Former SBC President J.D. Greear, the pastor of Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, has given some advice to beleaguered pastors with a few extra bucks in their budget; ‘invest’ in several ‘research assistants’ in order to help write and craft the sermon.
It is unclear if the research assistants are all Summit staffers or if he’s still using Docent hired guns– that infamous company that creates sermons and sermon outlines for pastors. You’ll recall that previously, in a glowing endorsement (that has now been removed but is still available on a Wayback Machine archive), Greear not only admitted that he has used this service, but that he uses it to make him look good.
Docent has been a humongous help to me, saving me literally hours each week and improving the quality of my preaching dramatically. These guys are the real deal. I give them assignments and questions on everything from interpretation to cultural analysis to illustration, and they get me thorough answers, always on time. They are outstanding scholars and really “get” my job as a communicator. I often have people remark to me, “How many hours did you spend on that sermon? Where do you get time to do all that research?” Ha. Thanks, guys for making me look so good!
On a recent Church Leaders podcast with Ed Stetzer, he explains how he collates content for his sermons:
And to be totally transparent with our listeners here, now that I, you know, we have a larger staff, some of this is easier because I can actually appoint people. I can- to give people like, hey, I want you to go listen to this text by and we have a list of like 30 preachers, I’m like ‘just go find where any of these people have talked on this text and let’s just use five or six of them that look really interesting’.
So I will actually sit down to what is a ‘digested outline‘…And that’s really helpful, it means I can do it a lot more quickly. But I will say before I had the resources to do that team, I just, I did it almost all myself.
He continues:
Between between my notes, my compilation as well as what now happens through some research assistants, I will just spend that time on Monday morning. One more thing, just for people that are early in the process, what I would do is, if I knew I was going to preach on John 4 in in three weeks, because I’m working my way through John, three or four weeks before, I just spend an afternoon collecting a lot of those sermons, you know, online, you know, DVDs, whatever, stuff.
So and I would just start, like using devotional reading, you know, an hour a day or so, getting ready for this thing that was three or four weeks away. So it’s harder if you don’t have research assistants. At some point as gives you the resources, I’d encourage you to invest in some of that, it will help. But it’s possible to do when it’s just you.”
Bonus. Don’t forget that in our article Ed Litton Sometimes Skips the Sermon Prep: Preaches what His Team Gives Him, former SBC president and serial plagiarist Ed Litton explained the resources he uses to craft sermons, including a whole preaching team,
We (his 8 member preaching team) meet on Monday afternoon. And all the members of the preaching team which we’ll talk about later, they come together, they have been studying the same text and we work on it now. Actually, the interesting thing was that’s become so helpful for me, is that I got an email Monday evening from the preaching team, they went over the text without me. Which was awesome, this is what we do.
And I said, alright, I need to know, and here’s where I’m thinking–in a letter–I just said ‘you guys tear it apart, tell me where I’m wrong, tell me what you think is best” And language, we talk about language, we talk about tone, all those things cause they’re all younger.
And so that week, actually I had a little bit of study to do in between killing pheasants and taking pictures… I literally walked to the church and filmed it.
