Let's Make a Statement Published May 2, 2022 Picture this. It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re browsing at a bookshop. You’ve got coffee in hand, there’s classical music playing overhead and the pleasant buzz of chatter from nearby tables. You’re glancing through the magazines when you spot a copy of WIRED. On the cover is a headline that catches your eye: Churches Radically Support Open Source. You flip through pages until you spot the article, and you find yourself smiling at the content inside. Churches across the country are pledging monthly support to open-source repositories and GitHub is now covered in dozens of logos of churches who are sponsoring the creation of open-source tech. The tech world is puzzled. There are blogs being written about it, long Twitter threads discussing it, jokes about it on Late Night. Over and over, it’s repeated: Churches care about technology. We have a unique opportunity to make this vision a reality, and it would require very minimal effort or expense. Historically, churches have always been at the forefront of technology and art, and this a chance to get back there again. If each of us reading this were to support one open-source repository in the name of our church with as little as $5 a month, hundreds of church logos would be popping up in the sponsor section of GitHub and OpenCollective. If we were to each share this initiative with a friend, we could see thousands of churches in support of open-source technology. How could the tech world fail to notice that? The Church itself is founded on generosity, and we have a chance to show our generosity in a way that is not only unexpected, but deeply impactful. But, as Jon said in our recent podcast episode, “It will only be a thing if we a) all do it, and b) tell others to do it too.” We can show the world who we are. We are generous, we care for people and we care about technology. Find out more about the open-source repositories that Spark supports on our Open Source page, and listen in to our thoughts on open-source on Episode 124 of Rock Cast.