landonville

This is part of a draft chapter for my book "Open Source Church." In this chapter I'm exploring the history of Wikipedia as a model for what an open source church might look like.

This is certainly out of the larger context. If you want more, the first chapter is up at landonwhitsitt.com

Feel free to comment or suggest edits. Anything to make this little project better.

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Wikipedia didn't start out as the game-changer that it is. In the beginning it started by playing second fiddle to another online encyclopedia, Nupedia.

According to the "History of Wikipedia" article on the Wikipedia site, Nupedia was viewed by its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as a serious enterprise. Although it was to be a free, online site, Nupedia, was built on the idea of using contirbutirs who were experts in their content area as well as insisting that each article move through an extensive peer-review process. Wales and Sanger had a mailing list full of interested editors with Sanger acting as Editor in Chief. They even had an intern. Yet the generation of articles remained slow. In the first year, only 12 article were produced. They needed a faster way to generate content.

Wikipedia began as a "feeder" for Nupedia. The intention was that articles would be begun on Wikipedia and eventually taken over by the Nupedia project to be cleaned up for inclusion in the "serious" online encyclopedia. The use of the "wiki" (Hawaiian for "quick") was no accident, as it was seen as the best way to open up the process and get the project moving. Larry Sanger proposed the idea to the Nupedia mailing list:

"No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.[1]"

Nupedia’s editors were not excited about wikis being a part of their project, so Wikipedia was founded as it’s own entity, yet still serving a “feeder” purpose. Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001. By February 12, 2001 the project passed 1,000 articles, 10,000 articles by September of that year, 20,000 by its first birthday, and 40,000 by the next August. Unfortunately, Wales and Sanger began to have severe disagreements about the management style of Wikipedia. Wales favored the open style that has come to define the project, while Sanger favored a more top-down approach (which eventually led him to leave the project and begin another online encyclopedia). Suffice it to say, that what began as a project intended to benefit Nupedia quickly took on a life of its own and needed to break with its parent.

This brief history of Wikipedia provides us with the first point of comparison to the Open Source Church. If you are anything like me, you have been a part of a church experience during your youth that was fun and interesting, and in which you felt like you learned a lot and were valued for who you were. Your creativity was called upon and you were encouraged to collaborate with others to a large degree.
Yet, once you became an “adult” you began to experience a very different form of church, one which was billed (probably implicitly) as more mature. “This is the way grown ups do church” was the message you got. Are we honestly surprised that many youth leave and do not return?

Similarly, churches decide to "start another worship service" or what-have-you with the idea that this new program will serve as a sort of feeder for the programing and structure that they already have. There is an implicit understanding that this new thing is okay for the kids, but it will not be (cannot be?) the "main thing." Church boards are okay with offering some new experiences (or new spaces for experiences) in order to attract "young folks" but I believe that many of them harbor a hope that these young folks will someday want to be a part of the church in the same way that they've experienced it.

Some of this is arrogance, sure, but some of it is also a very real fear that they "don't know what to do" for young folks. As a result, they decide that they are going to do what they do and do it well.

Wikipedia's origin story suggests to us what the church is in for (and has already experienced, in many cases) when confronted(?) with an open source worldview. Established institutions are quick to do whatever they can in order to ensure their viability (Nupedia's development was slow and Wikipedia would ensure that it got content up in a timely manner), but they rarely realize that they very thing they are counting on to save them will be the harbingers of their death. There might be a host of reasons for this, but the primary one has to do with structure. Institutions are aware they their current way of doing business is not tenable in the long run, and are astute enough to know that they must commit to some drastically different practices if they want to survive.

Typically, these "new things" are given much wider latitude than the organization would normally employ. In the church, youth programming and worship services are encouraged to employ creativity and to do it with abandon. The thought seems to be that we should do whatever we can to get the kids interested in the faith, to make sure they understand that it is relevant to their life. In the Presbyterian Church (which I am ordained in) our national youth gathering is known to have some of the most creative, powerful worship that most staid Presbyterians have ever experienced. Yet there is a disconnect when they return to their congregations and no creativity is involved, and efficiency is the order of the day. Youth are discouraged from participating in worship because, in many cases, the service is simply a weekly puzzle. The pastor and musicians certainly put thought into the service elements, but when was the last time your church sang a hymn in a different spot? Or more/fewer hymns?

My point is not to harp on worship styles, but to point out the larger thought that at one point we create a system that encourages creativity and participation, and then expect those same participants to want to join us in something that is built to be assembled quickly and easily and is in general monological.