CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

Wayne Stacy's blog

I heard a sermon the other day that moved me…to regurgitation, nearly. Ostensibly, the sermon was on the central text of the Gospel of Mark (central both strategically and theologically); namely, Mark 8:27-38. The preacher took as his theme “The Messiah's Mission.” That was okay in that that's a fair assessment of what this story in Mark is about. What bothered me about the sermon was where he went from there. Forcing his subject onto a procrustean bed of alliteration, he launched into a Scriptural scavenger hunt that led him to pillage all four Gospels meaning to mine them for the letter “M” - The Mission of the Messiah; The Method of the Messiah; The Mandate of the Messiah; The Murder of the Messiah; The Mastery of the Messiah. By the time he was through, I was mulling another “M” in my mind - the madness of the minister.

Those who defend this kind of slavish servitude to alliteration in preaching do so because, they insist, it helps the audience to remember what the preacher said. Yeah, right. You really want to ask your congregation what you said in your sermon on a Sunday? How about asking them the following Sunday? No? What about that same Sunday afternoon? No? Well then, what about on the way out the door following your sermon? I didn't think so.... READ MORE.

Wayne Stacy's blog

I’ve been grading papers in my masters degree program classes, and I constantly run up against a recurring problem: students don’t know when and how to document their sources. The academic world insists on honesty and integrity in writing and, therefore, has come up with a system for vouchsafing it. It’s called the footnote. The footnote tells the reader that what follows is not his own, that he’s borrowed an idea from someone else, but in the interest of honesty and fairness, he’s acknowledging that fact.

With the move toward casualness (and irresponsibility) ubiquitous in our society, footnoting has become a lost art. Students now think that if they lift a line from someone else’s work without appropriate attribution, it’s quite all right. But in the academic world, it’s not “quite all right.” It’s plagiarism, which is "education speak" for stealing.

But move that same dishonesty into the pulpit, and it’s no longer deemed plagiarism; it’s just preaching. I’ve actually heard preachers say: “When a better sermon is preached, I’ll steal it!”

I know; it happened to me. It happened when a story I told in a sermon at First Baptist Church in Raleigh got lifted and used by someone else as though it had happened to them.

Years ago, when I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Raleigh, an incident happened to me that shook me to my soles. I came home and told Cheryl about it, it bothered me so. Some weeks later, looking for an illustration for a sermon that drove home the point that everything we do matters, I remembered the incident and told it in a sermon. The incident was this... READ MORE.