Way back in 1768, a little-known Baptist pastor named Isaac Backus denounced a growing trend in preaching. By his day it had become quite fashionable to read sermons from a manuscript, instead of preaching extemporaneously. This, Backus argued, was an "upstart notion," a newfangled approach to an old task. And it had two strikes against it. To begin with, "the reading of sermons is a dull way of preaching." (He didn't feel the need to elaborate that point; it just is.) Second, and more troubling, reading sermons from the pulpit made it easy for pastors to plagiarize. Though "people may know that their minister reads other men's works [in the study] yet how can they ever know when he reads his own [in the pulpit]?"

If we stop there, Backus's warning seems like a sampling from the fat folder titled, "The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same." Plagiarizing sermons has only become cheaper and easier with the availability of illustrations, outlines, and full sermon manuscripts online. ...