Eco-Preaching: Recycling and Plagiarism

February 3, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 7 Comments

We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. Cut and Paste was a hassle until a few years ago. Now there is endless resource online just sitting there ready to be plagiarized. At the same time, preachers face the pressure of busy lives. And then there’s the pressure to live up to the impressive and often carefully edited sermons of the superstar preachers that everyone can listen to all week. It’s a recipe for plagiarism.

There’s plenty on this subject online already, so I’ll just offer a few thoughts on recycling content that is not our own:

1. As ministers of God’s Word, we should have higher standards than academics and journalists (and they can lose their jobs over it). Sadly, some act as if everything is fair game for cutting, pasting and preaching as if it is personal work.

2. Oral communication doesn’t require, and cannot support, the tedious footnoting needed in academic work. But it does need integrity. If I’m quoting the words of someone else, I mustn’t give the sense that they are my own. Last Sunday, for several reasons, I quoted “a great figure from church history” (and was fully prepared for people to ask who that was after the message).

3. Appropriately using a well-turned phrase or a helpful illustration as part of a message that is unequivocally yours is not the same thing as lifting a whole outline or sermon and preaching it as if it were your own. The latter is stealing intellectual property, it is deceitful toward your listeners, and it is cheating both yourself and others due to your lack of time in prayerful biblical preparation.

4. First person illustrations from someone else should not be shared in the first person. If it didn’t happen to you, and you give the impression that it did, you are lying.

5. Inasmuch as I’ve tried to be clear here, we need wisdom since there is so much that is unclear in this issue. May our wisdom be thoroughly shaped by the good character of the God we represent as we preach!

Eco-Preaching: 5 Dangers of Recycling Sermons

February 2, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Yesterday I offered five potential benefits of recycling sermons. Now let’s consider five dangers:

1. Personal stagnation. John Wesley is widely credited with saying “Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.” (Apparently, though, he was quoting another preacher, and disagreeing with him. We need to be careful when we recycle quotes!) But there is a validity to the sentiment expressed by whoever it was. If I always recycle the same message, I am missing out on all the growth of personal, devotional, spiritual biblical study and application, as well as the blessing of praying through new messages (since repetition of “successful” messages could lead to complacency and trust in the message rather than God).

2. Ministry burnout. Too much recycling can lead to a dangerous equation. An increase in activity (if I recycle I can preach in every possible gap in the schedule), combined with a decrease in personal feeding (since I can recycle in the wrong way without any time in God’s Word or presence), will lead toward burnout. Easy to be a firework in ministry.

3. Preaching thin. I mentioned this in passing the other day. When I prepare over several days and then preach a message, the message is much more than the outline or notes I record at the time. It is actually more than even the message I record and have on record as an audio file. There is also all the wealth of exegetical study, the supporting biblical content that didn’t make it into the message, but was fresh in my heart at the time of preaching. Returning to that message in the future means returning to a skeleton of the original. I am in danger of preaching “thin” – without the wealth of supporting materials.

4. Loss of attention. If the listeners get the sense that this is old material, rather than being a message from God for them, today, in particular, then the level of attention invariably drops. They will be subconsciously tempted to evaluate your performance, rather than listening for God’s message to their hearts. If it is recycled, it must be prayerfully re-prepared for them – don’t dump leftovers from the fridge, serve them with care! I know the various stories of “I’ll repeat the message until you act on it!” – but the truth is that it is much easier to be bold in an anecdote.

5. Loss of integrity. If the content you are recycling is not your own, then you lose integrity. More on plagiarism tomorrow!

Eco-Preaching: 5 Benefits of Recycling Sermons

February 1, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Here are five potential benefits that can come from recycling sermons. Not every one will apply to every situation, nor will every one always be a benefit. Please apply wisdom and balance this post with tomorrow’s post on the dangers of recycling sermons!

1. Time. Time is a valuable commodity. If I committed to never recycling a sermon, then I would have to take on a significantly lower amount of preaching in venues other than my local church. It can be a privilege to serve another group with a recycled sermon that doesn’t require me to sacrifice my main ministry commitments or my family.

2. Greater conviction. The first time a message is preached, it may only have a few days to saturate the heart and life of the preacher. If that message is recycled prayerfully and honestly, then the reworking of the text and the re-preaching of the message can allow the truth of it to penetrate deeper into the preacher’s life. This is not the case when a sermon becomes a mere performance through prayerless and heartless repetition. Sometimes I will listen to a message again, allowing it to minister to me, as part of my preparation to preach the same basic message.

3. Better message. If point 2 suggests that recycling can lead to a better preacher, then this point suggests the possibility of a better message. By prayerfully reviewing the first presentation, and by working further on both text and message, the recycled sermon can be a better one that its predecessor.

4. Offering our best. Let’s say a preacher is invited to preach as a guest somewhere. While it may be fair to critique itinerant preachers with their single polished gem of a sermon, there is also something to be said for a preacher offering their best. So for example, a younger preacher may have far better training and study in one particular book – why impose the requirement of preaching from a completely new section every time? I’d rather hear a preacher handling a text well than struggling through something that is new to them. If a sermon has been prepared well and it was worth saying once, why wouldn’t it be worth saying again (if refreshed, see yesterday’s post).

5. Reinforcement. I am sure we are too quick to move on in our preaching. That is, people need reinforcement. Typically this will come from thematic reinforcement from multiple messages, but perhaps there is a place for going back over familiar ground. People don’t tend to transform instantly, so why not recycle in the same venue (again, only if refreshed!)

Eco-Preaching: Recycled Sermons Must Be Refreshed

January 31, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I don’t believe a preacher should pull out an old sermon and just preach it, unless the invitation to preach was five seconds before the sermon slot. Any longer notice and the preacher should be prayerfully refreshing the message.

Undoubtedly, a recycled sermon takes less preparation time than a sermon from scratch on a passage previously never preached. But my suggestion, if you are preparing to re-preach an old sermon, would be to follow a process along these lines:

1. Prayerfully consider the text itself before looking at the old notes or outline. Even if you only have time for a brief engagement with the text, there needs to be a freshness about your approach to it, even if the end result remains the same in terms of message outline and details (since the passage does communicate something specific, and that, at one level, does not change). Be sure to feel the impact of the text on your heart as you pray through it.

2. Prayerfully consider the specifics of this occasion before looking at the old notes or outline. It is good to get a clear image of who the message will be preached to on this occasion. What are their circumstances, what are their needs?

3. Prayerfully walk through the whole passage preparation process as you reconsider the previously preached sermon (or ideally, your old exegetical notes). Why are you selecting this text? What are the pertinent elements of exegesis that should drive your understanding of this text? What do you now think was the author’s purpose in writing this text? Is that main idea still the best summary you can make of this text? You may find that your interim growth and biblical studies have changed your level of understanding so that you start tweaking your old passage or study notes. If you only look at the end product (outline, notes, etc.) then you are preaching without the richness of the exegesis that didn’t make it into the notes, but was fresh on your heart.

4. Prayerfully walk through the message preparation process as you reconsider the old sermon. What is your message purpose this time, this congregation, this occasion? Can you improve the message idea to fit this particular preaching event, or to better reflect the text’s idea? Is your old outline the most effective idea delivery strategy? Do the details of introduction, conclusion and “illustrative materials” fit? You may well find that the message also changes in some ways.

5. If at all possible, prayerfully preach it through out loud. Listeners can spot a stale notes-dependent presentation. Just because it looks ok on paper, does not mean it can be preached with freshness from your heart and mouth. Run through it and prayerfully “own it” again.

This may seem like a lot of work, but actually I could do this process in less than a couple of hours (plus the run through of step 5). This is a lot less time than a full sermon from scratch, and as we’ll see tomorrow, time saving is not the only benefit.

Eco-Preaching: Ever Old, Always New

January 30, 2012January 30, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

This week I’d like to go green and consider the notion of recycling sermons. We’ll touch on different aspects of this broad subject over the next few days (although there may be a quiet day or two as we have a baby imminently joining the family!) To get us started, two fundamental thoughts:

Ever Old – Every sermon we preach is made of recycled materials. All of us are standing on the shoulders of the giants who’ve gone before us (and sadly some are standing on the shoulders of non-giants too). If I stop to think about it, as I prepare a message, I am in the debt of so many people, and I never have new source material.

Ever Old Influences: As I think about yesterday’s two messages, there are too many influences to name. My mind scans over the preachers I have heard over the years, the professors at seminary who taught me how to handle the Bible, who taught through those particular books in survey or exegesis courses, who taught me the languages, who taught me homiletics and theology and pastoral ministry, etc. I think of the conversation partners I turned to in the form of commentaries, and the footnotes attest to some of those that influenced them. I could go on, but you see my point. I’ve preached hundreds of messages, probably into the thousands, and it would be a bit self-aggrandizing to suggest that I have generated more than a few truly original thoughts.

Ever Old Material: While I pulled out a few illustrative elements for yesterday (and didn’t look them up in an anthology of distant impersonal illustrations), the bulk of the material was the Word of God.We must be ever wary of the temptation to think our thoughts, be they original or probably not, are somehow better source material than the ever living Word of God! Yesterday in the course of my preaching I returned to texts that I’ve preached in this church in the past year, and without apology. We need to hear God’s Word.

Always New – Every sermon we preach is new. The text of Scripture doesn’t change, but everything else does. The preacher can never stand still. Either the preacher has grown, or the preacher has stagnated and changed negatively, but life never stands still. Two congregations can never be the same in constituents or their circumstances, even if it is the same church. The situation is always fresh. Different preacher, different listeners, different occasion, different set of needs. I suppose, in theory, I could preach the same text in the same church once a month for the next several years and never preach an identical sermon.

Tomorrow we’ll probe a bit beyond this foundational level as we seek to be good stewards of a preaching ministry.

Radio Interview: The Leadership File

January 18, 2012January 18, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I was invited to head into London for an interview on Premier Christian Radio, with Andy Peck on The Leadership File. The show was broadcast on the 18th December, and is now available on demand in two 12-minute segments:

Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here

(I can’t get the media player to work on Safari, but it will on Firefox. I know others have had issues. I had to install Quicktime plugin on Firefox on a PC. Anyway, hopefully you can get it to work, here’s the page for the show.)

A Starter for Ten?

January 6, 2012January 6, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

It’s great to have another guest post, this time from a Welshman in Italy. Huw Williams was in the Cor Deo programme in 2011 and every week Huw and I enjoyed great conversations about preaching as he pursued his mentored personal study in the area of homiletics. Since finishing Cor Deo, Huw and Alison have moved to Turin, Italy, where Huw is the pastor of the International Church (check out his blog here). Huw’s practical insight here is so on target for us all as we try to be clear and effective biblical preachers…

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Over the Christmas period, I found myself preparing three short talks, each of around ten minutes. As a newbie to the rhythms of the preaching calendar (I’m at the end of my first three months in full-time pastoral work) there were a few surprises in store for me. Here are a few reflections.

Firstly, I have learned that it’s difficult to speak for only ten minutes and say something. (I guess it’s relatively easy to speak for ten minutes and say nothing but I’m assuming none of us are interested in that particular art.) I was struck by how hard I had to work on my material to say something of substance, in (I hope) an engaging way and remain within the time limit. In my naiveté, I had reasoned along the lines of “well, I normally preach for around 30 minutes, so this should be a third of the preparation time.”

Won’t be making that mistake again.

In turn this caused me to reflect on my ‘regular’ preaching, by which I mean, those times when I am going for the 25-30 minute sermon. If I find it a challenge to distil and expound the message of a passage into ten minutes, then isn’t there a possibility that my longer sermons might just have a bit of unhelpful padding around them?

What I mean is this; I’m a pretty convinced exponent of the one-point sermon (which you can read about elsewhere on this blog) and as part of my weekly sermon preparation, I usually try and get to a one-sentence passage summary. I find it a great exercise, to try and condense all my text-observation study into a single summary sentence, which usually serves as my key preaching point.

But what happens next is perhaps the weak link in my preparation chain. Because it is at this point that I simply start writing. And writing. And writing. And what begins with a single sentence summary, often turns into – a few hours later – the realisation that my sermon is too long and unwieldy.

So here’s a thought. What if in my preparation, I moved from summary statement, to 10-minute sermon, and then to ‘full length’ sermon? What if my ‘ten-minute version’ was a halfway house in the preparation journey? Having reached this post, and if things have gone well, I have found a way of saying what I trust the text is saying, succinctly and briefly. Now the final stage in my journey – all those extra minutes – are all then put to the use of complementing the argument; further sharpening, further illustration, further application, all of the one main argument of the text.

I think I’ll try it. Perhaps I’ll let you know how I get on.

Let Man Not Separate Holy Spirit and Preaching Content

December 29, 2011December 28, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday we addressed the issue of preparing to preach, and how that is a part of ministry life that truly and profoundly involves the Holy Spirit (or at least, it should). The danger of divorcing our ministry from the Spirit persists into the preaching event too.

There are a few places where this danger lurks:

1. The notion that explanation is not needed from the preacher, for the Spirit will bring home the truth of God’s Word. I have come across this a few times. It comes across as if something profoundly spiritual is supposed to be happening as the preacher states the Word, but fails to explain it. It may be accompanied by knowing comments and tones that give the impression that those “in the know” have some sort of insight here, and hopefully the rest of us will get that mystery knowledge too. Then maybe the preacher carries on with this statement-without-explanation approach, or perhaps they move into a list of highly relevant personal applications (or anecdotes).

From my perspective this lack of explanation tends to come across to some as profound spirituality that inspires or intimidates, and at the same time it can come across to others as indicative that the preacher is incapable of explaining the text and is sort of bluffing. Preacher, lean fully on God’s strength and pray continually for the Spirit to be at work, and explain the text, that’s part of your role.

2. The idea that application is the Spirit’s work, not the preacher’s. I have come across this one more than the other, perhaps at the other end of the ecclesiastical spectrum. It is exemplified in my experience in a sentence that rings alarm bells – “Now may the Spirit apply to our hearts and lives the truths we have seen in His Word. Amen.” This sentence sometimes comes after a lengthy lecture of biblical content devoid of overt application and clarified relevance. Why is that somehow the Spirit’s role, but not at all the role of the preacher? Is this phrase suggesting that the explanation was all of the preacher, and nothing of the Spirit? I hope not.

So why not follow through and not abdicate a key role the preacher is called to – namely to not only lecture biblical content, but rather to communicate the meaning of the text with an emphasis on its relevance to the contemporary and specific listeners? Preacher, lean fully on God’s strength and pray continually for the Spirit to be at work, and apply the text, that’s part of your role.

One more area tomorrow – the whole matter of delivery.

Preaching Proverbs 5: Random Thoughts

December 16, 2011December 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

To finish off this series of posts on preaching Proverbs, here is a randomly organized collection of brief thoughts. See what I did there?

1. Preaching topically may be fine. I’ve avoided the more obvious approach of addressing a subject that Proverbs addresses with multiple references, but it’s fine to do that. And it would be fine to not be exhaustive, why not just focus more on two or three proverbs and aim for effectiveness over exhaustiveness?

2. Preaching a shorter sermon will be appreciated. I’ve shared how a full-length sermon may be possible from a two line truth, but why not preach short? Finish ten minutes early and your listeners may talk about the message for years!

3. Preaching a section may be effective. You can check out Bruce Waltke and discover structure that you’ve never seen before. Or you can go where my Hebrew prof suggested . . . preach a series of apparently random proverbs since that is how life is experienced from our perspective.

4. Remember that Proverbs is primarily observation, not promise. Don’t turn an observation of life lived under the covenant of Deuteronomy 28-30 into a promise for all people of God in every age.

5. Preach a pugilistic match-up of contemporary wisdom with Proverbial sagacity. That is, take a saying from our culture and watch it lose in a fight with one of God’s inspired sayings.

6. Preach Proverbs with humour and with poetry. Help people see what life is like and what it could be like with a healthy dose of sanctified wit and biblically saturated poetic presentation. Certainly the main idea should be proverbial, poetic, memorable, pithy, precise.

7. Preach Proverbs for living with godly wisdom, don’t preach godly wisdom to fuel the fires of self-centred success.

8. Provoke further thought, don’t bore listeners into submission as if your extensive knowledge is the focus. Their further thought, in the fear of Lord, worked into their hearts and lives: that is the focus.

And if you don’t have it yet, get hold of a copy of Jeff Arthurs book, Preaching with Variety – his chapter on Proverbs alone is worth the price of the book. Actually, the rest is good too . . . and I will be giving a copy away on the facebook page promotion later this month – click here to go to the promo information.

Preaching Proverbs 4: Sayings and Sermons

December 15, 2011December 9, 2011 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Yesterday I described two masterpieces of the art of preaching Proverbs (click here to see post). Both the explanatory emphasis of the first and the applicational emphasis of the second affirmed the possibility of a full-length single saying sermon from the Proverbs. What were some of the key features of these sermons?

1. Repetition. In both cases the preachers repeated the main idea (the proverb) multiple times. It never felt forced or tedious, but it did tattoo the truths on the hearts of those listening. Proverbs are designed to be memorable. While we don’t have the memorability of the original language to aid us, repetition certainly helped.

2. Memorability. We don’t have sound-play in the wording like the Hebrew, but memorability can be achieved in other ways. In the first example Haddon Robinson achieved memorability by pursuing visualization. That is, through vivid description, the listeners could see what he described, and having seen it on the screen of their hearts, they wouldn’t forget. In the second example, Gene Curtis achieved memorability by a different type of sound-play. Not the sounds of the words, but the clever use of a repeated first line of a song. Actually, this musical marker was so effective in flagging up the need for the proverb because he ended the mini-rendition by tweaking the tune into a melancholic minor key each time – a refrain introducing the main idea each time.

3. Non-linearity. Neither sermon imposed what felt like a foreign sermon structure on the text. There was no overt three point with sub-point presentation involved. Both felt relaxed and slightly circular, yet on paper could have been defined using standard outlining, of course. There wasn’t the urgency of a narrative, or the driving progression in logic of an epistle. The structure seemed to fit the genre.

4. Application. Both sermons were marked by specific, tangible, relevant and vivid application. While the one placed greater emphasis on explanation, both felt absolutely preached to the listener, to mark the listener and to bring about transformation. I’m sure many of us could manage it, but surely it must be wrong to turn a practical, vivid, life truth, into an academic curio. It takes great intellect to make something simple and clear, but a lesser preacher can impress and confuse the listener. Hey, was that a contemporary antithetical distich? Nice.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the series . . .