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.

Why I’m Not Rushing to Two-Person Preaching – Part 2

January 25, 2012January 24, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

If our churches follow cultural trends, which they tend to, does this mean we are facing the prospect of “sanctified banter preaching?” After all, it seems like everywhere we look in the media, there are now two presenters, two DJ’s, two hosts. So do we have to consider having two preachers simul-preaching? I suspect not…

I remember sitting at a big Christian convention where three speakers rotated through the morning session in soundbites. The blessing of hearing one was only frustrated by the ranting of another, it felt bitty and unprepared. But what if it were done well?

I’m not convinced. There are venues where it could work and it could work well. But I’d lean more toward it in a teaching situation than in a preaching situation.

As with some powerpoint/media intensive preachers, I get the sense that the preparation would be radically changed. Instead of time spent with God in prayer, the powerpointer sometimes seems to spend hours in mouse-clicking creativity. Actually, (in many cases they seem to end up not spending enough time with God, or in preparing the powerpoint fully, but that is another issue.)

So the collaborationist preaching pair might spend hours in scripting transitions and dialogue, hopefully without the tacky banter that seems so plastic on some TV shows, yet not have anywhere near the depth of time spent in God’s presence.

The change in preparation would mean a potential loss of profundity. There is something about a preacher spending time with God in the text praying for the people, and then coming to speak to the people. I would love to hear this done by a pair of preachers who have really pursued God, His Word, His heart for these people, etc.

I fear that profundity would disappear if the 2-person preaching were seen as a contemporary solution to a contemporary problem (like the acetate and the powerpoint were also seen as ways to fix poor preaching in recent years).

Somehow the core has to be kept in place, and done well. Then there may be benefits to supplemental approaches like this. I’m not opposed, I’m just not convinced.

Why I Am Not Rushing to Two-Person Preaching

January 24, 2012January 24, 2012 / Peter Mead / 8 Comments

Whether we admit it or not, our churches are shaped by our culture. When overhead projectors became the thing in business meetings, so suddenly preachers wondered how Wesley had survived without acetates. Then preachers pondered the problems Spurgeon must have faced without powerpoint and projectors.

As well as technological influence, there are others too. How regularly do we hear and see another “study” indicating people have shockingly short attention spans so we should keep our messages to less than 35 seconds? It’s amazing how these “studies” seem to selectively focus on the criteria that make the point of the person writing – not exactly solid science in many cases.

So here’s one that surely must be coming . . . two-person preaching. If I think back to the TV I saw in the 1980’s, I tend to think of individuals – film reviews? Barry Norman sat in a black chair and looking at the camera. Satire? Clive James on his own with the occasional guest. Now everything is done in pairs. Presenters have their sidekicks for painfully choreographed repartee in some cases, or side-splinting banter in others. Radio shows rely on the bouncing back and forth between DJs, and if one DJ is dominant, the other acts as a foil. So should we expect to see more 2-person preaching?

There are positives that come to mind here. Some of the best educational experience I had involved two professors co-teaching contemporaneously. In Cor Deo we have deliberately adopted a two-mentor teaching model, and I delight in the advantages of that approach. It offers the benefit of added perspective in discussion environments. It offers the possibility of variation in voice and presentation. It offers a tangible relational approach that fits for an inherently relational faith.

But when it comes to preaching, there are also negatives. And I’ll share my thoughts on this tomorrow. I’d love to hear other perspectives on this . . .

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.)

Bible Software and Sermon Prep

January 12, 2012January 11, 2012 / Peter Mead / 28 Comments

This post isn’t a fair comparison of Bible software, but it is a suggestion that you look into the value of something beyond the free options. I shared a free option on Monday, and others have followed in the comments. If you are in a position to invest financially in software, then Bible software is well worth considering.

There are three “big boys” that I’ll mention. Feel free to add your experience with any of these, or others you’d care to mention too.

Available on PC and Mac, Logos offers an impressive array of content. I’ll be honest, I’m still getting used to the pure Bible functions of Logos, as I have been a Bibleworks user for so long (and still reach for it on my netbook at times). But it seems to me that Logos is improving and at least catching up in terms of exegetical function. Where Logos seems to stand alone is in the array of commentaries and research materials you can get on it. My suggestion is to prioritize the quality commentaries and resources so that they are the ones that you automatically go to when you are looking at a passage (i.e. there are plenty of resources on Logos that you shouldn’t feel bad about ignoring – it’s still worth the price for the quality ones!)

In simplistic terms, if you want lots of books, go to Logos. If you want to work with the text itself rather than commentaries, especially in the original languages, then Bibleworks is fantastic. It is a PC based software (although some do run it on an emulator on the Mac, I haven’t gone down that route). Truth is that Bibleworks is probably capable of much that you will never use. I would say that people with any original language knowledge probably need something beyond the free options, and this is definitely one to consider for PC folks. If you don’t use Greek and Hebrew, then Bibleworks will still prove very helpful, but you may find the cost prohibitive (as with all three).

I can’t speak for this one as I haven’t gone there. Accordance is the Mac based Bible software. Users I know seem to delight in it, primarily for its intuitive Bible-handling interface, but it also has Logos-like collections of resources that can be added at a cost. I suppose Accordance would argue: what is the point of emulating a PC on a Mac? If you have a Mac, you know how it works, and so do the Accordance folks as they’ve always designed their software for this platform.

For many, these software options represent a luxury that is simply out of reach financially. For that reason I am thankful that the gap between free and expensive is not as big a gulf as it would be in most purchases. For those who have experience of any of these, I’m sure others would appreciate your comments.

Disconnected Technology and Sermon Prep

January 11, 2012January 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / 6 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about some of the ways we can be connected to others as we prepare a sermon. Today let’s unplug the router and think about disconnected technology that may be helpful:

Word Processor – I suspect this is by far the most popular sermon prep tool. Recording notes in our biblical study, cutting and pasting information in, typing out manuscript or outline, being able to format for fading eyes, etc.

Recording Equipment – While the word processor records through the input of our deftly moving fingers, there are other recording devices that can be useful. I mentioned audio recording on smartphone apps yesterday, and the same would apply to any type of dictation device. Sometimes you may not have, or be able to safely or efficiently use, a pen and paper. And speaking of paper, every time I fly and look in those shopping catalogues in the sky, I’m always drawn to the scanner pens. Scanning sections of a book to then transfer into the word processor, seems like a nifty gadget. Anyone use one? Worth it?

Bible Software – This is a big category, so I’ll post on this separately tomorrow.

Alarm Clock – Here’s a clever little piece of technology. Some of my most productive hours are early, but without my alarm I often wouldn’t see them! And for “bi-vocational” preachers, I suspect this is a must.

Square Scolls – Talking of all this newfangled gadgetry and advanced technology, let’s not forget one innovation that surpasses everything listed so far this week – the book. There is a very real danger that preachers get caught up in contemporary technology and miss the powerful combination of some earlier advances in technology – the codex and the printing press. What a privilege to own even a single book! It is intriguing how technology is supposed to save time, yet sometimes it seems to create noise and squeeze out time from things that really matter. Preach well this week, get your nose back in a book!