Stealing Sermons

I just read an article by pastor Steve Sjogren on why we should quit wasting all those hours in sermon preparation. Instead, he says, we should just use the sermons of others. I don't know whether to scream or cry.

Sjogren writes: "I regularly read the blogs of my favorite communicators from influential churches around the United States. Without mentioning their names in this article, they are young guys who are well-known to everyone reading this piece. They are all authors. They all have very large churches.

"Each of these pastors has recently come out on their blogging sites and admitted, curiously, the same thing. They get approximately 70 percent of their messages each week from other people – word for word according to them. They fill in their own personal illustrations and stories, of course. Two of the guys that I am thinking of as I write this have churches of more than 10,000 in attendance each weekend.

"We need to get over the idea that we have to be completely original with our messages, each and every week. In my mind there is a tremendous amount of pride (let's call it what it is) when we insist on being completely original as communicators. In our desire to give 'killer messages' we are dishing out something far less. Think about it for a second: If you really were giving a killer message each week, would your church be the size that it is right now? Maybe you need to be open to doing things a different way.

"After listening to tens of thousands of messages over the last 30-plus years as a leader, I have come to the conclusion that there are probably only a handful of truly unique communicators in a given generation. And those communicators are almost always the kinds of messengers who speak to already-believers, not the kind who can connect with not-yet believers.

"What is a leader to do? First of all, stop all of this nonsense of spending 25 or 30 hours a week preparing to speak on the weekend. The guys I draw encouragement from – the best communicators in the United States – confess they spend a total of about 15 hours preparing for their message. As I have already said, they get 70 percent of their material from someone else. Remember, Solomon wrote that 'there is nothing new under the sun ...'" (Click here to read the full article.)

Where do I start? First, the idea that drawing a big crowd is the goal of preaching is an utterly destructive notion that can tempt us to cut ethical corners and modify the message in order to entertain and pull numbers. Do we want the church to grow? Absolutely! Is it more enjoyable to preach to a big crowd than a handful? Ususally is for me. But God did not call us to draw crowds; He called us to faithfully preach His Word. A lot of people through the years have been able to draw great crowds to hear their dynamic speaking, but many of them are people we would never dream of trying to emulate. When pastors get the mistaken notion that their primary purpose is to build a big crowd, they are heading into dangerous territory.

Is it OK to use the insights of others as we preach? Absolutely. When I prepare messages, I read sermons by others on the same text/theme, and I regularly find illustrations, textual insights, or other observations that I draw on for my own message. Sometimes I draw extensively from the sermon of another preacher; when that happens, I find a way to tell my listeners about that source (in a way that doesn't become distracting). And I know that others have drawn on my work for their sermons; I know because other preachers have told me, and I'm glad! We are all in this task together, and we have much to learn from each other.

But that is vastly different than what Sjogren proposes -- to lift another person's sermon in total and preach it as your own. That is called plagiarism -- another word would be stealing. You can dress it up in all the rationalizations you like, but when I take something someone else has done and present it as my own work, I am stealing -- compounded by the fact that I am also deceiving a congregation, giving them the impression I have done something I really didn't do. Would we look kindly on a staff member who told us he had made several pastoral calls, only to find out he got someone else to go on his behalf?

The reality is that in adopting the practice of regularly preaching others' sermons as my own, I'm also stealing from myself. Part of the passion and power that comes through the preaching of God's Word is generated by the challenging work of praying over a biblical text, studying it, and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide me toward a message. It's the old illustration of the butterfly and the cocoon -- the struggle to escape the cocoon is what ultimately gives the butterfly the strength to fly. Take away the struggle and you take away the power.

If you believe that preaching is simply sanctified acting -- just a performance on Sunday morning, with the pulpit as your stage -- then using someone else's script is perfectly acceptable. But if you believe that the preaching of God's Word is a sacred moment in which God speaks to men and women through an empowered human messenger, then how dare we take an easy shortcut that abandons the transforming power that can come through the process of preparing a message from God's Word.

If you are too busy to prepare sermons, then you are too busy to preach.