Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Open Source Ministry
At the Buzz Conference in D.C., I heard Ed Young Jr. encourage an audience of pastors to "plagiarize" creative ideas from other pastors. Sure, in the world of journalism and academia this practice is frowned upon. In the church, it shouldn’t be. Maybe a safer term could be borrowed from geekdom: "open source." When computer software is "open source," it is made accessible to users for adaptation, modification and improvement—without violating copyright restrictions. Even as I was writing this column, I heard about a church that’s offering a complete multimedia VBS curriculum it created—downloadable for free. Another, LifeChurch, opens its own vault of creativity--free for the plundering. Their material rivals anything you would pay money for. If you’ve discovered a creative way of doing ministry, it is unlikely you stumbled upon it by serendipity. If it’s a "God idea," it belongs to all of us. Seek. Find. Adapt. Share. Collaborate. As Mark Batterson says, "There are ways of doing ministry that haven’t been discovered yet."
