Ministry CommonsIntroduction
Most of the Christian world spends most of its collective time producing, distributing and consuming mininstry materials.
The most common, and well known form, of ministry material is the Bible itself. There are many other types of materials as well, from traditional Bible tracts, books, sound and video recordings, radio and television programs. In the past 25 years these materials have now come to include music CDs and various types of software.
All of this activity, in whatever form it may take, is a direct result of the great comission, Go, make disciples of all nations. Winning as many people as possible for everlasting salvation through the power of the shed blood and the power of the resurrection of Jesus.
This activity has been going on for a very long time. Some written parts of the Bible may be as old as 4000 years. For nearly as long people have also been writing letters that have encourged people to grow in their respective walks with Jesus.
The need for written materials was not lost on the author of the Bible. The Bible spells out how those materials are to be distributed. Using its own peculiar language the Bible spells out the conditions that should be attached to those materials. Those conditions form what we will call here the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate.
The essential detail of the Sharing Chain Mandate is that the chain is formed by people who pass information from one generation to the next. Like parents, directed to provide an inheritance for their children, the producer of ministry materials is responsible for providing those materials to the next generation for free.
Most of the Greek manuscript fragments that form the basis for the western textual traditions are apparently hand-made copies of the Bible that were lovingly preserved and passed on as an inheritance from one generation to the next, until the texts were so decayed they could not be used any longer. Decayed texts were replaced when a family member took it upon themselves to re-copy the entire text, by hand. This traditional form of providing Bibles follows the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate quite closely.
Indeed, certain classes of people, primarly members of royalty, are required in scripture to produce their own personal copies of the scriptures.
For most families in the pre-printing press world, the cost of supplying a Bible to their offspring was the same cost as they themselves had paid... nothing. It was received freely as an inheritance and passed on freely as an inheritance. Freely Received, Freely Given. Only when one generation did not adaquately handle their copy of the word did it require the next to make a new copy.
With the invention of the printing press the average cost, really man-hours of work, to make a copy of the Bible, or any other written work, went down considerably. But, the process now required investment capital. Since the investors did not consider readers to be like their own children, due an inheritance as per God's directives, the production of Bible copies became a commerial activity, where the receiver typically paid for their own copy.
This was the first crack in the Sharing Chain Mandate. For someone considering making a copy of the Bible the choice was now between their own time to make the copy and their wages needed to purchase a copy. Of course this choice had always been available to the upper classes, monks have traditionally sold hand made Bible copies. The printing press made this a viable choice for most people.
Also curious, early printed Bibles used fonts where each letter was shaped in different ways so the printed text had the same appearance as a hand-printed monk-made copy. Hand written Bibles were percieved as higher quality than machine made Bibles.
Spiritual Parents
Of course parents, and we include spiritual parents of any form, could still pass on the one copy they themselves recieved by inheritance. If they needed more copies, because they had introduced someone to Jesus, or if their own copy wore out, they could buy a copy of the Bible for less work than making their own hand-written copy. That printed copy could still be passed on for free as an inheritance to their children.
This more recent form of the Sharing Chain Mandate was seen as the Family Bible tradition so common near the start of the 20th century. Most families had a machine made Family Bible and that Bible was now passed on just as hand made manuscripts had been passed down across the centuries before.
20th Century Changes
But, during the 20th century, the numbers and types of ministry materials changed considerably, followed the technological changes that so characterized the century. The church collectively lost sight of the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate as a basis for creating ministry materials.
Curiously the century saw the rise of information based industries, especially movies, radio and television. In many ways the church generally took after these often times degenerate commericial patterns.
No longer did the creators of ministry materials listen to Paul's lessons about how he was free.
No longer did creators of ministry materials treat their audiance as spiritual children, due an abundant and free inheritance by God's directive.
No longer did spiritual parents feel the need to provide for free everything their spiritual children needed to grow in knowledge of Jesus.
Instead the audiance was considered a source of funds to support the production of those materials, and as an important side-effect to provide a tax back to the original authors of those materials. As perverted as a parent squandering their child's inheritance, so too did the 20th century end with money based ministry industry producing perverted ministry materials.
At the end of the 20th century, nearly everything produced, distributed or consumed in the way of ministry materials across the organized church was following the world's mammon based commerical patterns learned from secular media. Few were following the Bible's Sharing Chain based free patterns that should have been applied to those same works.
21st Century Revival
As the 21st century unfolds there are various important and profound trends happening across the church at large. Generally speaking these changes are a response to the degeneration that so pervasively characterizes 20th century culture, including the Christian culture. This new Christian trend is best characterized as a departure from the culture at large.
Many Christian families home-school their children, abandoning the perverted public school system.
Many Christian families have abandoned secular media, abandoning perverted televisions and movies from Holywood.
Many Christian families have joined food cooperatives, abandoning the toxins, hybridation and genetic modification that has so perverted the western food-chain.
Many Christian families have also abandoned the organized church, itself perverted with the ways of the world. Of course Christians still gather together, but in unincorporated, unaffiliated home fellowships much like the Puritans of 400 years ago, or the early church of 2000 years ago.
This revival is one of the strongest that has ever happened. It is unseen since it is happening in homes, away from the prying eyes of Christian magazines and secular media at large. This revival is costly, and everyone involved knows they are on a more difficult path. This revival is also permanent, and within a generation it will unrecognizably change the face of christianity.
Technology Changes
Just as christians are rethinking with christian practice really is, a major shift in the technology used for ministry materials is also happening. The printing press, a technology for making copies, was interesting because it reduced the cost and increased the quality of each copy produced. With an up-front cost of a centralized capital investment, the benefits of the press could be realized by many.
Starting about 1990, another important copy making technology, the internet, started coming into widespread use. With capital costs mostly born by individual users, the marginal costs of copying information of all types suddenly dropped to zero. And, the cost advantange of making individual copies suddenly reverted to individual people, much like the days before the invention of the printing press. It is now less expensive to email, or post to a website, some piece of ministry material, than it is to use a traditional press
The problem with computers and the internet is that individuals still bear a heavy upfront cost. Those costs are coming down quickly. In the western world today, nearly every young person has access to a computer. More than 1/2 of all computers sold are laptops and the trend towards ultra portable computers will continue for many more years. One recent survey estimated that 700,000,000 people have access to the internet. That number is also sure to climb.
There is at least 1 serious effort underway to produce laptops at under $100 a copy. The goal is to get a government paid-for laptop into the hands of every school aged child across the world. Within a generation every person on the planet can be expected to own or have ready access to a portable laptop style computer, connected wirelessly to potentially every other computer on the planet. These machines will completely replace ink on paper as the means for carrying and reproducing information.
In this highly computerized, highly interconnected world all ministry materials are simply computer files and they are as easy to reproduce as copying a file from one computer to another. The cost of making those copies are once again as low as they were when Bibles were received by inheritance.
For the case of materials that might still belong printed and bound it is possible to send out computer files to print-on-demand publishers to will print bind and return via mail just about anything someone may want to have printed and bound.
The Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate, long abandoned mostly for cost reasons, can now be rediscovered and followed closely since the fundamental costs to spiritual parents for passing on a large body of ministry materials is now low enough to be both possible and practical.
Legal Environment
The revival going on now across the Christian church is frought with problems caused by the modern legal environment. All of the main features of this revival are hindered by the modern legal environment. Examples taken from the list given above include:
Many homeschoolers still risk harrassment from local school districts and visits from the local sheriff. It is still not unheard of for homeschooling parents to be arrested, generally hastled, or litigated for various reasons.
Many of the toxins in modern foods are there by legal mandate. People with wheat alergies, for example, are often times actually alergic to the government mandated additives in refined flour. For these people it is illegal to buy safe flour, so these people must grind their own at home.
Many problems in organized church come in part from legal mandates that drive what can be said from public pulpits. The legal environment requires Christians to remain unincorporated, to fellowship by invitation only and to meet in private homes instead of public gathering places.
Similarly, sharing materials of any type, including ministry materials, between computers also still risks arrest. RIAA, for example, has been litigating people who use file sharing networks. Use of those networks for any purpose is risky, even though their is a genuine use to anyone sharing the Gospel of Jesus.
Though none of the large Christian publishers are known to have ordered someone's arrest, the legal environment clearly allows them to do so. Their materials are not properly labeled to guarantee they won't have a consumer arrested for mis-use.
There are some notable efforts to make free Bible software and free electronic editions of the Bible available over the internet. These efforts are still inconsequencial compared to the amount of materials that are produced, distributed and consumed by Christians in their regular ministry. There is still no widely accepted norms, as their is with, say, homeschooling and home fellowships, that are widely known and easily followed in the area of minstry materials.
Purpose of Ministry Commons
The purpose of Ministry Commons is to provide education on this problem and a framework for explaining how to go about producing materials that can be easily, safely, and legally produced, distributed and consumed.
In 1998, through legislation funded mostly by the Walt Disney Company in their attempt to keep Micky Mouse from the public domain, the United States Congress changed the historical opt in nature of the copyright system into an opt out system.
Suddenly it was no longer possible to satisify the Sharing Chain Mandate, spelled out in detail in the Bible, by simply ignoring the copyright system.
If you are producing ministry materials, in nearly any form, you can no longer simply ignore the copyright system. You must take explicit action so your work can satisfy scripture, satisify the law, and make any long term difference in the lives of people.
Anyone wanting to obey Jesus' explicit instructions on how to produce and distribute ministry materials must now do 2 things:
You must now understand the intricate nature of the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate.
You must now figure out how to mark your materials in such a way as to satisfy that mandate.
This is alot of work, and can take along time to figure out. Once done the answer should work for many people facing the same challenge. Instead of forcing people to figure this out on their own, Ministry Commons provides a survey of the problem, and some recommend practices for getting around this mess.
Ministry Commons Goals
The Ministry Commons project has several goals:
It explains the salient features of the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate, so those who are interested can understand the fundamental issues when producing, distributing or consuming ministry materials.
It suggests a set of practices, in a language more modern than the Bible itself, for people wanting to follow the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate.
It provides a set of marks that can be put on ministry materials in order achieve the same goals as the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate within the current, opt out copyright system.
It provides an easy to remember name so you can quickly explain the rights you grant to use of your ministry materials.
Ministry Commons does not introduce any sort of new legal language, but relies instead on the legal work of the Creative Commons project. That project provides the fundamental legal language and detailed licenses.
The Creative Commons project includes a family of possible licenses that can be placed on creative works like ministry materials. Unfortunately, only 1 of those licenses satisfies the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate.
So, it is not possible, for example, to explain to a christian audiance in a Church that your ministry materials use a Creative Commons licence and at the same time mean that your work satisifies the Sharing Chain Mandate.
Ministry Commons provides the connection between the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate and the legal work of Creative Commons.
License
- The License page links to the full text of the Creative Commons - Attributive - Share Alike license used by Ministry Commons.
Registry
- The Registry provides a place to list works marked with Ministry Commons. This provides an "upstream" or up-chain source of materials, and it provides a place to share or down-chain your works.
Articles
There are a series of articles still to come. The following are the articles that are planned.
- The Sharing Chain Mandate explaining how materials are to be shared in such a way as the receiver can also share, forming a chain. This is what non-copyrighted works once did.
- Commercial Ministry is such a contentious issue that it gets covered in its own article. Bottom line is that commerical ministy, services for fees, like books, music CDs, seminar manuals and such, are possible under the Sharing Chain Mandate, but not like that practiced by people using regular, unmodified, copyright notices on their works.
- Loss of the Commons explains that the opt-out nature of the new laws effectively destroys any form of commons, from which materials can be recombined for uses unknown to the original writers. If we all used our own individual licenses we would not rebuild that lost place. All works placed under the same Creative Commons license reform a private commons in many ways equivalent to the public domain. This is why Ministry Commons cannot add any legal language of its own.
- Selecting Creative Commons explains the various possible Creative Commons licenses and which ones support the Sharing Chain. This provides the basis for which licence is implied by saying Ministry Commons on some work.
- Marking explains what marks to put on a ministry materials.
- Technology changes are enabling the Bible's Sharing Chain Mandate in ways never possible before. This article explores the implications of machines making copies with no marginal cost. Most people in ministry are unprepared for these changes.
- FAQ's answers common questions.
