One thing great preachers enjoy about traveling is that they can hear other
people preach.
But the American orator A.J. Gordon received a shock during an 1876 visit
to England. Sitting anonymously in a church, he realized that the sermon
sounded extremely familiar — because he wrote it.
“The man in the pulpit was reading it verbatim without saying a word about
the source. After the service, Gordon introduced himself and we can just
imagine the pastor’s reaction,” said the Rev. Scott Gibson, director of the
Center for Preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary outside Boston.
Perhaps the pastor read one of Gordon’s books or found the sermon in a
journal. He might have lifted it from a major newspaper, because it was
common in those days for sermons to be published in Monday editions.
But the preacher never thought the author would cross the Atlantic and land
in one of his own pews, said Gibson, who is studying the history of
plagiarism in preaching. It has always been hard for an offender to believe
that a church member has read the telltale source or that a visitor with an
excellent memory happened to be sitting in the right place at the wrong
time.
“This is not a new problem,” said Gibson. “Some people think the World Wide
Web came along and suddenly you had thousands of pastors copying other
people’s sermons with a few clicks of a mouse. But there has always been a
lot of laziness out there.
“Preachers get busy and they run out of time and then they just plain
steal.”
The temptations are timeless, but the Internet has raised waves of new
ethical questions.
In his study, Gibson defines “plagiarism” as preaching someone else’s
sermon research or content without giving public credit for it.
But is it plagiarism to use an outline or text the pastor has legally
obtained — even purchased — from one of the thousands of preaching sites
that have sprung up online? Is it acceptable to use a respected site such
as SermonNotes.com without telling the congregation? What about quoting
from the anonymous inspirational stories that arrive daily in every
pastor’s email? Is it wrong if a megachurch pastor has support staff
members who do “ghost” work as researchers and writers?
Does a preacher have to reveal each and every source of inspiration?
“It’s hard to footnote sermons,” said the Rev. Haddon Robinson, an
internationally known teacher of preaching in Dallas and Denver before
arriving at Gordon-Conwell. “There’s no way to make people in the pews
understand all of the sources you are using, especially if they’re highly
academic sources. I don’t think anyone expects preachers to stand up there
and quote all of their reference books and commentaries by name.”
But all preachers read and hear stories and insights that they want to
share with their flocks. It makes a sermon more colorful to feature a
quotation by an author ” who simply says something better than you can,”
said Robinson. Attributing direct quotes also adds authority, especially
when quoting figures such as Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis or Billy Graham.
This is safe territory. The danger is when pastors appropriate entire
outlines or sermon texts and claim them as their own. Perhaps the strongest
temptation is to personalize anecdotes that happened to other people.
But it only takes seconds, noted Gibson, for a preacher to cite the source
of a story or to say something like, “I heard a great sermon on this
biblical text by pastor so and so and I want to share some of his insights
with you.” Some pastors add additional references in the Sunday bulletin or
in study pages on the church website.
It’s easy for preachers to play it straight, said Gibson. The question is
whether many congregations have become so mesmerized that they will
overlook plagiarism.
“Some people get so caught up in the experience of hearing that great
preacher,” he said. “It’s not so much the content. It’s his persona. It may
not matter to them that he is using someone else’s sermons. What you hear
people say is, ‘He’s our preacher and it doesn’t matter what he’s doing.
Let’s move on.’
“Some churches today just don’t care.”
