Ten Strings Attached

My Palm Pre nags me. All my fault, so I shouldn’t complain. I use a third party task tool to capture a range of ideas, not least ideas for posts in this blog. One such post was putatively an open letter to the Christian Church with a shopping list of things it needs to do in the second decade of the 21st century. I should probably abandon that grand idea, not least for the inherent presumption behind it.

But one idea has persisted which I’ll try to unravel here.

Yesterday at church during the evening service, the speaker chose to refer to a passage in the Book of Revelation. If you’re at all familiar with the text, we looked at the last of seven letters to the early Churches scattered around the Mediterranean basin and Asia Minor. Jesus’s to the Laodicean Christians is scathing, but tinged with hope. One criticism stands out – the Laodicean’s material wealth compared with spiritual poverty.

Now, as a political libertarian, I believe there is nothing wrong with being wealthy, but as long as it does not become an idol and that like any other gift, it is used for the benefit of others. To that end, it irks me that so many facets of Christian ministry, books, DVDs, audio presentations, are de facto revenue streams more than they are avenues of service. There is a fine line that must be walked as paying for a book etc. can be a valid way to support a ministry, but in my eyes, many ministries are on the wrong side of the line. Arguably this has been at the heart of the most modern of heresies, the ‘Prosperity Gospel’.

So what is the solution then? The church needs to look to the Creative Commons phenomenon.

Creative Commons is a way to licence works for free without going down the full route of making a work public domain. The author of a book could, for example, make electronic copies available for download while offering a printed version which can be paid for. Depending on the licence selected the CC version can be redistributed, used for derivative works or constrained from commercial exploitation. The copyright remains with the licensor.

Hopefully you can begin to see how this would address my concern; those who do not have the means can access the resource for free, media can be shared among a church without fear of breaching copyright, and those who are able can still support the creator through the commercially offered versions.

This model works. Authors such as Cory Doctorow (of Boing-Boing blog fame) and the Diesel Sweeties online comic enjoy success by licensing their works through Creative Commons. At risk of using a horrible business cliché, it’s win-win. So what’s stopping the church achieving its mission by doing the same?

J