Watch your toes...
I want to put in my plug for more Creative Commons churches. 
One of the beautiful things about the age we're living in is the unlimited potential to share. Where sermons and art and music used to take years to circumnavigate the globe, now, they take less than seconds. We have the ability to share what we create in our local Christian communities with the larger Christian community and with the world. But not many of us do it.
Why?
I can think of a couple of reasons...
Some are making money.
There's gold in them thar hills! Churches... strike that... pastors are literally desperate for creative materials, for help in the area of music and art/visual resources.
And while I understand the impulse to commercially meet that demand with our supply, I certainly don't think it's best. It seems to me that the mixture of commerce and spirituality always ends badly... and degrades everyone who takes part in that mixture.
Many churches have full time media/music/creative professionals. I'm okay with that (having been one). Many churches have also started their own media businesses, selling what has been created for their community to other communities. I'm less okay with that. I tend to see it as "double dipping."
When I spend time, time when I'm "on the clock", to create something for my community, I have been compensated. My time has been paid for. I create, and I give to my community the gift of what God has allowed me to create. However, when I turn around and market that, I, or my community, is making moeny off of what should be an act of worship.
That's where it starts to get dicey.
Do I think it's wrong to sell creative works? Not at all. If a musician or a video artist takes his or her time to create something that he or she feels would be helpful to a church community, I think they have the right to sell that work to others.
It's the selling of things created on "community time" for a specific community's use that I disagree with. It's the selling of that which would otherwise sit on a shelf... and it's the selling of things created for the worship of God that bothers me.
For example...
Many pastors package their sermons and sell them in book form. Fine. I think pastors should be able to write books and sell them. My issue is when the content of that book was created during time paid for by a community, in the course of pastoral duties for a community, for the edification of a community. Now, it certainly costs to distribute a book... So clearly, something has to be charged for that. And I can understand charging for a CD of your sermon to cover material charges...
But in the age of downloads when the cost to produce and distribute has dropped to essentially zero, how do we justify charging someone $2 or $3 to listen to the message I preached for my community last week? Or my sermon manuscript? Or selling the powerpoint created for my sermon? Or the song created for our worship service?
We need to see churches large and small giving away what they produce for the greater good of the Body of Christ.
Some are worried about others stealing their jive. Well, here's where I can think of two helpful concepts. The first legal and the second spiritual.
When you license the things you put out under a Creative Commons license, you can choose what level of rights you retain. You can specify whether others must attribute to you, whether they can change, reproduce, create derivitive works etc. Check it out. There's no reason you can't safely distribute everything you create, knowing that you will receve credit and no one else will make money off of your creativity without your permission.
But the bigger issue here is spiritual...
Think back to the last sermon you heard/preached on stewardship. It's all God's, we say. We offer back to Him only what He has given to us first, we say.
Well, God has given your community the gift of musicians, artists, writers, speakers... If not all of them, probably one or more of them. There's something your community does that other communities could benefit from.
And now, with blogs and podcasts, and Flickr and Google... With the world at both your fingertips and your doorstep, there's no reason not to share what God has given you.
Freely you have recieved...
