The Rise of Christianity as "Content Creation"
The idols of cultural relevance and performative faith have made significant inroads among those who once held (or still claim to hold) the principles of gospel-centrality. The social media “influencer” phenomenon has shaped new iterations of evangelical attempts at treating church like a marketable consumer good. Where gospel-centered folks once maintained a healthy aversion to the cultural-relevance-at-all-costs mentality of the attractional church, we now see more drift back into positioning the church as a product.
We see this manifested not just in the creative trappings of sermon series and produced worship arts and the use of online media, but in the very way faith is communicated in sermons and biblical teachings. This is especially evident in the increasing treatment of sermons as “packaged content.” The reframing of spiritual communication as a product categorized as “content” is a direct pull from the digital age of the creative, but its indiscriminate employment by churches has severely eroded evangelicalism’s intellectual integrity and pastoral sensibility.
Take, for instance, the way sermons are increasingly treated as mines for viral video moments or simply as consumer products as a whole. With the growing acceptance of video venues and satellite campuses, more and more preachers are treating their preaching as a performance for the masses, rather than a well-hewn word for a specific flock. The sermon is treated like a curated consumer good, informed by committees acting like customer focus groups and contributed to by teams of writers. The sermon becomes a package of content designed for ease of distribution. Because of this reimagining of the preaching event, we are even seeing increasing transferability of sermons between churches, which can cause issues with plagiarism.
In 2021, it came out that Ed Litton, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, plagiarized significant portions of a 2020 sermon he gave at Redemption Church—the church he pastors—in Mobile, Alabama, from a sermon J. D. Greear had given to his church in 2019. Further investigation revealed even more uncited use of others’ material in Litton’s sermons. The incident sparked a widespread debate in the SBC and in wider evangelicalism over sermon plagiarism, even leading at least one state Baptist convention to adopt a resolution condemning the practice. For his part, Greear defended Litton and said he’d granted permission for his material’s use, credited or uncredited, and many evangelical pastors jumped to defend the practice generally.
Josh Howerton, lead pastor of megachurch Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas—himself a figure with many relational and public connections to those in the gospel-centered tribe—provided a widely read defense of sermon plagiarism, writing,
A church-sermon is not an academia-dissertation or a book/journalism-publication. I freely give away my notes to other pastors, because pastors aren’t preaching to make themselves look good, sound smart, or sell some- thing 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 differ- ent standards. Frankly, this is why “sermon plagiarism” accusations almost never come from other pastors, but from journalists, writers, or academics (or professional pastor-critics who need to manufacture new “scandals” to generate clicks for their monetized sites), trying to impose the standards of their industry onto another field.
Howerton marshals the support of figures from church history like Charles Spurgeon and Martin Luther, as well as some from more recent history like John Maxwell and T. D. Jakes, to make his case, which is not just flippant and flimsy, but a fundamental category error of what a sermon is. He may be rightly distinguishing preaching from an academic journal entry or book manuscript, but he is still treating it as a consumer good, interchangeable from church to church, a product that may be replicated ad infinitum for the download of any religious customers one happens to find himself in front of.
Contrary to Howerton’s and many others’ protests, it’s not difficult to give credit in oral communication. Plagiarism is dishonest, and over time it undermines a congregation’s trust that their preacher is biblically qualified to shepherd. Scripturally speaking, “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2) does not simply mean “able to speak well”; it means able to rightly divide (2 Tim. 2:15), competently exegete, and faithfully contextualize God’s Word to one’s flock. If a preacher is merely regurgitating someone else’s “ability to teach,” how can we be confident in his qualification?
Further, the preacher who plagiarizes his sermons and otherwise treats his preaching and teaching as marketable products reflects a superficial understanding of the spiritual work of ministry, which is not a franchising of the faith but a contextual rootedness of a church nourished by the spiritual rootedness of her pastors.
The reframing of church resources as culturally relevant content creation is just another sign of evangelical superficiality, and it has made distressing inroads among a fractured gospel-centered movement whose individual organizations and networks are all vying for superior market share.
This is an excerpt from my brand new book, Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel, available now from Zondervan Reflective. Order today.