If preachers pass off other people's work as their own, they automatically limit themselves to preaching about only eight commandments. “Thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not bear false witness” become off-limits.
But preachers can avoid plagiarism by beginning at the right place—giving time and attention to the biblical text before reading or listening to other people's sermons about the text, said Joel Gregory, professor of preaching at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary.
“To be sure you're not plagiarizing, do your own exegetical work,” Gregory said. “Take the text into yourself, and let the text speak through your personality. Once we as preachers stop doing our own exegetical work, that's when we start putting somebody else's stuff in the meditative microwave.”
Authentic preaching remains true to the text and true to the experience of the preacher, he added.
Years ago, Gregory asked Ray Summers—longtime seminary professor and religion department chair at Baylor University—how he listened to sermons. Summers told him the first thing he wanted to hear was the element of testimony.
“I believe that is a hallmark of effective preaching,” Gregory said, noting the importance of “truth as testimony” in preaching.
“I want to know what the preacher has experienced of the truth being preached.”
Naturally, that means it is “always out of bounds” for a preacher to use another speaker's first-person stories, he said.
But that doesn't mean every sermon must be a totally original creation for which the preacher owes no debt to anyone who has preached from the same text before.
“As one friend has said, ‘Originality is an oversold idea,'” said Beth Newman, ethics professor at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.
When it comes to the use of source material, intent matters, Newman noted. “I think a key distinction (between plagiarism and honest research) involves the use of other's work with the intent to deceive,” she said.
Faithfulness to the Scripture—rather than originality—should take priority, she insisted.
Gregory agreed—at least up to a point—that preachers benefit from listening to or reading sermons by other preachers. He draws a distinction between originality and creativity.
“Creativity stimulates creativity,” he said.
“Listening to someone else's sermon can give a preacher a different angle of view on a text. A lot of landscape painters can paint the same landscape in different ways. … Creativity means taking the same stuff and making different connections.”
Faithfulness to the listeners in a particular place rules out the option of the preacher who “simply goes online, prints out a sermon and preaches it,” Newman added.
Sermons are messages “to a particular body and should reflect the pastor's knowledge and relationship with a particular congregation,” she said.
“The sermon is an ‘occasional' event—like a conversation, in some ways—not to be preserved for the ages.”
With additional reporting by Jim White, Editor.