The rise of entities like Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of open-source technology to drive information and innovation. Books like Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics have made the bestseller charts by laying out ways that business can be more open, more crowd sourced and less controlled.
I’m among those who have wondered about the application of open-source methodology to ministry. Adam McLane has evidently been connecting these dots for some time. He makes some great points about the need to make sure we don’t equate the gospel with an institution, even when that institution is the church. And he rightly calls us to re-embrace the priesthood of all believers, for the health, vitality, and growth of the church in North America and the world.
I appreciated his honest diagnosis of how our current ministry models can often fund, staff and educate our institutions but do little to actually spread the kingdom of God. This is hard but true, and we need to hear it. We also need the perspective of faith that Adam brings, which sees a great deal of potential lying latent within the body of Christ. Things do not need to be the way they are or stay this way. The church is not doomed to shrivel up and die. But we need to tap into this latent, God-given and God-designed potential.
Adam is right to direct us to the original open-source movement, the spread of the kingdom of God through the priesthood of all believers. Current fads and trends may succeed precisely because they find new ways to implement old truths. For the people of God, the truth that we are all called to the mission of God is an old, sturdy, proven, capital-T Truth—but one that we habitually forget. If it takes the success of Apple to help us remember, so be it.
I loved how Adam anticipated a question that I and other readers probably had as we read. I thought, But Apple isn’t truly open source; they’re fiercely proprietary in certain areas. Adam’s proposal for a “hybrid model” is both biblically sound and brilliant. This would allow us to maintain agreement on certain theological standards while leaving great freedom for creativity and innovation in methodology.
It reminds me of Frost & Hirsch’s talk of the “centered set” vs. the “bounded set.” The bounded set aims to keep people safe, happy and healthy through building walls and boundaries. But walls end up inhibiting the lives they seek to strengthen. A centered set, by contrast, (which is another way to describe the hybrid model) doesn’t have walls. Spiritually speaking, it draws people around Jesus and keeps them aligned and centered through focusing on him.
A word of caution from someone who has tried employing open-source methodology for ministry: It’s difficult. A few years ago, I conceived of Commontary, an online, open-source destination for Bible commentary and theological resources. I wanted to do for Bible knowledge what Wikipedia does for knowledge in general. I gathered a team, and we registered the domain, installed the same program that Wikipedia uses (it’s free) and began adding content. I even attended a conference on innovation and ideation, and Commontary was voted by participants as one of the top ideas to emerge from the experience. I was given some money by a kingdom-minded businessman to develop it, and we built a mobile app. Virtually everyone I talked to loved the idea.
And then it fizzled. I hoped people would get excited about the product, add content and spread the word. This happened in isolated pockets, but it never snowballed. After a while, I lost interest in it myself. (Besides, by that time, everyone was using YouVersion).
I don’t regret trying Commontary one bit. I learned a great deal and met some fantastic, generous people along the way. But I did learn that opening up our platforms does not automatically generate millions of users. If we build the platform, that doesn’t mean people will automatically come to it. Still, the priesthood of believers is out there. It’s biblical, strategic and vital for us to tap into it for the health and growth of the church.
I share Adam’s conviction that those of us in vocational ministry must increasingly be platform builders. We’ll simultaneously have to be less proprietary about the peripheries but rigorous about the center. I would have liked to hear more about how to do this. The questions are many and varied. Should we be as rigorous at rooting out dangerous heresies as Apple is about rooting out bad code? How wide or narrow is that central platform, anyway? What does quality control look like, in practice? And how do we get that priesthood of believers to come, let alone send them back out?
These questions aren’t easy, but they are necessary. This is what the body of Christ is meant to be, and it’s our role to “equip the saints for works of service” (Ephesians 4:12). Not hoarding the ministry but equipping the rest to do it. May we see an explosion of kinetic kingdom creatives, doing the work of ministry in world-changing ways.
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