equip the Church

Martin Luther printed pamphlets by the thousands and let other printers copy them freely. He never collected a royalty. He was not building a catalog. He was trying to urgently get ideas into the hands of people who needed them.

We have access to tools he could not have imagined. A PDF costs nothing to send. An ebook can travel from Chicago to Nairobi in seconds. A theology book that took three years to translate can be read on a phone in a village with no bookstore within hundreds of kilometers minutes after being published.

And our response, far too often, has been to lock it behind a paywall.

There is a logic to this. Publishers have costs. Translation is expensive. Production is expensive. Staff is expensive. If content is free, what funds the mission? The argument is not ridiculous. It deserves to be taken seriously.

But Chris Anderson, in his book Free, makes an observation that cuts right through this logic. In the digital economy, the cost of distributing one more copy of something is not just low. It is effectively zero. The economics that govern physical goods do not govern digital content. When the marginal cost of distribution is zero, restricting distribution is not prudent stewardship. It is mission failure.

Think about what you are actually protecting when you put a theology book behind a paywall for a pastor in Cameroon or Madagascar who earns $100-$200 a month. You are not protecting a revenue stream that would otherwise exist. That pastor was never going to wire you $18 for a PDF. You are protecting nothing. You are simply ensuring that he never has access to those ideas.

Anderson’s deeper insight is that free is not a price. It is a strategy. When you make something freely available, you are not giving away value. You are planting seeds that grow into things you cannot yet see. The pastor who reads your PDF recommends the print edition to his network. The seminary that uses your digital commentary adopts your catalog. The reader who encountered your ideas free becomes the donor who funds your next project. Free, done wisely, multiplies rather than diminishes.

And here is what experience teaches: when a print edition is available and accessible, most people prefer it. They want to hold the book, mark the margins, pass it to a friend. The digital version does not cannibalize the print sale. It creates the desire for it. Where no print edition exists or no one could afford it anyway, the idea continues traveling through channels where you were never going to make a penny regardless. You are not losing revenue. You never had it. What you are gaining is reach you could not have bought.

This is not a secular business insight awkwardly applied to ministry. It is almost exactly what Luther understood when he allowed printers across Europe to reproduce his work freely, never collecting a penny in royalties. He was operating on a theology of distribution, not a business model. The ideas belonged to the Church. His job was to release them, not to monetize them.

Then there is the piracy question. Many publishers lie awake worrying about it. Someone will copy the file. Someone will share it without permission. The work will circulate without compensation.

Maybe. Actually, probably.

But think carefully about what that fear assumes. It assumes that the greatest danger facing your ministry is that too many people will read your books. It assumes that a theology text spreading through a WhatsApp group of pastors in West Africa is a problem to be solved rather than an answer to a prayer. It assumes that the person who receives a pirated copy of your commentary would otherwise have bought it, which is almost never true.

The Reformation did not stall because people were copying Luther’s pamphlets without his permission. It accelerated. Every unauthorized copy was another idea in another hand in another city. The piracy was the point.

Your content being passed around without compensation is not your biggest problem. Your content sitting in a warehouse, or behind a login page, unknown and unread, is.

The question worth sitting with is this. When we restrict digital access for commercial reasons alone, what are we actually saying? We are saying that the financial model of our organization matters more than whether this idea reaches the person it was written for. We are saying that the pastor who cannot afford the print edition does not get the theology. We are saying that access to the resources of the Church is a function of purchasing power.

That is not stewardship. It is scarcity logic applied to a gospel that has never operated on scarcity.

Anderson also makes a distinction that is useful here, between free and frictionless. Not everything needs to be free. Print has real costs, and it is right to price print fairly. But digital access to the ideas inside that print, excerpts, chapters, companion articles, audio versions, is a different question entirely. The marginal cost of letting someone read a chapter online is nothing. The marginal benefit, to them and eventually to you, can be enormous.

Sell the print. Steward the ideas generously.

This does not mean every publisher should give everything away. It means asking an honest question before every decision about digital pricing and access. Are we restricting this because it funds the mission, or because we have not thought carefully enough about what the mission actually requires?

The Reformation did not spread because Luther found the right price point for his books and tracts. It spread because he understood that the ideas were more important than the income and that the Church was more important than the organization trying to serve it.

The tools are different now, but the economics are more favorable than they have ever been for a publisher who wants to give ideas wings.

What ideas are you holding back that could be spreading like wild fire?