What do you think the future of Virtual Reality Gaming will entail? Is there a possibility that we can enter a world in the first person and experience the 5 senses of surroundings? Is there a limit on how much technology can advance or not?
That reminds me of a sci-fi book I read, some 30 years ago. The story begins with a man being tasked to check out a new "church" to find out why people suddenly are flocking to it in droves. He discovers that the leaders have devised a way to pipe pre-recorded physical sensations into each member of the congregation (the plot included a somewhat faulty conceptualization of VR), but the more freely a person donates the more sensation he receives. The man soon learns that the high-level donors are being fed the sensory perceptions of a couple engaging in... yup, you guessed it. It was pretty sick stuff. Even if I recalled the name of the book (long since thrown away), I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to read it.
I don't understand how one could get the sense of taste or smell with a technology still reasonably called "VR", given it would require a material product to generate taste and smell. Sure, they could mimic those senses in a "VR Experience", in a cinema or something where they burn things to create the smell of an explosion, or place flavour capsules in your mouth or something, but I don't think that's what we're usually talking about when we say VR - we could reasonably do that already. I think VR will become life-like for at least two of the senses in my lifetime (sight and sound), and get really good with touch through feedback in remotes, and maybe even full VR suits. I'm not sure if there will be much of a unique impact for churches, I'd predict any meaningful changes in the a persons life of faith would be mirrored in society generally as how we engage with media evolves.