The church needs open-licensed biblical content because all-rights-reserved, NonCommercial, and NoDerivatives terms still hinder churches that must translate and teach: all-rights-reserved withholds use until permission is granted, NoDerivatives blocks translation and adaptation, and NonCommercial blocks uses that a license treats as commercial. Copyright is a legal tool, and the question is whether those terms fit equipping every lingual church. Churches under an interdependent open model can use, translate, adapt, and share without waiting for a gatekeeper.
Churches that take up Church-Centric Bible Translation meet two obstacles:
Source: Tim Jore, The Gateway Languages Strategy (2017), §1.
A Christian Commons is unrestricted biblical resources the church can legally translate, adapt, build on, revise, redistribute, and use, without hindrance.
In 2001 a church in Papua New Guinea, having waited more than ten years for outside help, began translating the Bible into its own language. The leaders hit two obstacles: the training and tools they needed were in English, and the licenses on those resources applied only to members of certain Western organizations.
Copyright is a legal tool: the law attaches it when someone creates a work, and owners have the right to grant or withhold permission. The question for the global church is narrower, whether all-rights-reserved, NonCommercial, and NoDerivatives terms fit the work of equipping every lingual church.
Those terms hinder the church in different ways:
Owners who keep a tighter license are within their legal rights, but a license written to protect a revenue stream or a brand can leave a lingual church legally unable to train, translate, and share.
Letting Go (2019) describes four models for meeting the church’s need for biblical content:
Model | What it is | What it costs the church |
|---|---|---|
Higher Law | Ignore copyright | Avoids friction. Unwise. Erodes honesty and unity. Unstable legal ground for anything built on the work. |
Independent | Each church creates its own resources from scratch (“reinventing the wheel”) | Highly contextual. Slow. Quality and theological reliability vary. Complex resources take years many churches do not have. |
Dependent | Owners remain gatekeepers; churches request permission | Some owners are generous. Every request still goes to a holder who cannot serve the world’s languages. The model is built to decrease availability. |
Interdependent | Content is published under an open license; anyone who finds it is already cleared to use it on those terms | Scales through church networks. Requires owners to let go of exclusive control. |
unfoldingWord publishes original content under the interdependent model, using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Attribution requires credit and a note of changes, and ShareAlike requires that translations and other adaptations stay under the same license, so a later owner cannot lock an open work closed and the license itself does not include NonCommercial or NoDerivatives.
Owners who are not ready to open a work sometimes use a narrower grant to translate, with the translator holding rights in that translation. This page is not legal advice; read the license texts, and get counsel if you are licensing a work.
Paul had a right to be paid for preaching. He chose not to use that right in a way that would hinder the gospel: “What then is my reward? That in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not use up my rights in preaching it” (1 Corinthians 9:18, BSB). Owners can hold a right and still use it so others can hear. He asked the same of those who have, toward those who do not: “At the present time, your surplus will meet their need, so that in turn their surplus will meet your need. Then there will be equality” (2 Corinthians 8:14, BSB).
The believers in Jerusalem “were together and had everything in common” and “shared with anyone who was in need” (Acts 2:44–45, BSB). That is a household providing for its own, not a law that cancels property. Gleaning in Deuteronomy 24:19–22 is analogical in the same way, not a prooftext that abolishes copyright. Landowners kept title. They were told to leave margin so the poor could eat. Owners of biblical content may likewise keep title and still leave legal margin so churches can translate, adapt, and share.
Churches still check a text after the owner opens the license, because trustworthiness is a property of the content, not the license.
Many publishers keep tighter licenses because they fear distortion: that someone will change the work and pass the result off as the original, and that concern is legitimate. ShareAlike requires derivatives to credit the source, mark what changed, and stay open, but formation and church affirmation keep a translation faithful; the license does not do that work.
Original content © unfoldingWord, CC BY-SA 4.0. Last reviewed 27 August 2026.