Ubuntu and Open Source Church

By Kristy Harding

          Starting on July 8th, anyone with any interest in Episcopal Church politics (who isn’t actually in Anaheim, CA) will be feverishly stalking the intertubes for word of what’s happening at General Convention, our once-every-three-years governing gathering. Continuing the recent Anglican “Wonderful Things that Come From Africa” trend, this year’s theme is “Ubuntu,” which roughly translates “I am because we are.”

Because I’m married to a programmer, I can’t hear “Ubuntu” without thinking of the open source movement because Ubuntu is the name of a particularly good distribution of the open source Linux operating system.

I’m not the first person to connect church with the open source movement, but most of what I see online has to do with building emergent theology from scratch and making sermons and materials and software available. This is great, but it made me wonder:

What would happen, if we took the Ubuntu theme and really embraced the philosophy, having a truly “Open Source Church”?

Church would be accessible.

The point of the open source movement is freedom and open doors: You’re not locked out. You can get at the things that you need without barriers, and you then extend that freedom to others with whatever you create.  The community recognizes that each member needs the contributions of every other member and facilitates that members’ ability to share.

In an accessible church…

Anyone who wants to can get at the church.  Listing all the different people who should be included and all the different ways they should be included would take too long, so I won’t.  That’s what General Convention is for.

Anyone who wants to can have access to theology and spirituality. Until very recently, the private devotions of Lancelot Andrewes a treasure of Anglican spirituality was only accessible in a book that cost over $100–even though he lived during the reign of King James I. An open source church would do all it could to make sure as much of the riches of its traditions were as available as possible in places like Project Gutenberg and Google Books–and even, God forbid, mundane places like public libraries.

Our old theology and spirituality would be accessible, but our new work would be accessible, too. Sharing would be a virtue and more work would be released on the web under a terms like the Creative Commons License and the GNU GPL Public License.

This means making education accessible, too. Sometimes reading a book isn’t enough, and you get to the place where you really just need a human teacher. A person should never be put in the position of having to choose between ordination someday and learning about theology and growing spiritually now. There should be ways for people to get education who are deemed too young or too immature to go on the ordination track and who are chomping at the bit to learn more about the faith than their local church has the time and/or resources to teach them. This doesn’t necessarily mean opening up the floodgates on M.Div.’s. Why not let people in that position enroll in all the wonderful M.A. programs we already have? I’m sure the seminaries will manage!

We would have more bazaars and fewer cathedrals–in the sense of Eric Steven Raymond’s essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. “Cathedrals” are huge projects that involve enormous amounts of work to pull off. “Bazaars,” interestingly, are also huge projects that involve enormous amounts of work to pull off. The difference between a cathedral and a bazaar is that building a cathedral is centralized endeavor, highly-closed from public view, structured, and takes forever. Bazaars are the work of zillions of people, are a highly transparent affair, and are chaotic. But! They happen for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon and can disappear into the sunset cleanly. When something goes wrong in a cathedral, the cathedral collapses, and the entire town falls down with it. If a fire breaks out in a bazaar, it might tear through a section of the bazaar, but bazaars are like organisms: They’re flexible, and they can heal themselves quickly. By working under the bazaar model, the open source church would be truly open and listening to the experiences of its members, and problems wouldn’t get so big that they threatened to bring the entire building down.

Of course, since we’re talking about open source, we can’t forget about IT. An open source church might follow the example of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and edge toward using free, open source alternatives to expensive, prohibitive, proprietary software and start saving quite a bit of money in the process–maybe even…start using Ubuntu?

Tux image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sirmikester/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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