Ministry in the New Information Age (or "A Tale of Three Encyclopedias")

Submitted by Tim Jore on Thu, 2010-02-04 12:16

This is the (very abbreviated) story of three encyclopedias: Britannica, Encarta and Wikipedia. Their stories provide a good parallel for understanding where discipleship ministry is today and the unprecedented opportunities before us for equipping the global church.

Britannica was first published in 17681 and was a (maybe "the") leader in encyclopedias when they were only available as printed books. Encarta was one of the first computer-based encyclopedias and was available by subscription online or by purchase on DVD2. Both of these encyclopedias were built and maintained using the "silo" model where experts were paid to create the content behind closed doors, and the content is restricted so that it can be sold to the public who consume the resources – a one-way street.

Wikipedia is built on a completely different model – a two-way street where anyone can help create and translate the resources. The differences between the projects are telling:

  • Encarta was in English, had 62,000 articles in the Premium version (it is now discontinued)3 and is proprietary/restricted.
  • Britannica is in English, has over 120,000 articles in its on-line version written by 4,411 contributors4 and is proprietary/restricted.
  • Wikipedia is in English (with 3,181,204 articles) and 261 other languages (24 of which have over 100,000 articles), has over 11 million contributors and is released under a Creative Commons license which makes it freely available for translation, adaptation and use anywhere in the world – in print, on mobile phones, anywhere5.

In the realm of cross-cultural ministry the Christian church worldwide is at a point somewhere between the Encarta/Britannica model (copyright restrictions, "one-way street", few languages, expensive) and the Wikipedia model (free & open, "two-way street", available in any of the world's ~7,000 languages, totally free). In this new ministry paradigm – which is not new, but maybe forgotten – organizations that freely (as in "freedom") give away the most, first, put themselves in the best position to expand their ministry and effectively equip the global church for discipleship.

Ministries that have built large amounts of resources using processes that are expensive (i.e. the Encarta/Britannica model) may find it challenging to switch to a "free & open" (i.e. the Wikipedia model) approach to ministry. The complete change in process and foundation for ministry may be difficult to accomplish. For instance, Britannica has tried to adopt some of Wikipedia's approach to crowd-sourcing the creation of information and now allows users to make edits to the online version of their encyclopedia. However, there is a clear division between "us" and "them" in Britannica's approach – edits made by non-Britannica contributors are kept separate from the rest of the content, reside in a different section of the website and will not affect the published edition of the encyclopedia6. This is not a criticism of Britannica; this is merely an observation that even when existing organizations see advantages in moving from a "silo" model to a "social network" model, their historical process and products may result in only a partial transition, which often results in no transition at all.

The Door43 project (http://door43.org) is an attempt to create a "social network" model for ministry. It is starting from scratch and is specifically designed to enable anyone, in any language to create, translate, adapt and improve Biblical resources of the highest quality, for free, and with the freedom for the global church to take and use the materials for any ministry purpose without royalties or restrictions. Door43 is built on the same MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia but with one significant modification. Because we are dealing with Biblical content and matters of eternal significance, Door43 is being built so that anyone can edit the "draft" version of a page but only selected reviewers (likely identified by the quality of their contributions) can flag a page as "accurate." This makes it so anyone can help build it while still retaining the highest level of quality.

We believe that the global church is on the threshold of an exciting new era in ministry, where the concept of "free & open" discipleship resources is not a new idea but the default approach to ministry. In this new era, we think the motto will reflect 1 Corinthians 9:12,18

"...we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ... What then is [our] reward? That... [we] may present the gospel free of charge."