Your pastor is plagiarizing his sermons; What to do.

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All preachers borrow ideas and illustrations from one another.  I heard Adrian Rogers say, “I got this story from someone who got it from someone who got it from the Lord.”  We all smiled and the purists among us were satisfied.  He gave credit.

But what about when a pastor lifts the sermon in toto–lock, stock, and barrel–from another pastor’s book or website?  Is that right?  Is he guilty of something–possibly something illegal? or at least unethical?  Does he violate some unwritten law somewhere? Should a church be concerned?  And what if you are a member of that pastor’s staff and you are the only one who has learned where he is stealing those sermons?

A friend wrote to ask about this. He asked that we keep his identity anonymous, for obvious reasons.

His pastor is well-loved and highly respected.  A father figure almost.  Quite by accident the staff member discovered where the preacher was getting his sermons on the internet.  The man is preaching them verbatim.

“It’s quite impressive, actually,” he told me. “That he can remember those sermons in such detail.”

The pastor obviously did not give credit to the source of those messages since as far as the congregation knows, the Lord was giving those messages to him directly from on high (as opposed to indirectly, by way of this other guy, the one who spends untold hours in his study, on his knees, working and hammering out those messages).

The pastor is being dishonest, of course.  I’ve known of pastors being fired for such.  And he has lost the respect of his staff member who reported it to me.

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Destroyed for lack of knowledge–and loving it

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“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.  Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest.  Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children” (Hosea 4:6).

There is a reason people reject information that is new or different;  they love to be left alone in their comfortable deceit than to have to deal with all the changes required by the light.

Ignorance is bliss, they say.

The problem–whether with mankind or the redeemed–isn’t exactly a lack of knowledge.  If that were the case, we could remedy the situation by sending everyone back to school.

God would send educators to the church.  Instead, He sent prophets and shepherds.  He sent light-bringers. He sent a Savior.

Neither is the problem that people do not know the truth. Nor that no one has come to tell them the truth.  The problem is not that they have never heard the truth.  The problem is that they have rejected truth when it did come.

They are ignorant because they rejected true knowledge.   This is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were evil.  (John 3:19).

Not knowing something and rejecting the knowledge of something are two different animals.

Over here is someone in darkness who yearns for the light. It comes and he awakens and all is well.  The hour is coming and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live (John 5:25).

Stumbling in the darkness, they spurn the light offered.

The speaker of Truth comes and they run him out of town.  Or scoff and jeer and mock him.

They crucify Him.

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The kind of preaching we like; the type of preacher we want

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Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah.  And there eat bread and there do your prophesying!  But no longer prophesy at Bethel, for it is a sanctuary of the king and a royal residence.” (Amos 7:12-13).

My journal from a number of years back has this:

Got a letter today from a sweet, humble (really), godly lady who criticized the preaching of our Thanksgiving guest preacher.  She said, ‘Notice what he did last Tuesday night.  He told of the 9 thankless lepers and suggested reasons why they did not give thanks. Many people left our church when he was here because of this kind of preaching.”

Our speaker had been the interim pastor before I arrived. For some 18 months he had ministered to our troubled congregation as they tried to recover from a devastating split.  He had been the essence of faithfulness.

She continued, “Our people want line upon line, precept upon precept.”

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Radio spots for your church? Here’s what we did.

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Do churches still buy radio spots?  If you do, here are a few thoughts on the subject.

In a small to medium sized town, your church can probably afford an ongoing promotion of radio spots or a regular daily program.  Not so much in a metropolitan area.

In one sense, I guess I’ve done it all (or most of it!), everything from television broadcasting of our weekly services each Sunday to making 10-second TV spots promoting those broadcasts, to having a daily morning “live” call-in program on a Christian radio station.  I’ve hosted panel discussions on television, been interviewed on other people’s programs, some of them national. Was even on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” once.

When I pastored in Charlotte, NC, a major city with many radio stations and high costs for air time, our church came up with a budget for a series of 30-second spots which I would be recording.  Our committee did the background work and decided on three stations to run the ads.  I drove to each station and recorded the spots once a month.

Here’s what happened at one of those recording sessions.

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Why do church people hang on to their jobs too long?

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“Diotrephes who loves the preeminence…”  (3 John 9)

In one church I served, the assistant pastor had been there for over 25 years and was long past retirement age.  After I learned he was working against my leadership, when our people started talking about his retiring, I jumped on that bandwagon.  We set a date, with his complete involvement, and the congregation gave a generous love offering.  Then, just before the big day, the personnel committee informed me that they were asking him to remain in place.  He would not be retiring.

Yes, they “informed” me. They didn’t ask.

He gladly stayed on, seeing himself as the savior of the church against this young whippersnapper of a pastor.  (I was 46, not exactly a kid.)

And no, he did not return the love gift.

Why would he want to hold onto the job?  It seemed to give him a sense of prestige being a prominent leader in the city’s most storied church.  That and a dollar would have bought him a cup of coffee.

If you conclude I had more problems in that church than just the assistant pastor, you would be correct.  I ended up leaving after only three years on less than ideal terms.

What’s funny about that–sad funny, not ha-ha funny–is that two years later, I heard the new pastor was trying to get him to retire and having a time of it.  I had to smile.

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An illustration you may not wish to use in a sermon

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Coolidge Winesett was an older gentleman who lived in rural Wythe County, Virginia.  His house was old and the toilet was at the end of a long trail. I told you it was rural.

One Saturday a few years back, according to the Danville, Virginia, paper, Coolidge was sitting on the toilet when the rotten floor gave way.  He was plunged into the 15 foot deep pit which was half filled with the muck and mire (I’m bending over backwards here to keep it nice) of decades of use.  He was injured and in pain, and unable to get out.  He yelled and yelled, but because of the isolation of his place, no one heard him.  Soon he was hoarse and gave up yelling.

On Sunday, it rained.  Big rats came into the toilet along with all kinds of creepy-crawly things.

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Is there any encouragement? Then, let’s hear it.

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“This hope we have as an anchor for our souls” (Hebrews 6:19).

Richard John Neuhaus, a Christian social critic, was picked up at the Pittsburgh airport and driven to his speaking engagement.  The entire drive, his host lamented about the disintegration of the American social fabric and the absence of Christian values in our culture.  Cases in point were too numerous to mention, but the man did anyway.  On and on, he railed against every known failure of humans, particularly his favorite sins.  Finally, as they neared their destination, Neuhaus offered these words of advice:  “Friend, the times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Never forget, hope is a Christian virtue and despair a mortal sin.”

Hope is a virtue.  Despair a mortal sin.

If there is one group of people on the planet who should be forever hopeful and expectant, it’s the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If you want to see hope in the flesh, find a dedicated fisherman.  Someone asked one of those guys, “How can you stand it to stay out here in the hot sun all day without catching anything?”  The fisherman said, “Hold it–I think I feel something.”  When the line went slack, he said, “He’ll be back.”  Then, he turned to his friend and said, “What were you saying?”

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Loving the masses, one by one by one

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While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure;  but after the battle, these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.  –Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs”

“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”  –Joseph Stalin

“I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”  –Lucy, in “Peanuts”

Pastors, young ones in particular, have to conquer this challenge or forever pay a huge price.  It’s one thing to love a crowd, but another entirely to love that quarrelsome family, the cranky old curmudgeon, the gossip in the congregation, the unwashed homeless guy who wandered into your service, and the deacon who is dead-set on making you unemployed.

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son….  That would say to us that His love was not an abstractiont, not theoretical, and not just so much rhetoric.  Our Heavenly Father expressed His love by the supreme act of self-giving.

The radio preacher said into the night air waves, “Beloved, I love you.”  Everything inside me rebelled at such a claim.  How can he love someone he doesn’t even know?  Someone he will never see or have any dealings with?  He loves the concept of people, if he even does that.

Love is so easy to toss around, but so hard to live out.

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Go home again? We all try it from time to time.

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For two years after college, I worked as the secretary to the production manager in a cast iron pipe plant in Tarrant City, a suburb of Birmingham. I took shorthand, wrote Mr. Hooper’s letters, typed up instructions for the foundry and orders for the shipping.  I worked the teletype and emptied Mr. Hooper’s spittoon.

It was unlike anything I had ever done before or did afterward.  I loved everything about those two years.  We were young marrieds, and soon with a baby son, and in addition to working at the plant, I was beginning to pastor a small church 25 miles north of the city. Everything was new and fresh, scary and untried, and the adrenalin was always pumping.

In college, I had majored in history planning to be a teacher, so to say my theological education was lacking is the understatement of the year.  I had no idea how to prepare a sermon or to deliver it once I came up with one.  So every week I re-invented the wheel.  The sermons were pitiful, but they were sincere efforts from this eager, naïve, kid preacher. Give Unity Baptist Church of Kimberly, Alabama credit; they were patient.  For the entire 14 months I remained with them.  Smiley-face here.

They paid me 10 dollars a week.  My tithe was twelve.  In one sense, I was paying them for the privilege of pastoring.  It was money well spent.  Another smiley-face.

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Pastoring: Giving it the personal touch

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“I just called to say I love you…” –Stevie Wonder

My journal for the 1990s records something I never want to forget.

We were trying to line up 15 freezers of homemade ice cream for a church fellowship the following Sunday evening.  My assistant always had trouble getting enough freezers because he tried to do it from the pulpit.   A mass appeal like that makes it far too easy for people to ignore.

The best way to do this is by asking the people personally.

Profound, huh?

So, in order to make a point with my assistant, I made the phone calls.  In the process, I ended up making a huge discovery.  Or possibly a re-discovery.

Here is the Journal notation from a couple of days later, awkward syntax and all.

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