A year after former SBC President Ed Litton resigned after being embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, bringing to the forefront of the evangelical mind the question of the morality of stealing sermons, new accusations are being lobbed against Pastor Josh Howerton of the multicampus Lakepointe Church in Dallas Texas.
Shelia Wray Gregoire of the Bare Marriage podcast has accused of Howerton of lifting material from Andy Stanley, Steven Furtick, Mark Driscoll and Rick Warren without attribution, which can be seen examples from the 4:20-12:30 mark.
They hosts elaborated more on the Stanley case, offering this tweet and then the video to show that Howerton was aware that he was monkeying about with murky things. (Ironically, in his defense provided below would go on to quote trinity-denier TD Jakes)
Howerton has responded to the allegations, offering in part these points:
1. “Permission & Understanding. Because they have a heart to help, almost every pastor tells other pastors to use anything from his sermons that’ll help them. “If my bullet fits in your gun, shoot it!”: I’ve heard Adrian Rodgers, JD Greear, Craig Groeschel, Chris Hodges, Bob Russell, Rick Warren, etc all say this.
2. Differing industry standards. A church-sermon is not an academia-dissertation or a book/journalism-publication. I freely give away my notes to bivocational pastors and church-planters, because pastors aren’t preaching to make themselves look good, sound smart, or sell something proprietary. We’re preaching for life-change and to grow the kingdom. Those differing goals of written communication in journalism or academia vs. the goals of verbal communication in preaching lead to very different standards
3. It is understood that TEACHERS aggregate whatever content best helps their students. Guys, stop and think for a second: Pastors are TEACHERS. In schools, 0% of people assume every sentence their teacher says is their teacher’s 100% original thought and they never heard it from anyone else.
4. Many words / phrases / illustrations are common-source in preaching5. The Bible. I’m not gonna go here, but if you REALLY want to get salty, know who didn’t always cite sources? Bible writers. Gospel writers and other epistles borrow liberally from the Old Testament, sometimes citing, but often just saying without citation because in preaching what really matters is that people are helped with the truth.
h/t The Dissenter
