Community, Evangelism, Leadership: From Christian mission to

Open Source

Simon Cozens
June 16, 2010

For the rst ve years of the twenty-rst century, I was an open source programmer: I worked on the Perl interpreter,
particularly focusing on its Unicode implementation, and maintained many Perl modules on CPAN; I was also an occasional

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contributor to various other projects. I wrote a number of books on Perl programming, and edited the perl.com web site
for OReilly. ose are my technical credentials.
For the next ve years until the present, I have been a Christian missionary in Japan; I have spent a good proportion of
that time in training and education, rst attaining a Bachelors and latterly working for a Masters degree in missiologythat
is, the study of mission.
Although these two areas of my life may seem at rst glance totally unconnected, I have been continually surprised between
the overlaps between the two. e open source community has either consciously borrowed, or unwittingly independently
discovered, many of the concepts of the missionary community; in many areas, the two communities struggle with precisely
identical issues.
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What I wish to do in this paper is to cast a missiological eye over the world of open source, and hopefully to oer some sug-
gestions in how the open source community can better understand or better approach some of the commonalities between the
two disciplines. I am not claiming, however, that this should all be one-way trac; the decline of religion in the industrialized
world shows that missionaries do not have all the answers. Surely there is much that we can learn from programmers.
I want to organize my thoughts around three key areas of overlap: three terms which are commonly used by open source
programmers and Christian missionaries alike, and which are roughly coterminous between programming and proselytising.
ose areas are community, evangelism and leadership.

1 Community
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I have already alluded to the fact that the open source world uses the language of community to describe its activities. And
with good reason. Open source projects are not merely dissociated groups of people who happen to be working on the same
codeover and above the common goal, they provide a sense of identity and belonging. (Castells, 2004) ey become, as
Godin (2008) puts it, our tribes: try convincing, for instance, a Ruby programmer that they should be coding in Python (or
vice versa) and you will soon yourself watching a demonstration of tribal aliation. Faith communities see the same dynamic:
a common journey and a common experience lead to a common identity.
ere are many issues one could consider when investigating the concept of communitythe similarities and dierences
between schisms and forks, for instancebut I would like to think about one particular aspect of community life: how it
understands and encourages growth and development.
For many years the primary model of community growth in the Church was attractional. It relied on outsiders being drawn
into a pre-existing community. e pattern of growth wentand I am caricaturing heavilysomething like this: the faith
community represented all that was good and right about the world, someone was invited by a community member to attend
some special event at the Church, there became attracted by the exemplary nature of the faith community, and experienced a
change of heart and a change of conduct in order to conform to the norms of the community and be accepted as a member of

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it. In short: believe, behave, belong was the order of the day, and the direction of ow was from society into church. It was
incumbent upon the individual to seek out and join the community.
is worked well enough, until the advent of Generation X. Various factors caused the demise of the attractional model,
and we can only name but a few: the Church was exposed as failing to live up to the standards it appropriated for itself, and
consequently what residual goodwill the Church had accumulated in society became nullied; churches found that they were
trying to bring people back to church despite the fact that the majority of people had no church background and those who
had some experience of church were deeply cynical about it; most damagingly, Christian subculture became so distinct from
that of the surrounding world that no amount of seeker-sensitive services, aimed directly at the unchurched, could bridge
the cultural gap.
As a reaction to this failure, churches emerged that replaced the attractional model with the missional model. In this, the
direction of ow was reversed.

e change is to an outward focus: from a come to us approach to a we will go to you attitude, embodying the
gospel where people are, rather than embodying it where we are, and in ways we prefer. (Cray, 2009, p41)

e nal partways we preferis critical. ere came a realisation that the Christian message could not just be played,

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as it were, on home turf, but that reaching individuals requires rst understanding their own worldview, rather than waiting
for them to accept ours. We will look more at this subject when we consider dierent approaches to evangelism.
Concurrent with this shi, the emerging church attempted to bring a more inclusive understanding of community identity.
Sharing in the identity of the community became the means of growth, not its come outcome. Writing well before the advent
of emerging church, Bonhoeer (1996, p9596) explains that within his community, he ensured that every single individual
was given a dened role to encourage their sense of belonging to the whole:

In a Christian community, everything depends on whether each member is an indispensable link in a chain. e
chain is unbreakable only when even the smallest link holds tightly with the others. A community which permits
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within itself members who do nothing will be destroyed by them.

Instead of believe, behave, belong, emerging churches seek to embody belong, behave, believethe idea that someone
who already feels part of the community will, over time, conform to the social norms of that community and will eventually
nd themselves sharing the communitys core values.
Does this shi in the church have any parallel in the world of open source? Open source projects rarely give much thought
to how to expand their communities. I would suggest that the working mental model of programmers about the growth of their
projects runs something like the attractional model of church: project members work to make the project into the best it can
possibly be; the project attracts users mainly by its own obvious merits; users accept the majority of the projects functionality
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but wish for more; those users with sucient technical expertise then correct its shortcomings and thereby become developers,
and hence the community expands.
But this process contains a number of assumptions which, like those of the attractional model of church, may well prove
to be unsustainable.
First, a potential new contributor must already be able to contribute in an expected manner in order to be part of the
developing communityone behaves before one belongs. Worse, oen the community norms about what sort of contribu-
tions are welcome and in what manner they are to be made are opaque, and the onus is on contributors to learn by observing.
For some projects, the barrier to entry can be so high that even accomplished programmers are turned o. Missionaries have
seen this problem in action: when the church is perceived as holding its members to a particular set of rules for conduct, in-
teresting parties require considerably more motivation to join than they would had they felt accepted to begin with. Open
source projects need to develop strategies for accepting users into the community regardless of their ability to make technical
contributions, and from there to mentor or train users to make userful contributions to the project. is allows projects to
consciously develop and increase the contributor pool, rather than relying on external factors of luck, interest and attraction.
Second, as is well-established in the case of open source desktop systems, the features that those with the technical skills
are able to contribute are not necessarily the same as those which would attract users in the rst place. As the church found
out, an attractional strategy risks leading to ghettoization and cultural disconnection. To operate at the cutting edge, open

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source projects should be actively engaging with the user base and the not-yet-user base to discover the real problems that they
face. is naturally impacts on how project members choose to share the good news of their project with the outside world.

2 Evangelism
An evangelist is, literally, someone who has good news. While still a churchy word, it was adopted into the Open Source
community initially as an unocial, semi-ironic moniker1 but later appeared as part of ocial job descriptions to designate
members of large corporations who sought to engage with the wider open source community2 .
e principles and practice by which people share good news has been studied extensively by mission practitioners over
the past two thousand years, and, while again statistics highlight that we do not have all the answers, the church has made
some progress in understanding ways to share good news in current society. Once again, there has been a dramatic shi in the
past twenty years in the way that good news has been presented.
e traditional mode of evangelism was propositional and objective: the gospel was presented as a matter of absolute
truth, something to be presented through logical coherent arguments (the discipline of apologetics) and then the listener
was challenged for a response. Because it was framed in propositional, objective categories, it oen dealt with issues that the

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listener had previously no awareness of or interest in: sin, the plight of humanity, the state of the soul aer death and so on.
In other words, it did not take seriously the present worldview of the hearer, and expected them rst to convert to seeing the
world in the same categories as the evangelist, at which point everything would make sense and the logic would be irrefutable.
In other words, we had to teach people that they had a problem that they didnt realise they had before showing them that
we had the solution all along.
is kind of objective evangelism has recently given way to more of a subjective method: in felt needs evangelism, the
actual situation of the listener is taken into account. Witness then becomes bottom-up rather than top-down: the evangelist
can share examples of what their faith has brought them in similar situations, and the faith is introduced through the medium
of a shared and solved problem. Rather than universal propositions, the starting point is the individual story and relationship.
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(Strobel, 2009)
With an emphasis on story, there is a need for evangelists to have a collection of good stories to tellpoints of contact
between their life and the lives of their listeners. As they build a witness of stories, so they have the ability to share those stories
with others.
What does this have to do with open source? Too oen open source advocacy is played out in an objective mannerthe
superior merits of the project are obvious to anyone who can just open their eyes to see! Lists of features, arguments about
technical superiority, benchmarks and so on all bolster the evidence that a given project is what the user needs. e user, on
the other hand, is probably more interested in whether or not this project can do what they want.
Open source evangelism must therefore take into account the felt needs of the user. e best way to do this is not with
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impressive statistics or feature lists but with case studies, testimonies and stories which enable the end user to connect both
technically but also emotionally with the project and take away a sense that the project would be suitable for someone in a
similar situation to those described. Building up an armoury of such stories and publicising successes becomes an indispensible
means of advocacy.
ere is currently a reaction against felt-needs evangelism going on in the faith community. Some of the reasons for this
are not appropriate for Open Source, but certainly one is: there is a recognition that sometimes the solution is costly, and the
evangelist who focuses purely on the felt needs but does not express the challenge and costly nature of the solution does not
present their good news fairly. In the case of open source, it may be that migrating to a new project will provide the user with
a speed increase, but the cost of migration may outweigh the benets.
1
A Wired article from November 1998 is the rst reported use of the term open source evangelist in Google News. http://www.wired.com/
science/discoveries/news/1998/11/16084
2
See, e.g. Suns appointment of an Open Source Evangelist, http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5852586-7.html.

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3 Leadership
Open source projects have adopted the language of community and the language of evangelism. But what of leadership? I
believe that leadership is the missing link in open source projects.
e advent of mega-churches in the 1990s and early 2000s may have brought the world many things whose value we may
debate, but they certained issued in a positive change in the way that churches understand leadership. Prior to this time,
church leadership was essentially meritocraticseminaries primarily focused on Bible handling and preaching, and there-
fore rewarded bookish, academic pastors. Character development for interpersonal skills was not widely taught, if at all, and
teaching on leadership was few and far between. Aer all, there was little need: being a good preacher was somehow meant
to automatically equate to being a good pastor.
Importing much of the culture of American corporations into the Church, including the idea of pastor as CEO (Morgen-
thaler, 2007, p180181), opened the way for the Church to also import (and contextualize) secular thinking on leadership.
First, there was a recognition that the leadership skills required for pastoring a congregation go beyond mere meritocracy;
writers such as Adair (2005) and Ford (1991) introduced a generation of pastors to the importance of visionary, transfor-
mational leadership. Second, owing naturally from this, came the need for the development of leaders, currently nding its
expression in the mentoring movement. Spritual mentoring (discipleship) has always been a part of the Christian tradition,

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but this kind of mentoring brought a new dynamic: a conscious attempt to develop a pastors leadership skills. Finally, there
became an awareness of the need for leaders not simply to produce good followers but also to develop new leaders. (Hiebert,
1994, p174.)
In this respect, I believe that open source projects are now where the church was twenty years ago: they mostly organise
themselves as a meritocracy, oen lead by the original programmer, and their leaders are valued for their abilities as en-
trepreneurs, as dedicated persons, as technical innovators, and good designers. (Ljungberg, 2000) While good design and
technical innovation provides vision to a project, vision is not the sum total of leadership; I do not see any evidence that we
have recognised open source leaders for their ability to motivate, to encourage, to actively engage in the outside world in bring-
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ing in new contributors, and to develop the technical skills and leadership abilities of the members of their projects, nor have
we provided training and resources for project leaders to grow in these areas.
What is it that project leaders need to know? My research currently focuses on the role of leadership within voluntary as-
sociative communities, particularly in the Japanese house church; one of my conclusions is that leadership within postmodern
networked organisations is not primarily about setting goals or directions but maintaining the social cohesion of the group:
settling disputes, developing interpersonal relationships, and ensuring access to training and development resourcesin other
words, the promotion of social capital. For instance, one Japanese government report on social capital within voluntary asso-
ciations gives three elements required for an organizations continued growth:

An element of discovery or pioneering

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An element of leadership or co-ordination which works to build interpersonal relationships

An element of open, public communication3

Turner (1989, p92) provides a denition of the role of leadership in a particular brand of churches which also relates well
with the open source context; the apostles in his churches are responsible for promoting unity within the group, encouraging
the rise to maturity of the members of the group, liaising with dependent sub-groups, and providing the link between unrelated
groups.
e key skills required for an open source leader to operate in this way would be diplomacy and conict resolution. It
would also encourage the open source leader to actively manage the development of contributors within the project, through
mentoring, training or other means, with the explicit aim of not merely producing better code, but also producing better
coders, and ultimately, more project leaders.
3
Cited in (Kobayashi, 2007)

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4 Conclusions
We have only hinted here at some of the crossovers between missiology and open source programming, but already we have a
number of recommendations for the open source world. First, a focus on community development which seeks to intentionally
engage with non-users and to accept users as project members with the intention of guiding them into becoming contributors,
rather than expecting contributors to nd, engage with and understand their norms of the project before contributing. Second,
a case-study-based method of advocacy to encourage subjective and emotional connections with non-users. ird, a new focus
on training and mentoring project leaders to help them with diplomacy and conict resolution, and a need for in-project
mentoring to develop both the programming skills and leadership ability of project contributors.

References
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Press.

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Godin, S. (2008). Tribes: We need you to lead us, London: Piatkus.

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