That Sermon You Heard on Sunday May Be From the Web
http://tinyurl.com/ykm5yn

Rev. Moon Buys His for $10,
Others Get Them Free;
'Sizzling' vs. Plagiarism
By SUZANNE SATALINE
November 15, 2006; Page A1

The Rev. Brian Moon says he has come up with ideas for his sermons after
water-skiing, while watching "My Name Is Earl" on TV and while working on
his 1969 Buick muscle car. He also finds inspiration on the Internet, as he
did in August when he preached about "God's math."

"People are drowning, drowning in their marriages, drowning in their
careers, drowning in hurtful habits," Mr. Moon told his congregation at
Church of the Suncoast, in Land o' Lakes, Fla. "They need someone to rescue
them and bring them on the raft. They need people driven by God's addition."

Those words, it turns out, were first uttered three years ago by the Rev. Ed
Young, pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas. His Web site,
creativepastors.com, sells transcripts of this and others sermons for $10
each.

Mr. Moon says he delivered about 75%% of Mr. Young's sermon, "just because it
was really good." That included a white-water rafting anecdote similar to
Mr. Young's in the original. Mr. Moon, who has now been a pastor for seven
months, didn't give credit to Mr. Young, and he makes no apologies for using
a recycled sermon.

"Truth is truth, there's no sense reinventing the wheel," Mr. Moon says. "If
you got something that's a good product, why go out and beat your head
against the wall and try to come up with it yourself?"

These days, a lot of preachers would agree. The sermon -- an oration
traditionally expressing the thoughts of the cleric doing the talking -- has
entered the age of reruns. Topics and transcripts are available on sites
like sermoncentral.com, pastors.com, sermonspice.com, and
desperatepreacher.com. In the old days, when a preacher wanted to pinch a
sermon, he had to consult a book, a magazine or a sermon anthology.

The offerings have a multidenominational appeal, allowing Presbyterian
traditionalists or megachurch evangelicals to download talks on faith, hope
and charity for a few bucks, or even free of charge. Torah-Fax, in Davie,
Fla., runs a sermon email subscription service for rabbis. Some sites pay
the authors for individual sermons (about $50 apiece) and sometimes buy up
sermon libraries.

The widespread buying of packaged wisdom has touched off a debate about
ethics, especially after incidents in which pastors have resigned over
plagiarism allegations. Some members of the clergy say sermon sales diminish
religious oratory and undermine both scholarship and the trust between
ministers and their flocks.

"Every minister owes his congregation a fresh act of interpretation," says
Thomas G. Long, a preaching professor at the Candler School of Theology at
Emory University in Atlanta. "To play easy with the truth, to be deceptive
about where the ideas come from, is a lie."

The plagiarism debate grew louder in recent months after a sermon site
posted an essay by the Rev. Steve Sjogren titled, "Don't be original, be
effective!" Mr. Sjogren urged pastors to quit spending time striving for
originality and instead, to recite the words of better sermonizers.

"We need to get over the idea that we have to be completely original with
our messages, each and every week," writes Mr. Sjogren, founding pastor of
the Vineyard Community Church, in Cincinnati. "The guys I draw encouragement
from...get 70%% of their material from someone else."

The Rev. Ray Van Neste, an associate professor at Union University in
Jackson, Tenn., wrote on his blog, "Oversight of Souls," that Mr. Sjogren's
words were "utterly disgusting" and said that unhappy churchgoers were
writing in. "There are people in church who feel betrayed by their pastors,"
Mr. Van Neste says. "It feels like cheating."

After music minister Brian Jonson complained about plagiarism, a committee
at Liberty Heights Church in West Chester, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati,
gave the Rev. Terry Fields guidelines for sermon preparation, including how
to reference sources. The plagiarizing continued, said former Deacon Dan
Williamson, who has since left the church.

After four or five more complaints, Pastor Fields resigned last year. He
didn't return phone calls seeking comment. "I don't see preaching someone
else's sermon as proclaiming the word of the Lord given to him," Mr.
Williamson said.

Plagiarism allegations have also hit some well-known clergy, including Rev.
E. Glenn Wagner, former senior pastor of the Calvary Church in Charlotte,
N.C., and former minister-at-large with Promise Keepers, a national effort
to promote family values among men. Mr. Wagner said he left his church in
2004 after admitting that he had delivered sections of sermons written by a
preacher friend. Mr. Wagner said he had been depressed at the time. "Most of
the pastors I know help each other out, swapping materials and ideas," he
says.

Mr. Long, at Emory, believes plagiarism can come from a clergyman's desire
to be "sizzlingly entertaining," and from vanity. "Our churches have turned
into theaters and our preachers have turned into witty motivational speakers
with high entertainment value," Mr. Long says.

Pastors once pored over periodicals and anthologies to learn the styles of
famous preachers. Now Web sites offer ministers videos, skits and PowerPoint
graphics to match the sermon transcript. Creativepastors.com, a nonprofit
corporation owned by Fellowship Church, has posted revenue of $1.7 million
since January 2004, and has 17,500 accounts, according to the church's
pastor, Mr. Young.

"I think sermons are better today because of the vast amount of information
at our fingertips," he said. Growing competition from for-profit Web sites
and local churches has led some sites to give away content at no charge.
Sermoncentral.com, considered the biggest, posts more than 80,000 free
sermons, anecdotes and dramas and gets 170,000 visits each week, according
to the site.

Users say preaching sites spark creativity, provide research and offer
outlines to help structure scattered thoughts. Glenn D. Bone III, pastor of
Good Seed Ministries in Chicago, says he adapts Mr. Young's sermons but adds
"an inner-city" flavor. For instance, he will replace the big houses and
cars that Mr. Young mentions with references to "gold chains." In January,
Mr. Bone supplemented Mr. Young's sermon about tithing with a Barry White
song.

The Rev. Brett Blair, owner of sermons.com, says anyone who buys from the
trove of anecdotes and 6,000 sermons is paying for the rights to the
material. Others are more restrictive. Pastors.com requires buyers to agree
that the material is for their use, that it will not appear as part of a
church's resources and will not be made available on another Web site or a
broadcast. Sermoncentral.com requires users to register and provide contact
information. The site says it will freeze the account of any contributor
found to be submitting copied material and asks that users credit their
sources.

Ministers don't agree about the necessity of attribution. Mark Evans, senior
pastor at the Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock, Ark., says he routinely
credits "Purpose Driven Life" author Rick Warren from the pulpit. Mr. Warren
says that's unnecessary. "They are preaching a sermon, not footnoting a term
paper," Mr. Warren writes in an email.

Mr. Sjogren says he has been amused to hear his own sermons delivered in
other churches. He calls attribution "an absolute waste of time."

"Real plagiarism is taking stuff out of a book and putting it into another
book," Mr. Sjogren says. "Speaking, taking people's material and putting it
into a speaking forum, is not plagiarism."

Prof. Van Neste says any time a minister passes off material as his own,
he's plagiarizing. "Credit isn't really the issue. Integrity is the issue,"
he says.

Bruce Blatz, one of Mr. Moon's congregants in Land o' Lakes, Fla., says he
doesn't mind if his pastor preaches the words of others