FEATUREDSTORY
GIVING HONOR WHERE HONOR IS DUE … an Interview with Howard Rachinski
by Bruce Adolph
I have always said that if you have something that solves a problem for a church – that you have something good.
Several years ago Howard Rachinski saw that there was a need for his local church and a few other ones. From there something quite significant has grown and is now serving the church worldwide. I can personally testify that Howard and his CCLI organization has served not only this magazine but also our Christian Musician Summit conferences for 14 years now … their partnering spirit and friendship has encouraged me countless times.
Howard was recently honored by being inducted into the Gospel Music Association’ s Hall of Fame … we thought it would be interesting to speak with him about those humble beginnings of CCLI.
WORSHIP MUSICIAN: Take us back to when you first got the idea of creating a vehicle for churches to help them with their licensing … what were you thinking at that time?
HOWARD RACHINSKI: I was Music Minister for a large church in Portland, OR – Bible Temple. We had an 80-voice choir, 30-piece orchestra and I was very involved in writing, recording, arranging, creating dramatic musicals and overseeing the Northwest Worship Conference. I was“ at peace” with doing what the Lord had placed within me. In April 1984, our local newspaper reported that the Diocese of Chicago was sued $ 3.1 million for copying lyrics without permission. Ironically, one of the songs in the publisher’ s catalog was“ They’ ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love( We Are One In The Spirit)”. We were shocked!
I was thinking,“ How could a church be sued for doing that? That doesn’ t seem right. This is our worship expression!” Our church had 400 song transparencies and an extensive tape ministry that included our worship services. We definitely didn’ t want our church to face this type of embarrassment! I was upset, even angry, that churches could be treated that way.
At the end of 1984, I began to study the U. S. Copyright Law and began to realize what was really involved in song ownership and song usage. The Copyright Law was fair … but it wasn’ t practical. Churches have a copyright exemption for singing songs, but they don’ t have an exemption for copying songs. Simply, a song is an asset and in order to make copies of songs, a church needed to get permission from the song owner. A report in the mid- 1980s stated that 56 % of the churches in America were copying without permission.
When I told my pastor( Dick Iverson) this, he said,“ How can I preach from the pulpit about honesty and integrity when behind me we are making copies of songs illegally?” I told my Pastor that I think we can come up with a solution so that we wouldn’ t be sued.
In February 1985, I created a document called the“ Permission of Use”, whereby song owners could make their songs available to churches for an affordable annual fee and, in return, song owners could be paid royalties from this fee. We called our copyright service – StarPraise Ministries – and introduced this concept to 300 churches at the Northwest Ministers Conference in May 1985 for $ 75.00. We birthed and operated StarPraise Ministries in our church music department. Initially, we thought this copyright service would only be used by the few hundred churches that we were in close fellowship with. After one year, we had 500 churches working with us and, after two years, we had over 1100 churches. We then realized that this was a need much larger than just our own circle of church acquaintances – churches wanted to be honest, they simply didn’ t have a resource to help them in this matter. As a result, in January 1988, we separated StarPraise Ministries from the church, in April 1988 we changed the name to CCLI and in October 1988 we launched our“ new” service, which now contained 180 publishers. The rest is history …
The driving force in my heart at that time was simply to help churches deal with copyright legally and to support the songwriters fairly.
42 Jul � Aug 2016 WorshipMusician. com