The Open Source Ministry Blog

Out Of Ur has a post on Preachers Plagiarizing Sermons. I don’t think this is new, or necessarily wrong.

During my graduation, the speaker gave a nod to the preacher of the church where the service was being held (I graduated through a Christian school) and then proceded to use a wonderful illustration that preacher had used in a sermon. The funny thing was that the illustration was a key part from one of my dad’s regular sermons (he was often called as a guest preacher so he culled his sermons down to just his favorite few). The preacher then leaned over to my dad and said, “by the way, thanks for the semon.”

As a preacher myself I had some rules for “sermon stealing”

• Make it your own. Don’t just use a sermon, understand it and get behind it with your heart. Care about what you are preaching. Otherwise you have that resounding gong / clanging cymbals thing going on and nobody like to listen to that.
• Check for accuracy. (see post on Rick Warren)
• Don’t use it verbatim. If you talk about your childhood in West Virginia and the congregation knows you grew up in Indiana (I’m a Hoosier), then you are not only busted but you just distracted people from the point.
• Stick the original preacher’s name into the sermon where you use their content. They will probably figure you got it from someone else anyway, this at least makes you sound well read.
• Remember that the point of a sermon is not to make yourself look better, but to bring people closer to God than they were before the opening prayer.

I spent a lot of time digging through SermonCentral.com and SermonIllustrations.com and got a lot of great inspiration, indeed Google was my friend as well. I cannot remember actually taking someone else’s sermon and presenting it word for word as my own. I usually disagreed too much with how they did it to do that. I did stick pretty close to the 40 Days of Purpose sample sermons, but only because they were to be presented as one part of the full package for the week. I preached on the 5 purposes a couple years before 40 DoP came out and actually preferred those sermons to Rick Warrens, but I might be biased.