In defense of copycat sermons

There are over 300,000 churches in America, and 52 Sundays in a calendar year. This means that roughly 15,600,000 sermons are annually composed and delivered to expectant flocks. That's a lot of pressure on a pastor, and so perhaps it's not surprising that resources like SermonCentral and Pastor's Helper have emerged to make their jobs easier. The result in some cases is called "pulpit plagiarism," which seems to infuriate congregations more for the fact that a pastor passes off the sermon as his own than the fact that he didn't make up the words himself.

Public speaker by training, writer by practice, and analytical by curse, I've found many sermons lacking in one of those dimensions, and frequently in all three. When I do the math and see that over 15 million sermons are delivered each year, I can't help but cringe. As a result I'm inclined to welcome efforts to recycle good sermons, as opposed to inventing lackluster, meandering, poorly reasoned ones. I remember reading that in the first centuries of the Church, in fact, at least one Archbishop implored the priests in his domain to read texts from greats such as John Chrysostom, rather than string together their own stultifying messages.

One might retort that it's never the words of man that convict a heart, but the inspiration of God speaking through man. Yet none of us would tolerate, I suspect, the delivery of a sermon in pig Latin. At some level, we concur that the quality of the message has something to do with its effect, or at the very least, that the messenger ought to strive to deliver the best message -- one most consistent with the Word and working of God -- that he can. And in some cases (perhaps many) this might very well mean reading sermons prepared by stronger writers and thinkers.

Yet what would happen, I wonder, if pastors began to openly do this? I suspect a great many congregations would be up in arms, a consequence of our increasing tendency to view them as service providers and we the customers. Yet while we may be tempted to view pastors as existing primarily to lecture us from pulpits, many of them are far stronger at shepherding and ministering to a flock than lecturing at it. So why not give them license to deliver valuable messages prepared by someone else, thus freeing up their time to work where their gifts are strong? Maybe sermon borrowing is a practice that will catch on.

On the other hand, perhaps even bad sermons have a purpose. As Jayber Crow, the eponymous narrator of the novel by Wendell Berry observes:

"In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons."