Pulpit Plagiarism

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though old the thought
and oft exprest
‘Tis his at last
who says it best.
James Russell Lowell

A significant part of preaching to convince is the skill of making a sermon breathe life through illustrations. Paul borrowed from philosophers and prophets; Jesus drew heavily from the Old Testament writers. Some were credited and others not. How’s a preacher to know where to plant the verbal footnote? And what’s fair game to steal — credited or not?

Preachers are rightfully wary of signing their name on another’s illustration. No preacher wants to appear phony or unoriginal when worshipers recognize an unnamed source.

Jamie Buckingham, senior minister of Tabernacle Church in Melbourne, Florida, knows the value of the appropriated thought in his preaching and writing. He has also wrestled with the subtle distinction between a pirate and a parrot, between larceny and license.

The following chapter helps preachers draw the ethical distinction in their own sermons, so their illustrations convince their congregations of something greater than their preacher’s pilferage.

When I bought my Apple IIe Word Processor, I discovered the capabilities of split-screen programming. By pushing the right combination of buttons, I could look at two things simultaneously. The top, for instance, could show data typed in earlier, while the bottom remained blank.

I asked my instructor how this could be useful.

“It is used primarily for plagiarism,” he said candidly. “By putting someone else’s material on the top screen, you can then rewrite it.

“It’s done all the time,” he winked.

I thought of the mess Alex Haley got in when he was accused by an obscure writer of having stolen his material — word for word — to be used in Roots. Too bad Haley didn’t have a split screen.

I almost did the same thing with one of my earlier books. I copied material I thought was a taped interview but turned out to be material my secretary had copied from someone else’s book. Horrors!

Now my computer instructor tells me I’ll never have to face that problem again. With my split screen I can change just enough words that I never have to worry about going to jail.

But a question remains: Is it right?

It is the same question preachers face. For if plagiarism is an occasional problem for writers, it is a weekly problem for preachers.

For instance: Should pastors feel free to preach others’ sermons? If they do, must they give credit for them?

And what about telling stories they’ve heard other people tell — and taking credit for the stories themselves?

To a certain degree, all of us preach other people’s stuff. After all, as Solomon once said, there’s not much new under the sun. Besides, so many in the pulpit today have to preach far beyond what they are creatively equipped to do. Using other pastors’ sermons would be a great help. In fact, preaching sermons already preached by great pulpiteers would teach the rest of us a great deal about homiletics.

On the other hand, it makes me feel slightly uneasy to endorse something like this — which in many other realms would be considered plagiarism — without having a very good basis upon which I could do so.

Of course, in the strictest sense of the word, everyone plagiarizes. In fact, the preceding paragraph was plagiarized from the letter written me by Terry Muck, editor of Leadership, when he first suggested I write on this topic. I lifted it, word for word, and doubt if he or anyone else would have known the difference had I not called attention to it.

This brings up one of the primary reasons for not giving credit. Most speakers hate to break the flow in the middle of a message. It’s much easier to keep going than to confuse the hearer with a score of footnotes plugged into the actual text.

But courtesy calls for gratefulness — as long as it can be given without distracting. Recently the leaders in our church have been studying Richard Foster’s excellent book Celebration of Discipline. I heartily agree with much of what Foster has written and wish I had said it first. But for me to stand in the pulpit and take credit for what originated with him not only would be theft — it would be foolish. I would be quickly spotted carrying stolen goods. I would lose far more credibility (at least in the eyes of my leaders) than I would gain in the eyes of others who might be impressed with my brilliance.

Therefore, it is far easier to say, “I learned something this last week while studying Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline.” Now I am free to take off on whatever tangent I wish. At the same time, I have pointed people back to the genesis of an idea. If they return to the spring to drink — as I have drunk — they, too, may come up with original thoughts, just as I did.

In my early days of preaching, I relied heavily on books of sermons and — perish the thought — books of sermon illustrations. Since a powerful experience with the Holy Spirit in 1968, I have not had to fall back on those. I discovered I had been preaching leftovers, while the Lord had set before me a banquet table from which I could feed the people. (This, by the way, is perhaps the strongest argument against preaching someone else’s material. If it is not your own, if you have not experienced the truth you are preaching, how can it minister life to those who hear it?) But the spring inside me that flows with eternal truth sometimes gets clogged with debris. My pump, then, is often primed by the sermons of others, written, taped, or heard in person.

A preacher friend once joked: “When better sermons are written, I’ll preach them.”

To that I say, “Amen!”

In fact, I hope I am one who will write the better sermons — and that he will not only preach them but improve on them as he does. It is a humbling honor to know that something I originated is now in wider circulation because it is being told from various pulpits where I could never go.

There is a danger, however, in taking someone else’s first-person experience and telling it as though it happened to you. This danger is especially acute in this day of mass media, when some of the people sitting in your congregation may have just heard the author tell the same story on national TV or may have just read the book you swiped your story from. (Incidentally, those folks will not call you a plagiarizer when they get in the car and drive home after church. They’ll call you a liar.)

Sometimes, of course, it works in the other direction. I remember when Charles Allen came to preach in the little South Carolina town where I was pastor of the Baptist church. I had read all of Allen’s books of sermons — and preached most of them.

Some of our folks went down to Main Street Methodist to hear Dr. Allen. One of them came back and told me, “You’ll never believe it, but that lanky old Methodist is preaching your sermons. He even told one of your stories last night and didn’t have the decency to give you credit.”

I held my breath until the week was over and Dr. Allen was safely out of town. At that time I was having enough trouble hiding other things without it being discovered I was stealing sermons as well.

The question is not whether we use material that originates with others. Of course we do. The question is whether we should give credit or not.

Sometimes we don’t want to give credit. The author may be someone who has a bad reputation — or whose works might lead people astray. In such a case, I find it easy to say, “Although I certainly don’t recommend the ideas of Hugh Hefner, I was intrigued by an interview in last night’s paper where he said …”

On the other hand, giving credit often strengthens the message. It lets your people know you are reading — and listening. In short, it adds authenticity. Even though Richard Foster is a legitimate scholar in his own right, he is relatively unknown. Therefore, when he quotes Saint John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or his fellow Quaker Elton Trueblood, it adds credibility to his scholarship. In fact, had he not quoted so widely, many of us would not have read his books.

I am impressed when I attend a mainstream Protestant church and hear the speaker quote a charismatic or Roman Catholic — and give credit. I am attracted when I hear a Pentecostal quote a traditional evangelical. It lets me know the person is hearing what God is saying to the rest of Christendom. In short, the credits often mean as much as the material quoted.

“I was listening to a Charles Swindoll tape last week, and he told of the time …”

“I wish all of you would read Henri Nouwen’s book The Wounded Healer. In the chapter on ‘Ministry to a Hopeless Man,’ he describes a fascinating encounter between …”

“A few years ago Leadership magazine interviewed Dr. Richard Halverson, chaplain of the U.S. Senate. In the interview …”

Perhaps the original material grew out of something informal, such as a staff meeting or home Bible study. If the originator of the idea is local, that is even more reason to give credit and thus encourage the person.

“Last Monday night in our home church meeting, Brooks Watson pointed out something he had learned a number of years ago in engineering school.…”

“In our staff meeting Art Bourgeois touched my heart when he began praying for …”

Giving credit, instead of distracting from your sermon, often leads your listeners into the situation. They wait eagerly to hear what you have gleaned from others.

Courtesy demands a certain amount of credit, and ethics demands you not retell a story as if it happened to you — unless it really did. If you’re afraid the audience will think you stole a story when you didn’t, a simple technique will get you off the hook. All you have to say is: “In his book Where Eagles Soar, Jamie Buckingham confesses the difficulty he had demonstrating physical love to his aged father. It brought to mind a similar experience I had with my own dad.…” From that point on, the story is yours, even though it might sound identical to the one I wrote about.

All preachers have a way of picking up cute phrases, vivid word images, clever bits of dialogue, even snappy one-liners they heard or read from someone else. Certainly Billy Graham didn’t coin the phrase “The Bible says,” but at least for this generation, he made it popular.

Such snatches are below the threshold of requiring attribution. But there is a level that enters the forbidden zone of plagiarism. It happens when we take credit for something valuable which is not genuinely ours.

Recently I heard a preacher at a ministerial convention tell an uproariously funny story of being invited to speak at a strange church and discovering, upon arrival, that it was a drive-in church. His congregation was a large field full of automobiles. He had no eye contact and no way of knowing if anyone was laughing at his jokes. His final dismay came when the pastor whispered in his ear that it was all right to give an invitation for people to accept Christ. He could even pray for the sick. If the people blinked their headlights, they had been saved. If they tooted the horn, they had been healed.

(“Yes, dear brother, I see those headlights out there.”)

I don’t remember the point he was making, but his story was great. As we were leaving the auditorium, I overheard one pastor say to another, “I just got my illustration for next Sunday.” I didn’t ask, but I doubted seriously if he intended to give the original preacher credit for the story.

But for that matter, it doesn’t make much difference. Back in 1974, Kenneth A. Markley, a Rosemead Graduate School psychologist, published the original story in his book Our Speaker This Evening (Zondervan). Dr. Markley, however, had not mentioned the horn blowing. That was added by the preacher to spice up an already good story and perhaps clear his conscience of being a plagiarist.

I wondered, walking away from the auditorium, how many preachers would add yet another twist — maybe turning on the windshield washers if you wanted counseling or releasing the hood latch if you wanted to donate to the visiting speaker’s missionary fund.

Professional writers have strict guidelines concerning plagiarism. One definition is found in A Handbook to Literature by Thrall and Hibbard (Odyssey, 1960):

Literary theft. A writer who steals the plot of some obscure, forgotten story and uses it as new in a story of his own is a plagiarist. Plagiarism is more noticeable when it involves stealing of language than when substance only is borrowed. From flagrant exhibition of stealing both thought and language, plagiarism shades off into less serious things such as unconscious borrowing, borrowing of minor elements, and mere imitation.

Writers and musicians understand this. But while they can copyright words and notes, they cannot copyright an idea. It is in this area that the blacks and whites blend to gray, and each preacher must determine the difference between what is illegal, merely unethical, or permitted.

I remember asking a colleague if anyone ever plagiarized his sermons. He said, no, he’d never said anything worth repeating.

On the other hand, why would anyone publish a book of sermons if he didn’t want them used?

Corrie ten Boom used to say that everything she had written or said was public property. She didn’t want credit. She felt the glory should go to God, who gave her the ideas in the first place. She also felt copyrights were of the Devil. On occasion, her publishers had to hold her down, or she would have given carte blanche permission for anyone to reprint her material without even asking, much less paying a permission fee.

But Tante Corrie was a unique breed. She never did understand why someone would publish something “to the glory of God” and then get upset when another of God’s servants used it without giving the author credit. After all, she used to say, that’s why we put it in print in the first place — to be used.

On the other hand, she was always giving others credit. When she and I wrote Tramp for the Lord, I had to struggle to keep her from naming everyone she had ever talked to about an idea.

Perhaps that’s a good rule to follow: Everything we say is free, and we expect nothing in return. For everything we borrow, we try to give credit — not because credit is due, but because God has a way of blessing honesty.