Today in the Mission Yearbook - Thou shalt not steal

A Matter of Faith podcast explores the persistent problem of busy and stressed preachers lifting their sermons from online sources

September 2, 2022

Photo by Nick Morrison via Unsplash

Thanks to the pandemic, tens of thousands of worship services are now posted online each week. For at least some stressed preachers who may be pressed for time, the temptation can be overwhelming to hear a well-crafted online sermon somewhere and pass all or part of it off as one’s own.

“It’s a really important and thorny issue,” Dr. Thomas Long, the Bandy Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, told A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe during a recent edition, which can be heard here. “It’s important because, among other reasons, a number of churches have discovered to their sorrow that their preachers have been taking their sermons off the internet or from other sources, pretending that they’re their own.”

“Even when the pastor repents and the congregation says, ‘OK, we understand and we forgive,’ I’ve never encountered a situation where the relationship could be sustained and repaired,” Long said. “Inevitably there’s always a break of trust and the pastor has to move to another church or another form of ministry. The stakes are pretty high here.”

Long’s comments stemmed from a listener’s question about whether the practice is wrong and how it can be stopped — or should be stopped.

Dr. Thomas G. Long

One complication, Long said, is that “not many pastors think of their sermons as intellectual property. They think of them as attempts to communicate the gospel to the people of God, and so they don’t have the same sense of ownership about a sermon that an author would have [about a published work].”

According to legal scholar Richard A. Posner, the author of “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” two things have to go together to constitute plagiarism, Long said: You have to use somebody else’s work without giving them credit, and the people to whom you have presented the work have to be deceived.

Sometimes, Long noted, a preacher will preach another person’s sermon, but no one is deceived. One example is a famous sermon preached in Appalachia called “The Deck of Cards Sermon.”

“The preacher will stand in the pulpit and pretend he or she is dealing a deck of cards,” Long said. An ace of clubs might stand for the oneness of God, for example, and so on. “Many preachers have preached that sermon, and nobody is fooled into thinking it’s [the preacher’s] own original creation,” Long said.

But when the preacher takes someone else’s sermon — or a portion of it — and presents it as their own, and people in the congregation “assume by the way it’s presented that my pastor created it, wrote the sermon, and they’re deceived,” Long said. “When they find out — if they find out — that the pastor has done this, trust is broken. Their expectation about what constitutes responsibility in ministry has been betrayed. It’s a serious breach of trust.”

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“There’s so much material out there readily available that people succumb to the temptation [to plagiarize] more easily,” Long said.

Nobody’s sermon is entirely original, Long said. “We’re all standing on the shoulders of others and we’re doing riffs off other people’s work. … You know it in your heart when you cross that line and are misrepresenting something.” If Long hears a sermon from, say, the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor “and that inspires me to preach a sermon on the same passage with a little of the same flavor that she had, it’s not really her sermon that I’m stealing. It’s her sermon that’s inspiring me. There’s a line in there, and in our own conscience we know when that’s the case.”

Doong wondered if Long had guidance for preachers “looking to maintain originality and protect what they’ve put out.”

“I think every pastor has to figure out where to draw the line on that,” Long said. “My personal decision — and a number of my sermons are available on the internet — I have decided I will tilt in favor of accessibility. Use the sermon, quote from it, find inspiration from it — and then preach something that’s moved by that sermon. I rejoice in that. I just have to trust that other pastors will be accountable and responsible.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Michelle Diallo, Accountant, Financial Reporting, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 
Doug Dicks, Mission co-worker serving in Israel/Palestine, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Gracious God, may we be open to your freshness and your recreative work in our midst. Repurpose us to do your work as we live into your kingdom. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Pioneering transgender minister lets her light shine

The Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson tells her story of faith and transition on ‘A Matter of Faith’ podcast

April 14, 2022

The Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson is the first known mainstream minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to change gender and remain in ordained office. (Photo courtesy of Erin Swenson)

The Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson finally met someone who shared her experience of being a transgender woman in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

“I grabbed her hands, and I held her close, and I said, ‘How wonderful to meet a fellow transgender Presbyterian. I’ve needed this for a long time,’” Swenson recalled. “And she looked at me and she said, ‘Oh, but I’m not a Presbyterian.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? You love this church. They love you. Why are you not a Presbyterian?’

“And she looked at me and she said, ‘I, I didn’t think God wanted me to be in the church because of who I am, what I am.’”

At that time, in the mid-1990s, Swenson was in the midst of a bruising battle to remain in ordained office after her own transition. A committee in the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta was considering the question, and word was it was not going well for her. So, she took it upon herself to meet with every member of the committee to make her case, answer any questions, and tell that story.

The committee unanimously upheld her ordination, and in a close vote the presbytery did as well, making Swenson the first known person to change gender and remain in ordained office. She tells her story on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” which is produced by the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and Unbound: An Interactive Online Journal on Christian Social Justice.

Click here to listen to the “A Matter of Faith” episode with Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson

Swenson told her story about growing up in the church but realizing in fifth grade, “I wanted to be a girl and not a boy.”

It was the 1950s, and she learned to submerge her desire to change, which fostered a deep depression that lasted for years. Swenson went on to study at Columbia Theological Seminary and was ordained in November 1973, completing requirements to be a pastoral counselor.

But she lived with a deep sadness, and in the early 1990s began the process of gender transition. While one of her fears was losing her family, including a wife and two daughters, that did not happen. Swenson remains close with her family, including her now ex-wife, and she says they were all happy to see her depression lifted when she made the decision to live as a woman.

Swenson has remained active in the Church, particularly in the LGBTQIA+ community, at one point serving as a co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians, a queer advocacy group in the PC(USA).

For all the progress though, Swenson still has disappointments with how the Church has treated her and the transgender community in general.

“I would have loved to be able to say that over the last 25 years, I’ve been invited, that I’ve spent 20 or 25 weekends a year traveling about the country to various Presbyterian churches everywhere, helping people come to understand what it is to be transgender and Christian,” Swenson said. “Of course, that has not been, in spite of my wishes for it. I’ve even had pastors of progressive churches say to me, kind of in an embarrassed tone, that they’re sorry that they haven’t invited me to come to their church, that they really have meant to, but that they were afraid that there were these members of their church who were very unhappy about my ordination, and they were afraid of what those members would say to me — as if that would make any difference to me, like I hadn’t heard people say anything nasty. There still is a lot of fear about being transgender.”

And she laments that her experience is not unique among transgender ministers.

“The people who are transgender and in ministry are simply candidates for the ministry,” Swenson said. “They’re waiting on a call to be able to be ordained. Or they have become staff members of seminaries or presbytery staff. They’ve done just about everything there is to do except be a pastor in a church, and for many of these people, that’s what they dearly desire.”

“I’m fortunate that I got to have that experience before I transitioned,” Swenson said.

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” are released on Thursdays and can be found here or wherever you get your podcasts.

 Rich Copley, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Matthew Nurkin, Vice President, & Managing Director, Investments, Board of Pensions
Andrea O’Connor, Administrative Assistant,  Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Our Father in heaven, may we find courage and comfort in the daily reminder that you are a God who assures his children: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you” (Isaiah 43:1—2). In Christ’s name. Amen.