol”) proliferate in the comments. “The culture around Quin – they constantly make fun of him, do fart noises, attack his weaknesses, it’s just a meme culture,” Forbes says.
While he’d never watched Twitch streams himself, Forbes spent a month joining in on Crawford’s daily streams, which he refers to as a “duo streaming arc”. He also worked on a follow up to previous documentaries he’s made about Crawford. Then, with the help of “about 25 grand of Quin’s equipment” he could borrow, he started his own Twitch channel, mainly playing World of Warcraft and Age of Empires II. Forbes feels that he’s still learning the language of the platform. “I didn’t know the culture at all, I didn’t know what Twitch is meant to be.”
Forbes uses some of the conventions of the platform, like eating raw lemons and ginger as a reward for getting more subscribers, using long, all-caps streaming titles and sometimes using Elon Musk face filters. Yet the results are dreamier, almost absurd. It takes him several seconds to cut open a lemon (he broke his wrist in an aggressive game of bullrush at a Bible camp he attended in January, and currently games with a foot pedal). He reads a Stuff article about police in Rotorua taking away the supermarket trolleys homeless people use to store their possessions and decides that “if the trolleys are from Woolworths or Foodstuffs, I’m on the side of the homeless”. He declares “let’s get some knee action”, and focuses his second camera on his legs, curled up in his gaming chair. He makes noises like “budabudabuda” while he’s thinking. He shaves on camera, adding a mustache to his slightly shaggy bowl cut.
And then there’s the theology section. When he shifts to reading Bible passages, Forbes’ voice shifts and becomes slower, more enunciated. “I just want people to read the Bible, and understand the context,” Forbes says. He’s intentional about not mentioning his own church, or even asking viewers to go to church.
He also keeps any mention of religion out of the rest of his stream, so viewers who are just keen for Path of Exile or Age of Empires content can skip it. He doesn’t believe in forcing the Bible down anyone’s throats – but he also embraces the pragmatism of meeting a big audience of people who might be open to learn about the Bible where they’re at, online.
Forbes himself got a pretty traditional introduction to Christianity. He went to Sunday school as a kid, and his mum encouraged him and his siblings to read the Bible daily. As a teenager, he started to reject religion, and “tried to be staunchly atheist”. But he became interested in Christianity again in his early 20s, and started teaching basic introductions to the Bible overseas, while continuing to learn himself. He’s found that training to be useful, but not totally analogous, to talking about Christianity online. “In Cambodia, I am in someone else’s place, I’m the one who needs to tread carefully, to accept that I don’t know the culture,” he says. “On my channel, I’m the headmaster – I can choose the direction and culture, I can choose to ban people if I need.” He doesn’t have a formal qualification in theology or religious education, but has learned as he goes.
His church has been keen to help; Forbes gave a talk about his streaming at a Bible camp, and several others have hopped into the livestream to answer questions or moderate comments. “I reckon some churches have gotten ‘boomered’ – it revolves around what old people want church to be, so the younger generations are more disillusioned,” Forbes says. Instead of “an ancient British style of meeting” with a person speaking at the front, he reckons there’s merit to reach people where they are – online, interactively, with no judgement and a less formal structure. He never plans what he’s going to say, just making comments off the cuff. “Sometimes I worry that if I do more preparation beforehand, I would lose the pizzazz.”
Streaming can be gruelling. “At the moment I’m trying to establish a schedule of seven hours a day, seven days a week,” Forbes says. If you want viewers, you need to be consistent. The “BrotherZac” channel currently has 9,800 followers, although some streams have gotten as many as 38,000 views. He’s benefitted hugely from some of Quin69’s audience; it takes some people years just to accumulate an audience in the triple digits. Still, compared to people who can make a decent living from Twitch, he doesn’t have many followers. Forbes recently shifted his streams to a later time, so that he can pick up some relief teaching and then stream after work, but he’s not sure how sustainable that will be.
Still, he’s enthused by this unconventional approach to both streaming and reading the Bible, speaking to gamers by translating a religious text into something they understand. “Sometimes people who are anti-religion try to trap me a bit,” he says. “But even if they think the Bible is fiction, they might find that it’s a storybook with heaps of lore and cool historical settings.”