As longtime GetReligion readers may know, my father was a Southern Baptist minister, spending his whole career in Texas pulpits and hospitals.
I heard him, from time to time, gently correct people who called him “preacher.” He would note that he wasn’t a “preacher,” he was a pastor. Brother Bert’s life and ministry were not defined by his pulpit work, although I always admired his ability to teach the Bible to laypeople.
Like it or not, preaching is the crucial skill — almost a Darwinian performance art — in the world of megachurches and evangelical power. Superstar clergy, about 99% of the time, are known for their preaching skills, even in liturgical-church traditions. The styles may differ, from one church brand to another, but growing churches usually have orators who can pull people into the pews.
That was the subject looming over this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which focused on a strong Religion News Service report about the #Sermongate controversy surrounding the new leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. The headline: “New SBC President Ed Litton apologizes for using JD Greear sermon quotes without credit.” Here is some crucial material right up top:
A video posted on YouTube Thursday (June 24) showed clips of a January 2020 sermon on the New Testament book of Romans from Litton and clips from a January 2019 sermon on the same Bible passage from J.D. Greear, whose term as SBC president ended in June.
At several points, the comments from the two preachers are nearly identical. … The two pastors also say very similar things about homosexuality, which both believe is sinful.
But they each say Christians have erred by treating sexual sin as if it is worse than other sins — and singling out LGBT people as the worst of sinners.
What does “nearly identical” look like?
“Homosexuality does not send you to hell,” says Greear. “You know how I know that? Because heterosexuality does not send you to heaven.”
Litton says the same thing: “Homosexuality does not send people to hell. How do I know that? Because heterosexuality doesn’t send people to heaven.”
Readers interested in the fine details can dig into the whole story, which was written by Bob Smietana, who has years of experience in Nashville covering the SBC institutions that have long been known as “the Baptist Vatican (and even working inside one).” He knows the language and he knows the players.
But one of the strengths of this story is that Smietana knows that this is a news story, but it is not a new story. There is more to this than the plagiarism temptations of the Internet age. We will come back to that.
Let me offer another personal aside, one discussed at length in the podcast. In addition to being the son of an SBC pastor, I also taught for several years in the early 1990s at Denver Seminary. This evangelical campus was, at that time, led by one of the world’s most famous homiletics professors, the late Haddon Robinson, author of the classic textbook “Biblical Preaching.”
My main class (click here for a flashback) focused on the role that entertainment and news media play in shaping the lives and imaginations of the people to whom seminarians preach (or serve in Christian education programs, youth work, etc.).
The key: I wasn’t urging ministers to hang giant video screens and use movie clips as entertaining illustrations (that was already a temptation, back then). I wanted students to heed the valid questions raised in mass media and then RESPOND. That required, obviously, interacting with material drawn from popular culture and articles — news and commentary — about movies, television shows, popular songs, etc.
The link to the current controversy is that my students immediately had questions about how to do this in the pulpit. Were they supposed to quote screenwriters by name? Read passages from interviews with artists and tell their listeners where they got the material? How were they supposed to separate their own insights from those and others?
In other words, they wanted to know how to deliver these sermons without crossing over into plagiarism.
The mass-media elements of this process were new, but the temptations to use other sources to shine up their own sermons were centuries old.
How old? Here’s the opening of a 2003 column that I wrote on that topic: “Plagiarism and the pulpit.” This passage is long, but essential, featuring an anecdote from the author of a fascinating book on this topic: “Should We Use Someone Else's Sermon? Preaching in a Cut-and-Paste World.”
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. …
"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."
But there are other questions about this process, questions that preachers have been asking for ages. This is where the Smietana feature digs deeper than the polemics of contemporary SBC warfare.
For example, what if — as Litton and Greear insist — Litton had talked with Greear and received permission to use this images and even the structure of the sermon series? And there’s more.
Borrowing from other preachers is a common practice among pastors. When it goes too far, that can lead to plagiarism. In 2017, for example, a book of devotions by Hillary Clinton’s pastor was pulled by the publisher after news reports alleged that the book contained plagiarized material from other pastors.
Some preachers also use research assistants or “sermon helps” to find illustrations that help them convey the meaning of the biblical text to their audience.
That can be a form of cheating, argues theologian Scot McKnight, a professor at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. McKnight believes a sermon isn’t just a speech. Instead, it should flow out of a pastor’s encounter with God in the Bible and be written for a specific congregation.
The typical pastor’s office (pre-WWW, I guess) contains several shelves of biblical commentaries. Are pastors required to quote, by name, each and every commentary that they reference when explaining the depths of a biblical text and ancient languages?
What about stories that church members and friends share with them in emails?
What about those websites that contain libraries of sermon outlines and texts? Is it ever acceptable to purchase an outline and then adapt it to local circumstances?
I used to tell students — at Denver Seminary and later, in Gordon-Conwell lectures with Haddon Robinson — that I thought quoting sources added authority to a sermon and built trust with listeners. Then again, I am a journalist and my work is built on quoting sources.
Thus, I will end with this quote from the most famous preacher in the churches of the ancient Christian East.
The golden-tongued John Chrysostom decried sermon plagiarism, arguing “If it has occurred to any preacher to weave into his sermons any part of other men’s works, he is exposed to greater disgrace than those who steal money.” (“On the Priesthood”)
By the way, that quote is from a series of tweets by Church historian Stephen Eccher. Just saying.
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FIRST IMAGE: Illustration at SermonCentral.com on “3 Tests Of Plagiarism: Do Your Sermons Pass Them?”