When I discovered Napster, I had never heard of Shawn Fanning. Being technologically ignorant, I had never really even considered how it worked. All I knew was that a friend of mine told me that there was some cool music there, so I clicked…and in minutes, I’d found an incredible source. My eclectic taste had discovered the audio equivalent of the Old Country Buffet. Who knew Frank Sinatra did a duet with Bono? Wow! Dylan and the Dead playing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. Napster was an off-beat audiophile’s dream.

With all that’s been written about it in recent months, I’ve given much thought to whose music it is…but at the time, I was just pumped to find it. I clicked…and I clicked some more. Before long, I had quite a collection. I never really considered where the music came from. Like everything else on the internet, it was just ‘out there’.

Then one day, it happened: Someone found my copy of The Scooby Doo Techno Remix and they were downloading it off of my hard drive! AH! Stop! Yank the cord! Perform the 3 digit Ctrl-Alt-Delete Salute! Get that invader out of my space! I sat there in a cold sweat. It didn’t seem right --- I felt as if I’d been stalked…I felt violated…who were they to go through my files? It’s one thing to ride a bus with strangers, or even sit at a lunch counter with them, but I wasn’t quite ready for granting them unfettered access to my computer files. It was then that I learned that for the Napster community to operate correctly, I had to give up a little privacy. It is the nature of peer-to-peer sharing.

For Fanning to make Churchster work, we’re going to have to open up our files. Most of what goes on in the church world does so behind the social equivalent of a computer firewall. We package a nice product and are willing to market it to people, but there’s no way that we’re going to make ourselves vulnerable to them. For us to really allow them to see what’s written on our hard drive is out of the question. There are flaws on there that we could never let the world see…because they’d begin to think we’re just like them.

When was the last time you were transparent with a nonbeliever? Forget all the snot faced crying with the guys in the van on the way home from Promise Keepers…big deal. You go to church with those guys; they already know your junk. What about the guy across the street, whose only exposure to Christianity has been the plastic dashboard statue version --- are you willing to be honest with him? Are you willing to share your before Christ/after Christ experience with him, or are do you have to save that for the safety of your accountability group?

Transparency before others is a vital necessity if we expect people to consider a commitment to the Christian faith. Too often, all they know are picture perfect Christians who have never acknowledged a setback. Let others sort through your collection…your experience file…they just may find God in there.

Starving artists aside, it’s easily arguable that Napster’s been good for music. With profits falling, it may be causing a panic in the music industry, but the music seems to be doing fine. Kids are listening. People are tapping their toes. Occasionally, someone slides back from the CPU to dance the two-step. If one person listening to music is good, and two people listening to music is better, then the end result of Napster is great. It seems to me that, given the role of music in our society, Napster may just be the music’s best friend. If music were a personality rather than a tonal pattern, Music would be glad more people were listening, and Music wouldn’t care where they got it. Music would love Napster.

For decades, the distribution of music has been controlled by record labels. They dictated who heard what when, and which radio stations got which records. If you had a CD in your collection, it was because the label decided to sell it to you. There were undoubtedly recordings that you would have enjoyed as much or more than the ones you owned, but you never had access to them because some non-musician music executive made the decision for you. “Good music” was determined as music that most people would pay for…even though many critically acclaimed writers and musicians sold little very product. This explains why Lyle Lovett, the Texan Poet Laureate, plays small clubs while Britney Spears plays stadiums. It isn’t a question of good music or good writing; it’s a question of what people will spend, and that’s what infuriates the industry. They aren’t up in arms over Napster’s effect on music--- they are furious over their lack of control of the music…which leads us to wonder just whose side they're on. Surely not the side of good music.

This is going to be a stretch for some of you, but hang with me…the industry is betting it’s bankroll on the idea that an artist, or more correctly, a recording company, owns an idea or a creation, even once the possession of that creation has been transferred to someone else. I understand their point, sort of…but in the digital world, copyright laws have their flaws. In the May 2001 edition of Wired Magazine, John Perry Barlow is quoted as saying “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression…we will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances.”

For example, consider this piece of writing. It is my creation. I’ve typed it on my own laptop sitting here in a snooty coffee shop drinking an overpriced latte…but once I submit it to Next-Wave, is it really mine anymore? Like anything else on the Internet, it will probably be reprinted, quoted, linked to, and replicated a hundred places within a week. Do I care? Well, I hope that people are nice enough to spell my name right, but other than that, I’m just tickled the idea is out there propagating. The purpose of the idea is more important than ownership of the idea. If I were more concerned with controlling the ownership of the idea than I was the idea itself, I might act more like the recording industry. It’s ludicrous to think I might expect to have control over an essay once it’s out there…how could one expect any different for a piece of melody than a piece of prose? Profit notwithstanding, if the industry was purely interested in propagating music, they’d be Napster’s biggest fans.

How does this apply to Churchster? Simple…In order for it to work, ‘the industry’ --- the established church --- has got to realize that it doesn’t really own the message of God. Before you assail me with email for being over-inclusionary or seeking to reach across theological gaps to build bridges with Hindus, hear me out. I am very conservative theologically. I know and preach that the only way to God is through a relationship with his Son, Jesus Christ. My point is that just because I distribute the message doesn’t mean I own it. I don’t own the rights to the story. Someone gave it to me. They received it from someone else. The ultimate Creator-Artist offered it to us a long time ago, and was so in love with the idea of it that he attached no strings beyond belief.

Recently, I heard of a church planter who started a work in a small town that was dominated by another pastor and his church…dominated in the sense that, of the miniscule percentage of people who actually attended a church, most of them attended his. Like every other town in the nation, those not attending a church far outnumbered the attenders, and there were plenty of prospective attenders to go around. The church planter was commuting forty miles or so several times each week, and his message was finding an audience in the hearts of the college crowd --- a crowd that the established church had not reached.

After a short while, the established pastor approached the planter and quite pointedly told him “You are not a real church…you don’t live here, you don’t offer anything. We’d like you to fold up shop.” Lacking the energy, the resources and the unction for a sustained church war, the planter packed up shop. Rather than rejoicing in the fact that the message was being shared, the pastor was consumed with his control of the message…and the message reached fewer people because of him.

The spreading of God's message has suffered because of egotistical potentates who thought they owned it in their town. They wanted to make sure they controlled every presentation. Their thoughts were “Bless God, if someone’s gonna hear about Jesus in my town, he’s gonna hear about Him from me.” Others were allowed to participate, but permission was given reluctantly, and when they did take part, they paid dearly for the privilege. For Fanning to make Churchster work, some folks have to understand that they can’t control the God's message if it is going to go to all the world. To pilfer and tweak a popular phrase, the message of God was meant to be free.

I have a friend who’s a bigwig at a broadband ISP. He has a funky open air cubicle, a cell phone the size of a matchbox, sports a Visor and talks in gigabytes. He is a poster child for Fast Company magazine. My friend has been instrumental in bringing several cutting edge products to the Internet market.

He’s always been on the bleeding edge of technology. He was buying things on Ebay three years ago. I thought he was nuts. When I was lucky to get a 28.8 connection for 20 minutes without being disconnected, he was telling me “the day will come when people will be online 24/7”. I really thought he was nuts. He knows more about the Internet than I ever hope (or care) to…he is part of the technolegensia, yet he did a really dumb thing.

A while back, he was getting his email and saw a message with the subject line “I love you”. You guessed it---he opened it. As the message opened, he overheard one of the building janitors say “did you hear that thing on the radio about the “I love you” virus?” My friend, the Internet whiz, found out about the “I love you” virus from a janitor…but only after his computer was crippled for days.

With all the file sharing going on, even the most experienced users get burned some times. You click one thing, and you get another. Back when we all were using Prodigy or American Off Line, this rarely happened. Granted, there wasn’t a whole lot of communication going on either.

What’s the lesson here? With all the faith sharing that could potentially happen through Churchster, some folks are going to get burned. They’re going to download some wacky theology. Someone’s going to install something that resets his or her default eschatology settings. They’re going to get a wrong idea about the creator (or more commonly, Christians)….so what do we do? Refuse to share because of the possible risks?

Anyone who’s ever clicked the Download Now button anywhere on the web has taken a major leap of faith - you don’t really know if that server is located at a major corporate headquarters or your weird nephew Jimmy’s apartment. You weigh out the potential good vs. potential bad, decide if getting what your getting is worth what might happen, and take the risk. In most cases, you’re glad you did…and the times you get burned, you just reboot and count it as the cost of doing business online. The good still outweighs the bad.

People have done all sorts of wacky things while faith-sharing. Some people attach all sorts of weird legalistic requirements. Others oversimplify the experience. In some cases, the people being led to Jesus are being led there by people who don’t know much about the experience themselves. Would we prefer that they don’t share at all? No, we just debug the new converts through discipleship and go on. The potential for disaster is great….but the potential for good far outweighs the bad.

I’ll confess, I think the idea of Churchster is doomed. Even though Napster’s never made a dime (one of the curiosities of the Internet is that you can be wildly successful without ever actually making money), I doubt Fanning’s going to jump ship to work with us. Nevertheless, I think the idea is worth considering. Peer-to-Peer faith sharing is Biblical. All it takes is a willingness to allow people to see what’s deep within us, a commitment to unfettered access to the message of God, and a tolerance for the occasional bug in the system. Now go spread the word - and thanks for sharing!