[Vision2020] Word for Word: Everyone is Doing It!

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

World Magazine is a large circulation weekly put out by conservative 
Christians, and the article below focuses on plagiarized sermons and also 
Wilson/Wilkins' slavery booklet.  (Scroll down if you want to see just this 
part.) I was interviewed for this piece about a year ago and it's good to 
finally see it.

Just a few points before you read it: 1) The final signature count, while 
most Palouse academics were out of town, was 66; 2) Wilkins admits to doing 
it; 3) Wilson fesses up more than he did to the local press; and 4) Wilson 
claims that he apologized to the authors of Time on the Cross.

I'm still waiting for the publication of The Black and the Tan and eager to 
see how much the text has changed.

Nick Gier

WORD FOR WORD
RELIGION: More and more pastors lift entire sermons off the internet—but is 
the practice always wrong? | by Gene Edward Veith

Glenn Wagner was a successful mega-church pastor in Charlotte, N.C., until 
one of his elders heard a sermon on the radio that was identical to one he 
had heard from the pulpit. Mr. Wagner confessed that he had been preaching 
other people's sermons off and on for two years, including some he 
broadcast on Christian radio. He resigned from his ministry last fall.

A similar case occurred after members of the National City Christian Church 
in Washington, D.C., found on the internet sermons that Alvin O'Neal, 
moderator of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a celebrated 
preacher in that denomination, had preached. Mr. O'Neal apologized for his 
actions and remains in his ministry.

A number of lesser-known ministers across the country have also been caught 
stealing sermons. Sometimes it makes the newspapers, but other times 
congregations or denominations handle the matter quietly.

But is preaching a sermon written by someone else as serious an ethical 
lapse as academic plagiarism? Does a sermon really have to be original or 
are people overreacting to a common practice in the ministry?

Preaching canned sermons has a long history. During the Reformation, Martin 
Luther wrote out sermons that were inherited from the medieval church for 
the theologically illiterate clergy to preach to their people. Up through 
the 19th century, sermons were regularly published, and there are many 
accounts of them being preached in other churches. The great preacher 
Charles Spurgeon tells in his autobiography about how he was ministered to 
by his own sermon when he heard another pastor preach it.

Some pastors argue that there is nothing wrong with preaching another 
person's sermons.

"The question is whether this pastor is a faithful shepherd preaching and 
teaching the full counsel of God," said David Bayly, pastor of Christ the 
Word Presbyterian Church in America in Toledo, Ohio. "Specifically, is what 
he is preaching true? Does it meet the spiritual need of his flock at the 
point at which it is preached? Is it faithful to the Word? No honest pastor 
will be quick to criticize a fellow pastor for being helped at times by the 
work and words of another."

Other pastors disapprove. "The best sermons are those that are preached 
from the heart. People listening to sermons know when they are hearing a 
performance and when they are hearing a genuine, sincere, authentic 
sermon," said Paul McCain, interim president of Concordia Publishing House.

Preaching borrowed sermons is probably more common than most people 
realize. "Pulpit resources" are available to pastors, often providing 
full-blown sermons. Stewardship programs, Lenten series, and promotions for 
special services (such as pro-life Sundays) often come with ready-made 
sermons. Popular authors such as Max Lucado and Chuck Swindoll—ministers 
whose books are usually compiled from their sermons—are regularly plundered.

With the internet, whole sermons are online for users to search either by 
biblical text or topic. Sermons.org offers Baptist sermons free of charge. 
The plaintively titled DesperatePreacher.com charges $39.95 per year.

The largest site, SermonCentral.com, charges $9.95 per month and claims to 
be used more than 170,000 times per week. PreachingToday.com, a venture of 
Christianity Today, gives subscribers access to a database of sermon 
illustrations, outlines, preaching tips, and other resources for $49.95 a 
year. Christianity Today also sells full-text sermons at a sister site, 
PreachingTodaySermons.com, at $4.95 each. The site lists as "Top Sellers" 
sermons by Lee Strobel, Chuck Swindoll, and Bill Hybels.

Craig Brian Larson, editor of Preaching Resources for Christianity Today 
International and the editor of PreachingToday.com, said he is concerned 
that the service could be abused, with pastors simply downloading sermons 
and preaching them as their own. Mr. Larson said the site has posted a 
statement saying that credit for the sermons should always be given.

Kent Edwards, president of the Evangelical Homiletics Society and a 
professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, cites "the pressure 
today's preachers face to be effective communicators" as the reason some 
get mired in plagiarism.

Many pastors simply do not have the time and lack the homiletical skills 
necessary to produce high-quality and culturally relevant sermons, he said. 
"They have succumbed to the expectations of their churches to be 
omni-competent and omnipresent."

Nevertheless, according to Mr. Edwards, "If at the end of a sermon a 
congregation incorrectly believes that a preacher authored the sermon, then 
the preacher is guilty of deception."

Pastors are better off allowing adequate time to prepare a sermon and 
getting advanced training in how to create their own engaging sermons, Mr. 
Edwards said. "Learning from a master is wonderful. Pretending that the 
work of the master is your own is wrong."

And before desperate preachers download Sunday's sermon from the internet, 
they might consider something their congregations would get more out of 
than amusing anecdotes and vivid word pictures: Take a passage from the 
Bible and preach that.

Doug Wilson and slavery

Southern Slavery: As it Was, a booklet defending slavery as biblically 
viable, has roused considerable controversy since its release in 1996. 
Critics of co-authors Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins have added to their 
content-driven charges of racism and shoddy history one more accusation: 
plagiarism.

The text failed 24 times to attribute word-for-word quotations pulled from 
the 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by 
Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. University of Washington 
history professor Tracie McKenzie, who attends a Seattle-area church 
connected to Mr. Wilson's Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, easily recognized 
the stolen sections because he teaches on the work of Mr. Fogel and Mr. 
Engerman.

Concerned with both plagiarism and the content of Southern Slavery, Mr. 
McKenzie drafted a response pointing out what he saw as poor historical 
conclusions and detailing the plagiarized sections.

After reviewing Mr. McKenzie's document, Mr. Wilson pulled Southern Slavery 
from the shelves in 2003 with the intent of correcting attribution 
oversights for a second edition. Now set for publication in the coming 
months under the title Black and Tan, the 150-page new edition reduces 
Southern Slavery to a single chapter and adds other essays on slavery, 
culture war, and Scripture in America. Mr. Wilson told WORLD the original 
thesis that slavery wasn't bad enough to justify violent abolitionism 
remains prominent.

The absence of plagiarism may not quiet opposition. University of Idaho 
philosophy professor Nick Gier collected the endorsements of 45 local 
academics for a widely circulated flier condemning the plagiarism. Steve 
Wilkins, pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Monroe, La., admits 
to authoring every plagiarized section: "It wasn't [Mr. Wilson's] doing. It 
was my fault, not his fault."

Nevertheless, Mr. Wilson, who edited the booklet, has taken the brunt of 
the criticism. The charges fuel an ongoing spat between Christ Church and 
the Moscow community, a quarrel to which Mr. Wilson admits his blunt style 
has contributed, but one he blames more heavily on community intolerance: 
"This is the first issue where we deserve the lump on our head. There's no 
question it was wrong and inappropriate."

Canon Press, a ministry of Christ Church and publisher of Southern Slavery, 
issued a letter of apology to the publisher of Time on the Cross, and no 
legal action appears imminent.
—Mark Bergin —•



"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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