Plagiarism for the Glory of God?

I recently received the following e-mail that I wanted to share with you. Names have been removed to protect the sarcasm of the sender:

Brent,
You might want to check out this article, especially since you’ve been so busy lately — it might be a great time-saver! I hate to see you wasting all that time studying.

Knowing the author of said e-mail, I thought that I had a reasonable idea of what to expect when I arrived at the article. I was wrong. In fact, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I had seen “Rick Warren’s Tool Box” before, a website with article and resources claiming to help equip pastors, but I’ve honestly never spent much time there.

In case you haven’t guessed from the illustration by David Julian, the article essentially advocates plagiarism from the pulpit. The article’s author, Steve Sjogren, introduces the article with these words (I apologize up-front for the large number of block quotes following, but I wanted to very clearly let the article speak for itself):

There has been much talk in recent years on blogs and Web sites about how much of other people’s sermons are appropriate to incorporate into your own messages. When does it get to the point of “plagiarism”?

Sjogren then discusses an interview with Dr. Cho, pastor of “the world’s largest church in Korea” (which must mean he’s doing something right!). Cho was asked how he prepares his weekly sermons because “They’re so powerful.” Sjogren records Cho as responding:
Honestly, I have never given an original message in all my years of ministry here at Yoido Church. Each week, I preach word-for-word messages from either Billy Graham or W.A. Criswell from Dallas First Baptist Church. I can’t afford to not have a home run each weekend when we gather. I don’t trust my own ability to give completely original messages.

Sjogren then notes that he “regularly read(s) the blogs of my favorite communicators from influential churches around the United States.” I find it telling that he doesn’t refer to them as “pastors,” but that’s another point entirely. Sjogren then notes that each of these “communicators” (although at this point he does refer to them as 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” (which, again must mean that they are truly honoring God, right?).

In case there’s any confusion about Sjogren’s own position towards this practice, he says quite clearly:

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.

I honestly couldn’t believe that I read that. So I re-read it and re-read it and re-read it until I was clear: Sjogren just said that it is prideful to carry the notion that pastors ought to write their own sermons, because we all share a desire to “give “killer messages,” which means “wowing” the “audience” every week! He then asks a very telling question: “If you really were giving a killer message each week, would your church be the size that it is right now?” My heart sank at these words. In Sjogren’s article we have reached the epitome of not only pragmatism, but of elevating numbers to the gauge of success or failure in ministry. In applying this message, Sjogren argues that leaders need to:

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 …”

He then outright urges that we “Borrow creatively from others in the Church world” and that we need to “forget about originality – which is often a form of pride. Let’s begin to focus on effectiveness, and pray that we will be powerful at connecting with not-yet believers.” He then closes the article by stating:

A wise mentor of mine brought great liberty to me when he was coaching me in the area of how to put messages together. He said, “There once was a man who said, ‘I will be original or nothing;’ in the end he became both.” Dare to step out of the box. Regardless of what you have heard or been taught – hit a homerun this weekend with the help of a message master!
The real issues here are not even about originality, but about respect for the Word and obedience to Christ’s command of making disciples (Matthew 28:18-20) as our principle ends. Sjogren has reduced effective preaching to mere pragmatics and numbers. How do you know when you are preaching “homeruns,” when you have numbers and if you don’t have numbers, then you ought to consider cutting corners and refashioning your product! This is a blatant lack of respect for the Word and the Church and in the end, God will not honor such approaches. Large numbers sometimes mean that more ears are being tickled than souls edified (2 Timothy 4:3), yet such concerns do not seem to appear on Sjogren’s radar.

The very notion that we must preach “homeruns” is in itself misguided and borrows more from marketing than Scripture. Not that we do not strive for excellence, we certainly do, but the excellence that we strive for is properly understanding, explaining and applying the Word, not “wowing” our audience. If that happens in the process, that’s fine, but once that “wow” becomes our focus, we’ve lost sight of true preaching. The question of the

“communicator/preacher/pastor” as “entertainer is a crucial one. Is it possible that driving a Corvette and pulling things from the trunk while you preach on letting God deal with “your junk in the trunk” is perhaps going too far?

Is it pride for a minister to strive to adequately understand and apply the Word? Is it pride to think that a pastor ought to actually write the words he presents as his own? Is it pride to let our “yes be yes” and our “no be no” (James 5:12)? We cannot tolerate views such as this one that lowers the church from being the “pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15) to nothing more than a marketing model and business approach. We would do well to remind Sjogren that “we who teach will be judged with greater strictness,” (James 3:1-2) and that God’s business is never truly accomplished using man’s methods. What works for the world does not work for the church. Oh that we would be a generation that takes the preaching of the Word seriously rather than simply as a pragmatic means to an end…

1. Read Steve Sjogren’s article “Don’t Be Original - Be Effective!”


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