Plagiarizing Sermons

Last updated on: July 23, 2009 at 12:09 am by Scot McKnight

Plagiarizing Sermons 2009-07-23T00:09:46-05:00 Scot McKnight

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A repost on a topic that is always relevant:

The NY Times ran an article about pastors swiping sermons from sermon sources, and then Out of Ur ran a piece which got some comments. I’m wondering what you think. Here are my thoughts:

I once was in a situation when a pastor admitted to using sermons from sermon sources, and he also said he hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with it. What most confused me about the situation was that he was using illustrations from other preachers in the first person — and you really did think these experiences were his. So far as I know, he stopped.

What are the issues? Here’s what I see:

First, it is not honest. Part of the pastoral task is to preach (if
that is part of your “job description”), and that means preparing their
own sermons. I don’t know any search committees that prefer their
pastoral candidates and preachers to use sermon sources in order to
borrow or swipe sermons preached by others on a routine basis or
without acknowledgement.

Second, the temptation is evidently strong, and I’d like to know what
you think drives pastors to plagiarize sermons, but here’s what I see.
Sometimes they don’t have the time to get a sermon ready. Sometimes
they have too many sermons or talks to get ready for the week and
resort to using somebody else’s for one of the talks. Sometimes the
pressure to be a good preacher is so strong the preacher is tempted to
use someone else’s already-shown-to-be-good sermon. Sometimes there are
so many good preachers in the area swiping sermons is the only way a
preacher can “compete.” Sometimes a pastor’s job is on the line for how
he or she preaches and they are able to postpone the inevitable with a
few good sermons swiped from a source.

Third, pastors should not subscribe to such services if they are at all
tempted to swipe sermons. I suppose these services are designed to help
pastors see what good preaching looks like — but that’s another
series. If the temptation is there, it is far wiser to make it
unavailable.

Fourth, sermon services are partly culpable here: I’ve never been part
of this so I’d like to hear how they work. Do they warn of plagiarism?
Do they educate on the proper use? Someone will know more than I about
these services.

Fifth, what is a sermon? Well, it’s a whole life brought to bear on a
text each week for a single 30 minute or so sermon before a specific
congregation. It shames the preacher not to be who he or she is in the
pulpit, and to pretend to be someone else. It de-localizes the sermon
from the local context. It distorts who the preacher is before the
congregation. So, the sermon is highly biblical, highly personal,
highly local, and highly temporal: it is the individual preacher
engaging God and Bible and congregation, in that specific location, for
that time.

Sixth, which brings up the philosophical issue: Is there not nothing
new under the sun? Well said. To be sure, nearly every sermon emerges
from books and sermons and ideas and all sorts of things that were
used. But it is bricolage, it is quilting, it is convergence — it is
precisely those things and not simple usage of others. It brings
together other people’s ideas and says so if it is substantial; but it
is a uniquely personal, local, and temporal bringing of those things
together. Taking someone’s sermon destroys the bricolage and turns it
into a canned, deceitful act of creating a false image in front of
God’s people. Now let’s be honest: sermons don’t have footnotes and
need not. You need not end each separable idea with a “I got this point
from Ortberg and this one from Niebuhr and that one from Bonhoeffer.”
We all use things from others in sermons, and when we use a lot from
someone about some point, we say so. By and large the congregation
doesn’t care about that. But, I think they expect the preacher to be
preaching his or her own sermon and not someone else’s.

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