Holy Joys Podcast
A discussion of theology and ministry practice, all for a holy, happy church. A ministry of holyjoys.org.
Holy Joys Podcast
Plagiarism and Preaching
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David Fry and Johnathan Arnold discuss plagiarism and the need for preachers to show integrity in their public speaking.
You know, if God has called you to preach the gospel, he has called you to preach the gospel through your God-given abilities and strengths, not through somebody else's.
SPEAKER_02When I get up in the pulpit and trying to model good thinking. Good thinking is not lone ranger thinking. Good thinking is thinking with others. So when I cite C.S. Lewis, a modern thinker, and Augustine, an ancient thinker, that shows my congregation that I am thinking with others.
SPEAKER_01You're listening to the Holy Joys Podcast, co-hosted by Jonathan Arnold and Dr. David Fry. Visit us at holyjoys.org and stay tuned for weekly discussions of theology and ministry practice, all for a holy, happy church.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to the Holy Joys Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. David Fry, with Jonathan Arnold. Great to be back with you. Today we're going to talk about preaching and plagiarism, a hot topic in our private discussions, at least. And I think uh we will get some feedback, I hope, from our listeners as well. I'm very interested in hearing from our listeners on this topic because this is something that has uh that has come up several times. And recently I was reading actually several different stories, but some that stood out uh from the past. Uh most recently, of course, was the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, uh Ed Lighton, I think is how you pronounce his name, uh, in the now infamous Sermon Gate, and uh him preaching a sermon that he had private permission to preach from J.D. Greer, uh, but did not give any attribution and used you know the same stories, the same uh intonations and everything. And uh a YouTube video went viral showing the two side by side, and it is actually quite astounding uh for there not to be any attribution. But that raises a lot of questions to those of us who preach on a regular basis, and you know, the rise of online resources. Uh, I know that preachers will maybe just as quickly go to YouTube to watch someone preach on a passage that they're preparing to preach on. Uh, they'll as soon go to that as they would a commentary, uh, maybe even sooner in some cases. So it raises a lot of questions, uh, preaching and plagiarism. So that's what's on our mind today.
SPEAKER_02I think this is a needed topic, uh, not just for the broader church world, but uh even for the churches where we we minister, because I was at Bible college and heard a chapel speaker who was a regular chapel speaker, a very respected person in the area, and he preached a great sermon, uh, very uh well articulated, um very impressed by it, approached him after the chapel service and said, Um, you know, hey, I really liked your message, really appreciate it, would love to have your manuscript. And he said, Well, I'm going to have to uh I'm gonna have to get you a link. I actually got that online. And he eventually did send me the link, and he had preached that sermon word for word from somebody else and gave no attribution. I was uh just blown away. I I totally viewed that person in a different light, and I still do to this day. I really lost a lot of confidence, and I think that's what's happening at a broader level is I think even, you know, yeah, but this kind of sermon gate thing blow up, a lot of integrity issues there, like the the broader culture and even within the church world, it just erodes trust. Um, we're to be a people of truth and integrity, and it really, really uh damages our witness. So I think this is um this is an important discussion.
SPEAKER_00So, as preachers today, we face some new challenges in regard to integrity. As you mentioned, I think that is a big issue that we need to be aware of as we utilize uh online resources and as we have you know ebooks that are available, uh, software such as Logos, which gives us access to all kinds of material that we can integrate into sermons. And uh plagiarism is something with which those who are teachers or in the academic world are well familiar with. And I think there are well-established standards for what counts as plagiarism there. But we're talking about something different. We're not talking about the academic world here, we're talking about the world of local church ministry. This is preachers, these are teachers, these are uh people who are teaching and speaking in the local church, and we're not writing academic papers, we're not presenting heavily footnoted sermons. And so this raises the question as to uh how we ought to make use or not of especially online materials. I was thinking, and I know, that uh many preachers uh may even more quickly turn to a YouTube video than they would a commentary on their bookshelf. And uh the question that comes up is what how do you give attribution? Now, I don't always uh say give the name of a commentary that I consult when I preach. We don't certainly don't want our sermon manuscripts littered with uh with continuous uh citations of you know from those that we use. So what's it look like for a preacher to preach with confidence uh while not crossing a line of integrity and dishonesty? So there are, of course, some high-profile cases, right? That we I I mentioned Ed Lighton, uh obviously Mark Driscoll is another one who in 2013 went through uh you know his books, uh supposedly he had plagiarized in several places. Uh other people have uh even outside of ministry uh have been accused of plagiarism. Uh so there are a lot of uh high-profile stories in the last few years of that. And now we're talking about preachers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think we need some objective standards um for how we go about this. Everybody might do this a little bit differently, their manuscripts might look a little bit different. Maybe not everybody even preaches from a manuscript, but there's got to be some basic standards uh that we follow. And I think those standards should be the ones that are pretty broadly recognized. Um, and that changes from generation to generation. So, you know, 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, this might have looked a little bit different. But, you know, I come out of uh I went to public school. Um, I come out of a setting where they're they were extremely serious about plagiarism, and there were very, very specific standards that you were expected to follow. And um, coming into a uh a Hawaiian Bible college and to our setting, you know, I know that that that there was some discussion about it, but it wasn't, uh the standards were not as exacting. And certainly the standards, there was very few standards expressed for public speaking. Um the plagiarism is taking somebody else's ideas, their intellectual property, and passing them off as your own. So it, you know, the way I was taught is that it really doesn't matter if you're writing it down or if you're speaking it, you know, in a public speaking setting. If you pass off somebody else's idea as your own, that's plagiarism. Um and so I think we what we need to do is we need to think about um how do we, how exactly do we make sure that we, when we get up into the pulpit, are are clear about what ideas are our own, what ideas we're drawing from somebody else. Um and I've I sometimes people will say, yeah, but what really matters is that we get the truth out there, right? As preachers, it's a little bit different because we're preaching the word of God. And what I want to say is there's a difference between a truth and a particular person's articulation of a truth. So the fact that Jesus is Lord, that is truth, right? Um, and that's a truth so universally recognized, and you can find that you know in scripture itself, right? But, you know, uh a particular way of explaining or expressing or articulating uh Jesus' Lordship that you might find in C.S. Lewis, say, right? That that articulation is unique to that writer or that author. And it's it's one thing to get up and proclaim Jesus is Lord, right? I don't need to give attribution for something like that, but to say, um, you know, Jesus cries over every inch of creation, right? Mine, right? Was that Abraham Kuper? Right. Um, so that's that's a particular articulation of the truth. And that's his intellectual property. And I don't ordinarily quote that without attribution unless it's so well known, like the buck stops with me or whatever. Um, like those kind of truths that are so well known that everybody knows that you know that I'm citing someone else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So you gave a a working definition, which is common, that plagiarism is uh the act of taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. I would add this next element that you actually just touched on, and that is it's not just taking something that's not yours, but it's taking something that is unique to a person. So we'll we'll talk a little bit later about uh common knowledge and what the rules are, the lines are of uh plagiarism or what can be given without citation and what needs to be have some attribution. And again, preaching is in somewhat of a gray area, but I think I want to say to today's preacher that uh that gray area is getting smaller because the the expectations of this generation are becoming clearer. And so if we have someone, say my age, I'm 42 and older, a lot of this is going to be very new. Like we're not accustomed to operating in new ways, right? I mean, when I started preaching, I didn't have access to the internet. Uh someone who is younger, they have grown up with this access and they are more accustomed to the expectations. And so I do want to recognize that there is a pretty stark line between uh those who would be uh upper 40s and older and those who are younger. So, you know, probably those who are older are not going to really change their habits, but they also probably don't make a lot of use of the internet. Uh, some do, uh, but many won't. Uh so if you are older than I am, 42, and you do make use of the internet, then this is, I think these guidelines and expectations, understanding what those expectations are uh in our world as to what is morally acceptable and honest uh is really important. Uh younger preachers, I think, are going to be more aware of some of this, but are still asking the questions and are still trying to navigate that as well. I I would be interested, I don't know the answer to this, but uh and I don't even know who all teaches preaching in the various Bible colleges and seminaries, but I would be interested in knowing what the average age is, because that might make a difference as to whether or not these sorts of things are addressed in those. So maybe some of our listeners can tell us uh if you have gone to a homiletics uh class in the last few years, if this is something that is discussed uh in in homiletics these days.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, these issues are greatly complicated too by the uh introduction of live stream. So um personally, you know, insofar as it's within my within my uh ability, I I'm not interested in in live streaming. And one of the reasons why is is this very this very issue, it opens you up to uh to not be able to just stay locally focused, but but to to have to always be aware that somebody else out there could at any point be grabbing a clip and posting it online. So, you know, personally, I don't always, I usually do, but I don't always um if if I have a quote that's a little more generic, uh I won't always say who it was or where I got it from. I usually do though, probably I'd say nine times out of ten. Um I'll say, you know, C.S. Lewis helpfully say to this or say Suez Lewis said or or whatever. I'm just using him because he's in my mind.
SPEAKER_00Sure.
SPEAKER_02But if I'm locally focused, if I'm in in my local context, that's okay. Because my church knows they can have my manuscript and there's gonna be a footnote, there's gonna be a citation there. Uh but online, if somebody grabs that or somebody's watching and they're like, wait a minute, I think I just read that in C.S. Lewis, or I think I just, you know, they it's a lot, it's a lot easier for them to jump on that and say, like, hey, he's stealing, you know, such and such material. And those things happen, they're happening all the time. And so I think um the just the the way in which our words are just being so quickly disseminated in this day really complicates the issue.
SPEAKER_00Right. So you mentioned live streaming, that brings up the whole matter of social media where I have I have watched people take a portion out of a sermon from their preacher that morning, they post that, not recognizing that that's a quote from Augustine or Abraham Kuper or C. S. Lewis. And my wife and I have have noticed this before, and we're like, oh yeah, that was C.S. Lewis. Well, wait a second. Like they're attributing that to you know this preacher, and then the preacher is coming back and saying, Yeah, thank you, you know, the Lord will help me, or whatever, and not saying, Well, actually, those words are you know verbatim from you know the weight of glory, a sermon by C. S. Lewis. You know, like I've seen that happen. And I have too. And I'm embarrassed for the preacher. Now, actually, and I've not had that happen to me, but I did have something similar. So years ago, before internet, uh, we uh I I wrote a no, sorry, I I did not write a piece for a periodical. Um, they asked me for something to to contribute, and I said, What you need to publish this piece by this other person. And so I sent them the piece. I didn't know until after publication, they published the piece with my name on it. And so I had people come up to me and say, Hey, really enjoyed that that article that that you wrote. And and I was like, wait, what do you mean wrote? Like, I didn't no, I didn't write that. And I mean, like, I was embarrassed. And and and I and I I I knew like I had to to say I I couldn't say thank you. I had to say, like, like no, that like I didn't write that. Uh I suggested that to him. So I I in that case, I would have felt guilty if I had just said thank you, because that would have been a passive way of taking in uh what should have been attributed to someone else. And so uh I see this happen in in social media uh as well. So there let me let me uh give you my short list here, and I actually just added what we've just said here, live streaming in social media, as a fourth reason why plagiarism has become a problem. Uh the first one is simply uh because there are some pretty high-profile people, politicians, preachers, others who have been doing it. Uh secondly, because as pastors specifically, we're very busy and we know that we can't go to the pulpit empty-handed. And we know that there are sources out there that are readily available, and I can literally push print and I can have a full manuscript of any passage that I want to preach from with illustrations and everything, right? So in a few minutes I can read over it, make sure it's something presentable, and I can go to the pulpit and do it. Now, have I ever done that? No, I've never done that in my preaching life or career. Do I know people who do? Yes, regularly. I've had people admit to me that that's their habit. And uh I want to encourage them to uh be diligent students of God's word themselves and and create some original content, somewhat original content. We'll talk about that too. Yeah, what nothing's original, right? Uh but the third reason is um it's just easy to do. Not only do we not want to go empty-handed because we're busy, but uh the availability of that, Sermon Central and other places, it's it's just there. A fourth reason why plagiarism is a problem is because uh you just simply can't get by with it in today's world. Uh has plagiarism been a problem in the past? Yeah, I think it probably has, but you don't get by with it now. Live streaming, social media, uh the the accountability is there. And preachers who have not ever thought of their practices as plagiarism uh need to be aware that, well, actually uh something they're doing may actually be plagiarism, and they need to recognize uh the standards of integrity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know of a conservative church where uh several people, at least two or three in the congregation every Sunday morning would have a competition to see uh how quickly they could find the their preacher's sermon on the Sermon Central because week after week their outline, at least the outline and the major ideas were were cool right off. Like that's that's pretty extremely embarrassing. And I'm with you. I've never, I've never done that. Now, I have there's been a time or two when I preach somebody else's sermon, but like John Wesley or something, like I might say, like, this morning, I'm gonna share with you a sermon from John Wesley. And I might along the way, um, I might along the, and there's a long tradition of doing that. I mean, going back to the fourth century at least, uh uh references were we should be preaching other people's sermons from us. Like, it's a good thing, like to do that. To uh, of course, in the Anglican church, right, there's the standard sermons that that would have been uh shared from from Cramner. But we need to be upfront about that. And if we're not, like that's that's a lack of integrity on our part. The other thing is, I think it's also like uh a failure to fulfill our ministry. One of the things that we're called to do is keep a close watch on our teaching, immerse ourselves in the study of scripture and theology. Like, if you're not preparing your own manuscript, like that's you're failing to actually do your job as a pastor and as a teacher. You're you're not learning what you need to learn. Um, you're you're not equipped being properly equipped to help explain those things. And uh when you're asked to, you're you're just not gonna be you're not gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00Right. And you're shortchanging yourself. Um Carrie, Carrie uh Newhoff calls uh this these recent years in which plagiarism has really come to the fore as a ripoff epidemic, uh which is what we're experiencing uh within the preaching world, a ripoff epidemic. So recently we had a conversation as we were putting together a program for our men's recovery home. And the the other staff and I were talking, and we were trying to decide what do we do for our Bible study hour that we have every day, an hour of Bible study. And someone suggested, well, let's use like a Francis Chan, or let's use you know, some of these guys who are producing these videos, and you know, that's an easy thing, push play, let it go. And my response was, you could do that, but what we're teaching our men during their Bible study hour is that they need a professional, I'm putting that in air quotes here, professional to help them study the Bible on their own. Like, let's give them a Bible, teach them the methods of induction, and let let them let them read individually, then as a group, uh, because we do have chapel as well. And so I was trying trying to steer us away from the idea of comparing my own Bible study with someone who is highly polished and has a whole marketing team and production team behind them. And sometimes that's what we face as preachers. We're here's the challenge with being a pastor today. We are up against I say against, I don't even like to put it this way, but the reality is that in some way uh the live streaming and video content has caused uh preachers across the world to Compare themselves with preachers who have a productive team, production teams, and millions of dollars behind them to put together these powerful videos. And many people are choosing to stay home and watch those guys rather than attend their local church. So that puts even more pressure on a pastor to be like that guy. And so how do I be like that guy? Well, I better watch his stuff and I better start acting like him and talking like him and giving his stories and saying the same thing about this Bible passage that he's saying and those kinds of things. So there's that pressure as well. As pastors, we are in a very unique time. And I think what we see happening is that there is a generation that Generation Z, I think, they are they're kind of fed up with all the marketing and all the glitz and all the glitter and all the bright lights. They want something real and they want something local and they want something addressed to them. Not to the whole world, to them. John Wesley, when he said the world is my parish, did not live in the world of the internet. All right. Pastors, the world is not our parish. Our parish is where God has planted us right here. Let's be radically focused on our local congregation. So that's that's kind of a uh okay, that's a rant. All right, rant over.
SPEAKER_02But but it but it's it's very relevant, um, I think, because I've seen this like even in our circle. So I took a class one time, preaching class, where a young man um was in a revival meeting and heard a preacher who was really charismatic, like yelling, shouting, rural, passionate kind of guy. And he this this student was more of a kind of big teddy bear kind of guy, nice guy, warm guy. Uh, and he said he really just felt like he needed to just, he needed to be more passionate, be more like that guy. And so he pr proceeded to preach uh one of the sermons in the class and then get, you know, get feedback and just try to be someone he wasn't. And it was almost painful to watch. And I think that what happens is even if it's not those, you know, preachers out there, even it's very easy to try to imitate somebody else's ministry, uh, to use their sermons. And I know this has happened, um, where you grab these sermons and these sermon outlines um from like these big name guys, even within your own circle. You're trying to imitate, you're trying to be like them rather than just um being who you are uh in Christ. And I think it's Haddon Robinson, maybe, who defines preaching as like communicating the truth through your own personality. Um, like you gotta be who you are. And uh I think that that relieves some of the pressure, and uh, and that's part of the reason why you see guys like Mark Driscoll getting plagiarized and then plagiarizing other people.
SPEAKER_00Right, yeah. You know, if God has called you to preach the gospel, he's called you to preach the gospel through your God-given abilities and strengths, not through somebody else's, to an audience that God will give you, right? And so we have to believe God at this point. So so let let's let's cover some of the um particular challenges that preaching presents. Uh I've mentioned one, I think, already, and that is you know, preaching is not an exercise primarily in academic uh presentation. Now I hope that our sermons have some, uh are informed somewhat by our academics, but uh they're they're not a lecture, it's a sermon, and there is a difference. Uh a sermon, I think it was John Piper who said a sermon should be an echo, an echo of the voice of God, not an echo of an echo of the voice of God. So I think he said that uh, I think on probably on his podcast. And now I I differ with John Piper on one thing. He was pretty adamant on not preaching anyone else's sermon, period. Uh he was very strong on that. So don't preach anyone else's sermon, period. Now, someone immediately is going to say, okay, well, what about you know Wesley's 52 standard sermons? Well, I think there's good documentation to say John Wesley did not intend for those to be preached verbatim. Maybe they had been and were, and that's that's I don't think he was against that, but they were standard sermons. They were, they were outlines to give theological direction as well as exemplify the kind of preaching uh that was expected of the Methodists. So uh, you know, were they preached verbatim? Uh it wouldn't surprise me if they were. I don't actually know the answer to that question, but then again, uh they were pretty widely disseminated. So people would have recognized, oh, this guy's preaching Sermon 14 of the 52 standards, right? Uh so that would have been widely, widely recognized. Um so let's get into some of the ethical concerns, some of the issues at stake. Uh one is an ethical concern, and that is uh, what are the ethics of taking someone, what someone else has said, and putting into you know my words, my my sermon. And I want to say f off the bat that permission itself doesn't make something ethical or appropriate. And this is where Ed Lighton got in trouble. So he had, and he came out and said he had permission privately from from J.D. Greer to preach a sermon that J.D. Greer had preached. And so he he preached it again, verbatim. I mean, right, it's it's pretty astounding to watch the side by side. The problem is that was that was taken widely by people in the church and unbelievers as very unethical. So permission does not make something uh ethical or right. Uh now you have to have permission. It's necessary uh if you're going to repeat somebody uh who has packaged something uniquely, but that in itself is not sufficient. There is also a legal concern, and this um I don't want to get sidetracked here, but I'll just mention it because the question has come up uh who owns our sermons, who owns materials? So there was a legal case quite some time ago now, I can't remember who it was. Uh it was one of the large churches, uh, mate like Willow Creek or somewhere there. And the the court ruled that uh the local church that is employing this speaker owns the content of every sermon. So that is important when it comes to reproducing sermons, taking sermons. So right here on Holy Joys, you know, we gain we gain permission, of course, from if it's a sermon, we gain permission from those who have the ability to give that permission to reproduce that. So there is a legal concern there as well. Then there's an attitudinal concern. What's the attitude? Why, why is someone taking something? Is it a lack of discipline? Is it a comparing ourselves with somebody else? Is it a lack of focus? Is there jealousy? Uh, I think uh Carrie uh Neuhoff raises this issue as well, saying uh even if it doesn't even if it doesn't fall fall into the definition of plagiarism, there may still be some sin going on here. Uh that is uh a lack of discipline. So let's talk about some ideas of how to prepare and present a sermon within the ethical concerns that uh have come to the fore and are again, most young people are very aware of these uh in this world of internet resources.
SPEAKER_02I can maybe we can just start talking by talking about what we do personally. Um, not that everyone has to follow the exact method that we lay out, but um, so personally I have a uh template that I just fill in. Uh it has the title, you know, my name, where I preached it, the date, all that stuff, uh, word count, those kind of things. Um, but it's also set up so that uh, you know, the footnotes for footnotes uh smaller. And I always type out the manuscript, even if I don't use it. Sometimes I will um, you know, maybe I'll even leave out whole paragraphs uh and I might just speak extemporaneously, I might summarize, but having written it out, make sure that I'm able to articulate the ideas that I'm trying to communicate. And then when I have citations, I always footnote them. Quotations, I always footnote them, and I don't always format those according to a certain formatting guide. Like I might just type in like uh the author, the book, um, maybe a link, like a hyperlink. Uh sometimes I'll put page numbers, but I won't even always do that. But I know that I can find it, and anybody who looks at my manuscript knows where I got it. Um and then if I am quoting somebody and it is um, unless it's a pretty generic quote. So let me start there. So if it's really generic, if it's something that I could probably find worded almost the same way a couple places, um, I might not, I might not actually say who it's from, like if it's from a commentary or something. Um, but nine times out of ten, if it's a uniquely worded kind of quote, um something that grabs you, something that that I think somebody might quote. It's the kind of thing that somebody might put on a social media or on Twitter or something. Uh, there's even a chance of that. If it's the kind of thing that grabs you, definitely going to say who it's from. And I do not think at all that we need to feel like, oh, well, by by name-dropping, we're somehow like bogging down our sermons. Um, so for example, by by me simply saying, C.S. Lewis said, boom, I don't think that detracts anything from my sermon. I think it actually adds a few things. So one of the things that that I've thought about quite a bit recently is when I preach, I am not just telling people what to think, but I'm teaching people how to think. Um uh one of my friends, Dr. Timothy Cooley, once told me years ago that if somebody sits under my preaching ministry for 20 years or whatever, uh, they should not only know what scripture says, but they should have, they should have watched me model exposition for so long that they are picking up on my exegetical instincts and how to interpret the Bible. So my point here is this. If I when I get up in the pulpit and trying to model good thinking, good thinking is not lone ranger thinking. Good thinking is thinking with others. So when I cite C.S. Lewis, a modern thinker, and Augustine, an ancient thinker, and John Wesley, a thinker from my tradition, and David Fry, one of my friends, that shows my congregation that I am thinking with others, my colleagues, right? I am thinking with people in my own tradition, I'm thinking with people outside my tradition, I'm thinking with people modern and ancient, right? I want people to hear me do that. And I want them, when they they think to themselves, hmm, I really wonder what the Bible teaches about modesty? Well, you don't just go to the Bible and look for proof text, you also want the expectation, right? That creates the expectation that now when they go to study an issue on their own, oh, I really ought to look at what John Wesley said about that, right? Because that's how my pastor does it. And so I think there's great benefit in including those names and the citations in your sermon.
SPEAKER_00Right. And I do the same thing. I I will just kind of my own format put, you know, the name, maybe the last name, a short title, and I usually do put the page number. Rarely do I mention those as I'm speaking. But if it's someone who I think people would recognize, uh then I will, like C.S. Lewis. Uh sometimes I'll mention an early father. Uh, but it's it's it's not all the time, but I will mention them as well for the same reasons as you have mentioned. That's an easy thing to do. In our world of our digital age, if there's a question, our manuscripts should be available. Uh, it's easy to make them available. You say, well, I'm not a manuscript preacher. That's okay. Um, whatever you have, make it available. And uh it is true that in preaching and in conversations and uh in writing, a lot of times an idea will come to our mind and we can't remember where it came from. We know we know we got it from somewhere, but we can't remember where it came from. Uh sometimes we'll use it. And I've watched authors when they're writing do this. They'll say, they'll just say, you know, I remember reading somewhere, or uh, you know, from from somewhere that I've long forgotten this idea came. So it that's how you can do it in writing and preaching, I don't think you have to say that uh because people recognize that uh you know, we're we're we are drawing as pastors, we're drawing from a bunch of sources and trying to put it together into a a sermon that's ours. So uh let let's let's say this if a person, if you are preaching a sermon that is heavily reliant on maybe a single person or a single source, which I have. I recently preached a an Advent sermon that was actually based on several sermons of a single uh preacher. I have I have the book here. And at the beginning, I preface the sermon by saying, I'm drawing heavily from this book, um, which you know is widely available. Uh recommend it. And I'm putting together some thoughts that are scattered across a number of sermons uh from this person and then adding some of my own thoughts. And it ended up that probably 25% of my sermon was, you know, were was quoting from those sermons. Uh, but I just gave one attribution at the beginning, and that was I felt sufficient. Uh and so that that may happen at times. I remember hearing, I actually learned that from a seasoned uh preacher uh in the Cincinnati area who I and I really respected him because he got to the pulpit. He actually had the book with him. He said, today's sermon is drawing heavily from this book right here. And he didn't, he never mentioned the book again. He just went went on. And I and I respected that. There may have been someone there, I wish he had just come up with his own stuff. I was like, I'm impressed. Like he read that book and along with his Bible study to prepare for the sermon. Like, I feel like I'm getting ready for a feast. And uh I I was I was impressed. So I know that there are people who who are um well, there there are a lot of questions that may come up. Let's go ahead and address one of those. How much, like what's overboard? How do you keep a sermon from becoming a lecture or being littered with citations? And so this is where I think the the concept of common knowledge is really important. Um I I mentioned earlier that we're going to talk about that. So let's talk about that now. Uh, common knowledge is knowledge that we find or know we could find in three or more sources. Uh so you mentioned earlier there may be something that is commonly known, but someone packages it, packages it in a just a really unique way. Um if you're gonna if you're gonna use that person's unique way of conveying the truth, then you should you should put a footnote in your sermons. Um But generally speaking, if it's common knowledge, uh you don't need a citation, right? I I don't need a citation for telling someone what the weather is out because I can find three or more sources that will tell me what that is. You know, I don't I don't need uh sources for most of what I'm going to use uh in my and this is true with commentaries as well. A lot of the information we use from commentaries are uh and by the way, I use I always look at at least three commentaries for my sermons as well. Uh most of the information I get from commentaries qualifies as common knowledge, but occasionally there'll be something that doesn't, and this guy will be a little bit unique. You know, I'll footnote that if it's something that's uh not common. So if you're a preacher, especially a preacher who is just starting out or you're still developing your uh your method for preparing your sermon manuscripts, uh, first of all, I do highly recommend that you manuscript your sermons. Uh, whether or not you end up really following it when you're actually giving or not, I I highly recommend manuscripting your sermons uh for your future self as well as others. Secondly, I highly recommend that you make whatever it is you do prepare available in some form and fashion to uh your listeners, to your congregants. And it's really meaningful when someone asks, you know, for my sermon manuscript or when they have a question about something I said, and I can go back to my manuscript because I do follow my manuscripts pretty closely. Uh, and aside from that, it's recorded. So uh I have something to go back to. So I do and do recommend that. And I again I don't recommend I call it litter because we you can you can strain together quotes, and if you're all the time saying, you know, this one comes from C.S. Lewis, this one comes from Augustine, this one comes from Abraham Kuyper, this one comes from Jonathan Arnold. It's just repeatedly uh, you know, you don't want to do that. You want to have the smooth transitions in your sermons. So uh so footnote. It's okay to footnote, get used to, or end note, or whatever it is that you use, somehow note uh your sources uh so that uh you know where to go back to, and others who may want to utilize your sermons will know where to go to as well. Uh those are good practices. And then especially because we are in this live stream and social media world, uh make sure that uh you give verbal attribution uh to those who don't have access to uh your manuscript. Uh give give some some attribution to continually remind people that you are a person who you read and you study and you prepare uh for for your sermon. That's a good thing. That's not a bad thing. Um that's those those are, I think, the ethical expectations of our day. If you're borrowing an outline from someone, give attribution to that and uh acknowledge your dependence. Because a sermon is not about writing something original. In fact, a sermon should be anything but original, right? A sermon is an echo of God, as John Piper put it. It is it is actually going back to what has been said for centuries and packaging it for our the hearers of our day and uh communicating a fresh and a new uh the same old message uh that we have been uh preaching for centuries.
SPEAKER_02Reminds me of Tom Owen, who said uh that his stated goal as a theologian is to say nothing new. And uh our confidence as preachers comes from um thinking with the tradition and uh of course with scripture itself and not standing in the pulpit alone, but on the backs of a lot of great men, which inevitably means we're gonna need to give honor where honor is due and acknowledge their contribution. And I think that brings weight and authority uh to our uh preacher.
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