Sermon Plagiarism

 Once again, in preacher circles at least, the question of sermon plagiarism has come back up. This time, there’s an accusation leveled against one of the people who aggressively attacked a friend of mine for supposed plagiarism a few years ago. Because I have not fully examined the evidence, much less asked the preacher in question for his explanation, I’m not going to name him here. Unfortunately, this comes up enough times that you’ll probably end up wondering “which one?” rather than “who?”

First and foremost, let’s establish what “plagiarism” is: it’s the use of someone else’s words and intellectual property without acknowledging you got it from them. That’s my summary, if you want a full definition, here’s a good link. It’s essentially theft: someone else did the work, invested the resources to study and develop, and then the plagiarist stole it and used it as his own.

This is not the same as research, where one works from sources and then creates a new product. Research uses resources that were created to aid the preacher in developing a sermon: the author of that commentary expected you to read the commentary, learn more about the passage, and work what you learned into your sermon.

One difference in sermon plagiarism and academic plagiarism is that most academic work is written-first, even if the paper is delivered out loud in a seminar or lecture. The written document is part of your presentation and typically available for review. Therefore, the footnotes on the paper show what your sources were, your bibliography section shows additional places you found general info. (If you have endnotes, you have succumbed to the evil. TURABIAN FOREVER!)

Sermons are not sermons until they are preached. It’s a delivered medium, even though written sermons also carry the truth, a sermon is intended to be preached. Now, in an ASL (or other Sign Language church), it’s preached with the hands but there is still a live component. I would assert that this is necessary to make it a sermon. Otherwise, it’s a letter, a note, an essay…it’s a bit hard to check the footnotes of a sermon in the midst of the delivery. It would also be quite disruptive to either pause and cite or wrap-up the message with 3-5 minutes of source disclosure. You’d sound like a medication ad with the fast-talking fine print.

Typically, when we talk about sermon plagiarism, we’re talking about lifting direct quotes from other authors without giving any attribution. For example, lifting a paragraph directly from a commentary without making note that you are using those words exactly. Or quoting another preacher but presenting the words as your own.

An example here would be if I were to preach on prayer and say that “Prayer isn’t preparation for the work, prayer is the work.” That’s pretty close to the way Oswald Chambers puts it in My Utmost for His Highest. I should attribute that to him, because I didn’t think of it and the only places I’ve seen it are either Chambers or people quoting Chambers.

It gets a little sticky when preachers use material from other preachers, even if you have permission from the other preachers. You should still be forthcoming that someone else put it the way you are putting it.

Truth be told, no Biblical sermon is original. Someone else has been part of your formation and development. You’ve read Study Bibles, devotionals, commentaries, dictionaries, histories, and essays. You’ve heard sermons, lessons, hymns, and lectures. All of this forms the preacher.

What, then, do we do?

First: make sure your church knows that you are using resources to grow. If your church, like mine, has more than just Sunday morning times, use one of those to introduce attendees to your resources. I try, every time I start a new series (usually I’m preaching through a section of the Bible,) to use either a Sunday night or a Wednesday night to walk through “this is where I’ve been studying for this sermon series.” It’s a bit nerdy and you have to do it without being boring, but the main thing here is to show that you are learning.

It’s also helpful for your congregation to hear you attribute your learning to others. Mention pastors, preachers, professors that have influenced you.

And if you use something very direct, make it plain that it is direct: ‘Folks, I was at the State Preacher Extravaganza and heard a sermon on this. I thought I would try to share some of the same thoughts here.’ Or, ‘I just finished reading this book, and I thought the outline of this chapter made for a great sermon. So I wrote the sermon, here it is.’ I don’t think you should preach a sermon someone else wrote. I don’t even think you should preach a sermon someone else did more than 25% of the work on, but that’s another post.

Now, a few caveats:

I think there is a place to preach historically significant sermons if your congregation will listen and you believe God is directing you to do so. (You should never preach something God is not directing you to preach.) But set it up properly: “This is D. Elton Trueblood’s sermon, Conversion in the Church. I want you all to listen to it, though I won’t quite sound like him. After I’ve been through it, I’ll tell you why I think his way of looking at this text is so good that it should come from him.” That’s a rarity, but sometimes it works.

There’s also a place for an unattributed quote that isn’t the key to the passage. Especially if some folks will recognize it. I have a tendency to occasionally drop science fiction quotes and allusions into sermons. Folks who get it, recognize it. Folks who don’t get it, usually don’t remember it anyway.

Finally, I think if you are dealing with something that you have attributed many times before, there comes a point where you can say “As we’ve heard so many times” and just leave it at that.

TL;DR: Your sermon works in people’s lives through the Holy Spirit and your credibility buys it a hearing. Do everything in your power to ensure there is nothing in your sermon preparation and delivery that compromises your credibility.

(originally posted on my Substack page)

Pastor Shortages Part 1

 Something you’ll find if you are watching American church life these days is a high level of concern about looming shortfalls in ministers. (This being a blog, I’m going to assert that and not footnote it. You want validated research, check with LifewayResearch.com. This is mostly connected to conversations and a lot of readings around the ministry world.) This appears to be affecting both evangelical churches, liturgical church, Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, everybody. While there are some subsets of Christianity that are not experiencing it yet, it’s fairly common.

The shortages are appearing in a couple of categories. The first is the progression in average age of those employed in full-time ministry. This is not meant as an insult to those who have spent their lifetime serving the church, nor to those who have come later life into the responsibilities of ministry. My own father’s one of those, but his whole story is his to tell. Short version is that his retirement from his second career (post military retirement) has led to him serving as a pastor of a rural church.

But the reality is that, depending on the study you read, the average age of a pastor (most of what I’ve read excludes Roman Catholic and the Eastern/Greek Orthodox traditions, but loops Anglican-type “priests” into “pastor”) has moved up between 15 and 20 years in the last couple of decades. This makes for a looming crisis, because as we all get older, we’re not seeing younger ministers move into similar roles and responsibilities. Even similar ones to the roles we had at that age. Personally, I’m 49 and have been an ordained minister since 2005; I have pastored a church as the “pastor” (more on terminology issues in a later post) ever since. Spiritually, I was as responsible for the well-being of the body of Christ at 28 as I am now. (suffice to say, hopefully I’m better at it by a little bit)

That tells us that eventually, we’re going to be see mass vacancies even if we don’t see them now. It’s one thing to see roles in society age-out as the need decreases: you still need a few payphone repairmen but not as many as 3 decades ago. The aging average of pastors means we have experience now, but it’s not going on to the next generation. We’ll lose that experience while also seeing vacant pulpits and empty offices.

The second aspect of this problem is trying to work through the Biblical requirements of being a pastor. We’ll also deal with that in a later post, but as you look at expectations, many Christian groups have requirements based on Scripture that our culture makes more challenging to achieve. Whether it’s a problem with lifetime celibacy or taking the “never divorced” understanding of “husband of one wife,” people shifting through the difficulty of culture may come later to ministry than to the requirements. Someone may have divorced young before ever considering ministry. (Or married, Roman Catholics!) What do we do with those situations? The stronger the filter, the harder to fill the roles.

The third aspect is the concentration of ministry folks in larger church contexts. While a significant number of churches (75-85%, depending on the article) have fewer than 75 people in attendance, one batch of research suggests that more than 50% of people who attend church go to churches larger than 200. That means there are more specialty jobs and people going into those rather than general practitioners.

Those are just some general thoughts. I’ll develop those more later. 

Sermon Recap for August 16 2026

 Okay, for starters, I’m starting off with direct posting on my new Substack blog. I think I’ve gotten all the old blog posts transferred over. Eventually, this will allow me to create a sub-blog that has subscriber content, but don’t worry: all the very exciting “Doug Thoughts” will always be free. (of course, you can always voluntarily pay for them!)

Most of the pre-existing links should still work, but the categories probably don’t work. Also, the audio podcast automatically creates a post in the Substack, so there is some redundancy there.

Here is what you’ll find: there is an audio player with the sermon audios built-in to it, just click to find the one you want. The video is now native in Substack, but there is a link to the YouTube page here if you would prefer the centralized site.

If you’d like, you can subscribe to the audio feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DougHibbardPodcast

Audible Link is https://www.audible.com/podcast/Doug-Hibbard-Sermons-and-Thoughts/B08JJND2RP https://bit.ly/3WnLNR2

Spotify is here: https://doughibbard.libsyn.com/spotify

The video is linked on my personal YouTube Page here: https://www.youtube.com/user/dheagle93

Yesterday’s sermon was Hebrews 13:8 focusing on the eternality and unchanging nature of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Nostalgia Moments

This past week, our last teenager hit his 20th birthday. Now, we have no more teenagers at home. This lends itself to pondering the way the world has changed even in the 20 years since the last baby was born.

First thought, as I sit here with Spotify running through an Amazon Echo: our kids grew up with CD players in their rooms. We made mix CDs of soothing music for them, burned them on our laptops. There was instrumental music, playtime music, etc.. 

Now? They've got phones and bluetooth speakers and their Spotify accounts. Our middle child, 23, actually still has physical CDs but I'm not sure the other two do. 

Second, physical media of movies. We were still buying VHS tapes when our youngest was born. The kids watched TAPES. Tapes of singing vegetables and tapes of a rabbit doing opera. Tapes that taught wrong nature facts, because coyotes are faster than road runners....

Now? Stream it! Although we still have a stockpile of DVDs and Blu-ray, and even a few VHS tapes. I know, the physical media degrades. But it also cannot be altered remotely. And when I was a kid? Fast-forward, rewind, all those tricks with tapes. Generally, though, you want Bugs Bunny? 9 AM Saturdays.

Life changes. Technology evolves and develops. The rhythms of life adjust. After all, when I was a young adult, you could meet people at the gate for incoming flights. (Little Rock National Airport still needs to catch up with 2001 and build out an arrival area, it's been a quarter of a century.)

Some general thoughts on the nostalgia moments:

1. Remember the good parts and forget the bad ones as best you can; but just don't deny that it wasn't perfect. Again, nothing wrong with holding more tightly to the good than the bad, but there are challenges with everything. Sure, we walked to school and thought nothing about school shootings and such, but was it really safter? Stats show a mixed picture of the good ol' days. Plus hidden faults were just that, hidden.

2. Don't miss the good in the now just because you remember good from then. You're right: it was awesome to be on the field/on the stage/in the band. Now you're not. Is there anything good about your life and how you can enjoy it now?

Likewise as college move-in hits: sure, those were crazy days. But can enjoy the adulthood? (Except that sleep apnea garbage. Take it away!)

3. Listen to the joys of the people in your life in what they find good. And listen to others about what they found good. Realize that many of these judgments are subjective, not fixed. You can have a different opinion and still get along (unless you believe baseball is better with the universal DH, then you're just wrong). Let people enjoy their things, you enjoy your things, and build relationships together.

To-Do Lists

 A to-do list is a great thing. 

However, it's predicated on the assumption that you will get everything written down.

And that you will check back on it.

See, it's not that simple for most folks. There are learning curves and habits to be made.

That's why you try and try and try again until you find tools for self-discipline and self-direction that work for you.

Consistency

Consistency is one of the keys to turning where you are right now into where you want to go. 

If you're happy with the probable results of your habits, stay consistent with them and you'll get those likely outcomes. 

If you aren't happy with the probable results of your habits, make a change and be consistent with it.

Either way, bouncing back and forth will keep you from getting anywhere. 

The road of life is covered with flattened squirrels that wouldn't stick with a direction.

Health Reflections 4: Exercise

We need to be clear up front here: I'm no fitness expert. I'm very much in line with the old joke about being into fitness: "Fit'n diss pizza in my mouth." You want professional advice, go to a local gym. Or at the very least, sign up for The Pump Club with Arnold Schwarzenegger. You're getting my opinions here. They're worth every penny you pay for them---eventually I'll move to Substack and I'll have to make it worth paying for.

As I'm working on my own health, there are certain realities in adding exercise.

First, I have more excuses than exercise enthusiasm. I'd rather just not. I can come up with a variety of reasons why I can't exercise. After all, there's some truth to the challenges of having a bum knee and asthma. However, these realities do not undo the necessity of some form of exercise.

Second, an important truth: imperfect is better than perfect; done is better than undone. There are some levels of "wrong" to avoid: you can lift, do a sit-up, even stretch wrong and hurt yourself. But, you can also start toward exercise by doing intentional repetition of movement you already do. That way, you are not putting your body under strange strains for exercise.

For example, walking is a great exercise. If you are walking, even a bit slowly, even with a bit of support, then you've already got the motion down for one of the best, most durable exercises you can get. You may not move fast. You may not move much.

You may even do what the old joke was: put a concrete block in the middle of the floor and walk around it twice, claiming you "walked around the block." But that motion and that movement helps.

More than you might realize. The goal is to get into motion.

So start there: what are you doing that you can do at regular intervals through the day? Can you make the time to get up and walk, even 200 steps? Go to the bathroom that's farther from your office? It may add 5 minutes to each trip, but if you are being productive when you are at your desk, that might be feasible.

And it's better if you are doing a half-sit-up than doing no sit-up. Do it right, do it slow, do it halfway. Or do a push-up from your knees. Push off from the wall.

Lift 5-pound dumbbells if you've got them. instead of 10s. Do something.

Third, do it repeatedly. Make it part of your habit. If your lungs won't let you do long cardio, do short cardio. If your knees won't let you take the stairs, take the ramp twice.

We often make picture-perfect, instagram exercise the goal when our bodies just need us to get the blood circulating.

Take the small win and build on it.