Thursday, September 14, 2006

Pastoral Plagiarism Revisited

Those who have been reading this blog for sometime may remember the interchange that took place here last March on Pastoral Plagiarism (post 1, post 2, post 3). These posts brought a bit of traffic and some strong debate. An edited version of the original post has this week been published in the “Baptist and Reflector”, the TN Baptist state paper, under the title Pastors must be messengers of God, not ‘talking heads’. I hope to raise this issue in local church life because this seems to be a rising problem. I continue to receive email from people who have discovered that their pastors are preaching sermons taken directly from other men or lifted directly from a book. These people are shocked and feel betrayed. Whatever sort of rationalizing a pastor might do, the fact is that the pastor’s integrity is seriously blemished by this. This issue needs to be raised and addressed for the good of the church.

Joe Thorn is also discussing this here.

4 comments:

Adam said...

Great reminder of ths important topic, Dr. Van Neste. Nice article in TN BaptReflector, too. I am also grateful to hear that your son is doing better although I did not know of the scare until you mentioned it in the post below.

Perry McCall said...

When I was serving in Middle, TN we had a couple of pastors who were very open about using sermons off of the internet. Of course, they made them their own?? they sincerely admonished a pastor friend of mind to spend less time doing sermon prep. They gave him a list of web sites that he could visit every week.

Gordon said...

There are some sermon websites that are openly encouraging pastors to abandon their study and rely on these "TV dinners" sermons.

Glad to hear your son is OK.

Unknown said...

Here we go again!