Simon and Henrietta Cozens

When it comes to consulting for churches and Christian charities, I'm unashamedly a one-trick pony in my advice: Use open source software where possible.

While I'm a big fan of open source in general, charity work in particular has certain facets which I think make the choice for open source even clearer. It frustrates me exceptionally when consultants come into charity environments with the same assumptions that they carry over from the corporate world, whether unconsciously or consciously, and either fail to realise or feign ignorance that some of those assumptions don't apply. Heck, it shouldn't be that difficult - we're in the middle of examining the working practices of my sending church office and while everyone agrees it's all a mess, nobody has come up with the corporate solution of outsourcing it all to India. (Perhaps I should propose this, and claim that it also has a missionary dynamic. But I don't know if anyone would realise that I was being satirical.) So why people unquestionably apply corporate business practices to blatantly non-corporate environments is a mystery to me.

For starters, there is a moral imperative. Another charity wants me to choose some software to help them manage fundraising. Some of the systems they have under consideration are quite expensive, and the more money they spend on fundraising software, the more less money they have to spend on their core ministry, which is helping children at risk. Now, people who give them money do so because they want to support work amongst children at risk - not, I presume, because they want to support the profit lines of commercial software companies. I believe that they have a moral imperative to be responsible with the money that is donated to them, and this translates to them using as much of their donors' money as possible to do what the donors want to support - children at risk - and therefore as little of their donors' money as possible in infrastructure. (Unless, of course, they want to do a fundraising drive to cover the licenses of their new fundraising software.)

I feel this keenly as a missionary; I'm supported by donations and I want to be honest and upright with my donors about what is happening with their money. If I tell them they're supporting mission in Japan but I go out and buy a brand new camcorder so I can write a video journal of my time there, even if it makes me a better communicator it does not make me an honest steward. (Disclaimer: I bought a new laptop a while back but I did that with money earned from a software project. Book royalties also keep me in toys. I am praying for a new camcorder though.)

In the same way, if a church makes a collection for "Christian work in the parish and around the world", I believe there's a moral imperative to use as much of that money as possible actually for Christian work in the parish and around the world. It's just plain honesty. And that means finding the cheapest options for IT that do the job.

But, they say, expensive solution X will do the job better and quicker and more efficiently! That may be true. It may not. In some cases open source is a more efficient solution. But I am not trying to argue that point now.

The poitn I will argue now is that efficiency is another value imported from the commercial world to the charitable world without critical evaluation. Is efficient administration really a "kingdom value"? One of my favourite theologians, Kosuke Koyama, spent a whole book ("Three Mile An Hour God") arguing that it is not. How many years wandering in the desert just for the Israelites to learn about God's faithfulness? How many years from sin until the Messiah, again? The first priority of business may be efficiency, but the first priority of the church is love - a very different value. In fact Koyama argues that efficiency is the enemy of love, and I agree; another reason why I get frustrated with those trying to bring corporate principles to church activities. Perhaps the church is meant to be slow, disorganised, and messy, because its primary business is people and God, and people and God are slow, disorganised and messy!

Back to cost, though. When you're responsible to others for the money you spend, and when you make charitable appeals which you expect them to respond to, you have an imperative to - and I am going to put this in corporate terms - maximize shareholder value: to spend the money that they've raised on what they claim they've raised it for. Not on software.