Claudine Gay was only president of Harvard for six months before she had to resign due to charges of plagiarism. One could argue that the politics surrounding her resignation had more to do with her tolerance for antisemitism on Harvard’s campus, but plagiarism was the formal charge. In light of the great anxiety AI is causing the world of academia, there is a certain irony when the heads of academic institutions must face the reckoning of their own “old-school” plagiarism.
The pulpit faces its own challenge in regards to plagiarism. A friend recently told me that he had ChatGPT write a sermon on a specific text in the style of a well know preacher and it came up with a complete manuscript. Every week, thousands of churches live stream their services, meaning that there are thousands of sermons available online. From the president of the SBC to mega-church pastors, accusations of plagiarizing sermons are becoming more and more common. Some have gone so far as to defend this practice.
From one perspective, it’s easy to justify stealing someone else’s sermon. We all preach from the same book. There are a limited number of commentaries on the books that we preach about. So many of us (well, I have) have preached so many bad sermons, sometimes it seems like it would be better to lift a really good sermon from someone else – for the sake of our people, of course. But this brings up the question of why a congregation couldn’t live-stream a well known preacher at their gathering every week and just have church administrators. Essentially, this is what a multi-site church already does.
But every congregation should expect that the main sermon of the week – which for most churches in the United States would be the Sunday morning service– would be an original sermon delivered by their pastor. Occasionally, he might borrow heavily (preferably with attribution) from something that really impacted or inspired him. But his regular practice is to deliver an original sermon.
I take it as axiomatic that a sermon is different than a lecture. A lecture could be lifted from one context and given in another with a minimum of modification and be no better or worse for it. A sermon is given to a particular group of people by a particular person in a particular time and place. Let’s break that down a little bit.
A particular person delivers the sermon, and this person is the Pastor. He has a responsibility for the spiritual well being of his flock. He must know how to exhort, instruct, rebuke, confront, and comfort. Because He will one day give an account not only for himself, but also for the people under his care, He will necessarily speak to his people differently than any other person would speak to those people. A few years ago I commented to a friend that I thought he preached “pastorally”, and his expression revealed that he wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult. I intended it as a compliment, because he is a pastor, and is therefore doing the work of preaching as a pastor should.
The pastor delivers his sermon to a particular people in a particular time and place. He isn’t preaching on a street corner to random pedestrians. The communal life of a church has a rhythm to which the pastor is attuned. He understands the context in which his people are living and this informs the way he delivers his sermon and the application that he chooses to make from the text. Additionally, I believe there is a spiritual mood that a good pastor/preacher can sense as he is delivering his sermon. This may mean that he must stop and further clarify, exhort, or engage his congregation at different points in the sermon. The pastor is uniquely called and equipped to preach to the flock. To simply lift another man’s sermon would be a great disservice to the people listening. But there is more.
John Stott’s “Between Two Worlds -the Challenge of Preaching Today” gives us much to think about just in the title. To preach well, one must know the Word and the people. Since we have already discussed the unique calling of a pastor to know His people, we should (briefly) consider the requirement that a preacher know the Word.
The modern world is filled with knowledge, and much of it is contained online. I recently changed the brakes on my minivan and was greatly helped by YouTube, but I would never claim to be a mechanic on the basis of that one experience. The preacher who lifts his sermon online from someone else may understand what he is saying as he says it, but that falls short of what it means to engage with a biblical text.
I use a lot of yellow notepads, even though I’m a pretty decent typist. I can type faster than I can write with pen and paper. But there is value in the measured pace and tactile nature of hand writing. It takes time and thought for a text to seep into the soul, particularly if life is otherwise busy. I hate the feeling (although I have experienced it far more often that I would like) of walking into the pulpit without being gripped by the sermon text. The old saying is true: the preacher doesn’t have a grip on the text until the text has a grip on him. It is this wrestling with the text that gives the preacher the authority and authenticity to deliver a message. In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, the preaching of the apostles was received as the Word of God itself. (Side note – some pastors might respond that the demand of their ministry is such that it would be impossible to invest time in the text every week. This is an ecclesiastical problem that needs to be addressed but I don’t believe is a valid excuse.)
I can leave a lot of room for grace when it comes to this issue: we don’t need to judge this type of thing as persnickety as a grad school judges a thesis. The heart of the distinction is whether the preacher has invested his own time and energy into understanding and being changed by the text before taking that text to his congregation.
It’s easy to imagine a world in which a church has random members come up on stage and spin a large wheel to determine the sermon text, after which another member spins a wheel to determine the style of the preaching. The holographic musicians play incredibly while ChatGPT organizes the sermon and then and a life-size avatar on a screen preaches it. You know, as I write this I recognize that what seems like satire can turn into reality in a hurry, so now I’m worried that I just gave someone the world’s worst idea. But once you accept that you are better off with your preacher ripping off a better preacher’s sermon, you might as well make that leap. Instead, be content with a preacher who might never deliver a famous sermon, but who weekly does the hard work of laboring between two worlds.
Nathan Writes 