A prayer attributed to the memorial service for Oklahoma City bombing victims came by e-mail. Bob Guffey, associate pastor of First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana, recognized it instead as a prayer from Marian Wright Edelman’s Guide My Feet. Though the prayer may have been used at the service, it was written by Edelman and published in a copyrighted book. The e-mail made no mention of that.
Guffey wouldn’t have broken the law if he had quoted the poem in a sermon, but the author deserves the proper attribution. And if the message is published or broadcast, the preacher and the church could be violating copyright law. The greater risk is the loss of credibility when someone in the congregation knows you’ve fallen for spam and preached it as meat.
Guffey’s experience demonstrates the best and worst of the Internet. An incredible array of information awaits your fingertips in cyberspace, but a lot of it is untrue.
Some of the e-mails I receive are fascinating, amazing, miraculous—and wrong. No one is in charge of the accuracy of quotes, historical accounts, or purported archaeological discoveries in cyberspace.
All that glitters
With so much to sift through, surfing for sermon illustrations is like panning for gold—you go through lots of dirt before finding a precious nugget of insight.
How do you sort through the glut of material? A search for “prayer” on altavista.com will produce more than 2 million sites. Even a word like “righteousness” produces more than 97,000.
The question is no longer, Can I find an illustration? It’s Can I use what I find? And Is it trustworthy?
One principle that helps me is sticking to reliable sites such as LEADERSHIP’s www.PreachingToday.com or Preaching magazine’s www.preaching.com and other ministry-oriented sites (like www.goshen.net). And secular news sites like www.usatoday.com and www.cnn.com offer good, verified material.
Spam, served rare
Sometimes, though, an e-mail illustration is tempting.
Occasionally one of the stories I receive stands out (every preacher has a “that’ll preach!” gene that recognizes such illustrations). However, when I try to verify it—where it came from, who said it—the answer is almost always the same: nobody knows.
It used to take months or even years for a good rumor to travel the church bulletin circuit. Now a rumor can be told worldwide in a few hours on the Internet.
If you’ve gotten an e-mail story and want to verify it, try the searchable database at www.snopes.com that debunks the bogus and confirms the genuine.
If you choose to use an illustration that has no verifiable source, beware, the Net-savvy in your congregation can smell Spam. They may even have received the story you plan to use, and, if they’re like me, doubt its authenticity. In your sermon, at the least, admit it comes from the Internet.
An e-llustration should pass the plausibility test, but more important, it must pass the good judgment test. Though we all might be tempted on a Saturday night, the accessibility of information must not lead us in our haste to use illustrations from dubious sources.
Michael Duduit is editor of Preaching magazine and executive vice president of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee (mduduit@uu.edu).
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