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One of the primary goals for this site it to make it easy for churches and individuals to find and download great Christian resources for free. I knew before starting this project how difficult it was to find quality Christian resources that are free, but it wasn't until I started to compile a list of the ones available that I realized how bad it truly is. It seems that just about everyone who develops quality Christian resources does it for profit rather than for God's glory. I don't necessarily think it's wrong to make your living off the Gospel (just about every preacher does) and I certainly understand the time involved, hosting expenses and other factors. The part that amazes me is the lack of volunteers. There are a handful of people who do, and I'm very grateful to them, but it is much more rare than I would have thought. Even churches seem to be in on it. When a church develops a curriculum for VBS for example, the norm seems to be to copyright it and either sell it or just toss it aside never to be used again. Why not provide it to other churches to use for free? Aren't we all on the same team? Millions of people regularly volunteer their time teaching Sunday school classes, in church offices, going on mission trips, etc with no expectation of being paid. Why is this not the case when developing software, videos or other media? The only reason I can think of is that it's too easy to accept payments online or build an ad based site and the temptation is too great. It makes me wonder if the same opportunities were available in other areas of service, would Christians expect to be paid in every area where they currently volunteer. What do you think?
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Dear Jeremy,
We do agree with your article that is why we have created our FREE "Calvary Chapel Children's Curriculum" found at (CalvaryCurriculum.com). The reason ministries copyright material is because individuals take that material and either sell it or post without approval. That brings me to our situation. We have sent your various emails requesting that you remove our curriculum from your site seeing you did not receive approval to post it and our repeated attempts asking you to remove it have gone ignored. Please respond to us seeing you are illegally posting material you did not create or get permission to post.
Link on your site to our copyrighted FREE curriculum - http://www.believersresource.com/downloads/complete-sunday-school-curriculum-38.html
Sincerely,
CalvaryCurriculum.com
email: servinghim@calvarycurriculum.com
I feel the need to follow up here since this was posted publicly to let everyone know that Calvary Chapel contacted me by email as well and this issue has been addressed. This ciriculum was originally posted on BelieversResource.com several years ago before the recent re-launch and permission was granted at that time. As you can see from the archived copy of their site, "Anyone is free to reproduce this material and distribute it, but it may not be sold under any circumstances whatsoever."
It's kind of sad that they would treat this situation in this manner. I have a lot of concern about many of the directions Calvary Chapel has turned, and am very saddened by many of them. Thanks for your work here Jeremy! Here is a link to a blog I have recently found that has more to say on the Calvary Chapel topic, and they have conclusions I don't always agree with but others I do.http://galatiansfour.blogspot.com/