I swear this is too funny to be real, but it was in the NY Times! I felt like I was reading an Onion article. Here is the article, and here are my favorite quotes:

Tim (12 years old) explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

“We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour (Minister) wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

… Mr. Barbour (also) wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.” … “Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry… The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.