By Mark Kelly
I was pleased to see an excellent article on plagiarizing sermons in the April 17 edition of The Christian Century. Thomas Long, professor of preaching at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, brings some nuanced perspective to a subject often cast as a stark “either/or” issue.
Rick Warren has been taken to task by a few bloggers for telling pastors, “If my bullet fits your gun, shoot it.” Many of them act as if Warren thereby condones, in the words of a blogger this week, “theft, laziness, and dishonesty.”
They would do well to read Warren’s column on Pastors.com entitled “Other pastors’ sermons – the commentaries of the 21st century.” What he actually says is that “sermons preached by other pastors ... give me ideas. They help me see Scripture in entirely new ways sometimes. I believe these sermons are like the commentaries of the 21st century. I hope my sermons will do the same for you. That’s why I make them available to you on Pastors.com. Whether you use the outlines and transcripts for sermon ideas or listen to the preaching to fine-tune your delivery, I’ll be thrilled if your ministry becomes more effective because of them.”
What I see there is an encouragement to use material in specific ways – to generate ideas and sharpen delivery. Critics act as if Warren has endorsed a preacher using his personal illustrations – complete with the names of his and Kay’s children – as if they happened to the preacher!
“Sermon stealing” is not as simplistic a matter as some pretend.
Long points out that some cultures honor the use of the “set sermon,” where the preacher presents his own version of a well-known standard. He also notes that the Internet is causing a major cultural shift (not necessarily a good one) in how the ownership and use of information is understood.
He might also have added the issue of Christianity’s explosive growth in parts of the world that don’t have the resources some pastors in the United States take for granted.
Some of those who write about sermon stealing seem to have an idyllic vision of the pastor’s life – sitting at a mahogany desk in a book-lined office for hours on end, day after day, leafing through thick books, making copious notes on a legal pad, and musing about how to present the sermon. I’m not sure that has ever been reality for most pastors, but it certainly doesn’t describe the situation faced by most church leaders in the “Two-Thirds World,” where the vast majority do not have the benefit of formal education and access to theological books. Most wouldn’t have the money to buy books if they were available.
Many of us have heard Rick tell the story of walking up to a tent church in a village in South Africa and being shocked when the young pastor exclaimed, “I know who you are! You’re Pastor Rick!”
Turns out, the fellow walked an hour and a half to the post office every week to download one of Rick’s sermons from the Internet. Then he taught the material to his congregation back in the village that didn’t even have water or electricity.
He told Warren: “Pastor Rick, you are the only training I’ve ever had.”
“My heart of love went out to that guy,” Warren says. “I will give the rest of my life for guys like that – soldiers of the cross who are serving God with so little when God has given me so much. I will serve those people, and I will lay down my identity, my influence, and my income to help guys like that.”
At a time when the number of relatively untrained church leaders is exploding in less-developed countries, the Internet has given us a medium for providing resources to many of those church leaders. Suggesting that such servants of Christ should make no use of free resources and ought to develop their own preaching and teaching materials from scratch would be laughable if it wasn’t so outrageous.
Long makes a helpful contribution by offering two ethical factors to guide pastors in their use of material produced by others: (1) truthfulness, finding a way to acknowledge that others have contributed to the sermon, and (2) immediacy, being sensitive to the fact that God wants to speak through the sermon to a particular group of people at a particular time.
He also points out that “preaching, like all forms of communication, rests upon a tacit agreement between the parties involved. ... Preachers who stand up on Sunday morning with a sermon ripped off the Internet and preach the words as if they were their own almost certainly violate the implied agreement with the congregation.” Congregations ought to be taught that, to one degree or another, sermons always draw on the insights of others. Pastors ought to do everything they can to make each sermon their own, following the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
Of course, publishing someone else’s work, unacknowledged, under your own name is at least unethical. Selling another’s work as your own could be a crime. But the vast majority of pastors who use someone else’s sermons in preparing for Sunday are good-hearted servants of God who work under difficult circumstances. Few are trying to line their pockets off someone else’s work.
Even the most creative and original preachers have to admit they don’t footnote every resource that influences their weekly masterpieces. What do any of us know about the Gospel that we haven’t read or heard somewhere before? Can we begin to identify all the things we have learned from all the commentaries and books we have read and all the preaching and teaching we have heard over the years?
If the ethically important issue is acknowledging that a sermon is not the entirely original creation of the preacher delivering it, then every sermon preached in every sanctuary around the world ought to carry some sort of disclaimer.
As Warren says, “Nobody is original; we all just learn from each other, whether you get it out of a book or get it off of a tape or whatever. We all stand on each other’s shoulders. We’re all on the same team. Let’s help each other out – and when we get to Heaven, we can rejoice together over the people who were saved as a result!”
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By the way, today is World Intellectual Property Day! This year’s theme is Encouraging Creativity.
