Preacher Plagiarism: A Review of Tom Long's Article

The lead story in the current issue of The Christian Century (April 17, 2007) is by preaching professor Thomas Long (no relation) and is on sermon stealing. Prof. Long has discovered what to him is an alarming and increasing tendency of preachers to take their entire sermon from the Internet, put their name on the top of it and then preach it to their congregation as if it is their original creation. Long's reaction to this phenomenon, which he illustrates only through an anecdote or two, is both moral and practical. On the one hand such a practice is a species of intellectual fraud--pawning off someone else's words as your own. On the other hand, such a practice ignores the importance of addressing a "unique" word of God for one's congregation. Even though I have quite a bit at stake in this debate, since I post expositions that could be "cribbed" as sermons several times each week on my website (under Bible above), I disagree almost completely with Long's arguments. Or, to put it differently, unless he can show this as a fairly widespread phenomenon, I think his first argument is overblown. And the second argument, the sermon as "God's word to the specific congregation," is pretty much violated every time you have a guest preacher who may not know the dynamics of the congregation that closely. In other words, I think that Long has done what old liberal religion does best: retreat into a moralistic shell and then wring his hands before one even knows how widespread is the problem he describes. In the rest of this essay I will share my experience of posting online my homiletical/exegetical comments on the lectionary texts for each week.

Postings On The Lectionary

Beginning in January 2007 I have been posting essays on each of the four lectionary passages for the week on the Revised Common Lectionary readings. I sometimes had difficulty determining which passage to study (because the "Common" Lectionary reading was not so common), but I did so specifically because I wanted to help busy pastors and Bible study leaders with some easily-accessible and competent Biblical exposition of these passages. I have discovered, as the weeks have gone on, that my lectionary essays are viewed by more than 2,000 people per week. What is incredible to me, however, are the days of the week that these texts are studied as well as the average time spent on each essay by readers. I have this information because I subscribe to Google Analytics which, as I have said elsewhere, does everything to one's web site but put an endoscope up it.

I have noted two interesting things as my postings are being read by a growing number of people (by the way, Textweek.com graciously links to my essays). First, I have had the biggest number of Friday and Saturday "hits" since I began recording these hits a year ago. When I signed up for the Google service, I was a law professor, and students (my primary readers) would study hard from Sunday through Thursday, leaving my web site a rather pathetic creature on Fridays and Saturdays. But now that preachers read it, I note the steady uptick of page views on the weekends (Fri and Sat, and even Sunday mornings). What this means is that a large number of preachers "cram" for their sermons. I once mentioned this to a Bible study class I was teaching as an example of the extreme "faith" of the preachers. They were giving Christ as much time as possible to "return" before their sermon delivery (after all, why have an extra sermon lying around at the parousia?); when they saw that Sunday was probably going to come after all, they began their study. I am very pleased to be a person whose work these pastors consult in preparation for their sermons. If they want to "crib" an entire paragraph, that is up to them. I want to make their job "easier," which is the way I have often treated most professionals with whom I come in contact.

But the truly astonishing thing to me is the average amount of time that preachers (most of the readers of my Bible page) spend on my essays. While the average time a reader spends on my Shakespeare essays, which are usually the second most popular essays on my site, is about 2 minutes per essay, the readers of my Rev. 5 exposition today, for example, have averaged more than 10 minutes on the page. When I told this to my Bible class, one person said: "Oh, Bill, they just want to make you feel good. They probably pull up your page and then go for a 10-minute coffee break." What more could you want, with helpful students such as this?

What the "data" show, then, is that my essays, which are geared to the needs of preachers as they think through a text, are gaining in popularity and in length of time the preachers "study" them. When I wrote the essays (which I call "mini-essays"), I did so precisely because the mental time blocks of preachers these days are about 10 minutes. That is, ten solid minutes is about all the time they have to devote to their preliminary or creative thoughts about the sermon for the week. Many, of course, take loads more time than this, but I don't think I would be far wrong if I conclude that the amount of "research" or "study" time to generate ideas for the sermon takes a preacher about 10 minutes each week. And, since they have so little time to devote to their creative thinking, I believe it is essential that they be offered some useful, accessible, linguistically-aware, well-written and theologically-lucid comments on the text. I put my thoughts in the form of essays in order to encourage them not necessarily to crib my precise words, but to see how an idea can develop from text to paragraph. I wouldn't be too upset, however, if they use my words, even if they don't attribute them to me. I probably got many of them from someone else at one time.

Conclusion

People are going to the Internet in ever-increasing numbers to get help on all subjects. The fact that thousands of preachers/teachers go weekly to my biblical essays indicates to me that people are hungry for some clarity and easily-accessible (also free!) "help" in expositing the Bible. My hope is that I stimulate some thinking through my page, whether or not people use my precise words. Several grateful emails from pastors tell me that my words are having that effect. I don't ask them, nor do I really care, to "cite" me in their sermons. I don't like the idea of people using other people's precise words without crediting them, but I know, from many years as a teacher, that this practice tends to double back and bite you somewhere down the road. Thus, in the final analysis, Tom Long's rather moralistic approach to preacher plagiarism ignores some of the dynamics of how preachers actually use web resources in their sermon preparation. That, rather than plagiarism, is the more interesting subject.

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