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Though I can't say I've read everything out there on the subject, I can say that Thomas Long's "Stolen Goods: Tempted to Plagiarize" is the best thing I've read so far about issues pertaining to preaching and plagiarism. Brian Larson, editor of PreachingToday.com, offered the same sentiments when he first received permission for us to run the article. If you haven't read it, take a moment to check it out. Also, we'd love for you to give a listen to the most recent episode of PT Talk to hear us discuss this controversial topic. This entry builds off of thoughts I briefly shared in that audio cast.

PreachingToday.com is currently running "Stolen Goods: Tempted to Plagiarize", an article by Thomas G. Long about the necessity of citation and the damage of deceit in preaching. The editors of Preaching Today wanted to use our new weekly audio feature - PT Talk - to chime in with a few thoughts on this controversial topic. Please use the comments section to share your own reflections.

Click "Play" on the audio player below, and you can listen to PT Talk via an audio stream. If you'd rather download the audio file so you can have it on the run, there is a link just below the player.

To download this episode of PT Talk, click here.

PreachingToday.com is currently running "Stolen Goods: Tempted to Plagiarize", an article by Thomas G. Long about the necessity of citation and the damage of deceit in preaching. If you're a member of Preaching Today, you can read it at any time by clicking on the link. Brian Larson (chief editor) and I will be discussing the article and its implications in the next episode of PT Talk (to be posted very soon). In the meantime, here are a few juicy quotes from Long's work:

A section from Gary Thomas's The Beautiful Fight struck a deep chord with me this morning:

You may be interested in attending a preaching workshop that I have gone to several times over the years and have always found rewarding. The event is sponsored by Simeon Trust, an organization spearheaded by author Kent Hughes and devoted to advancing sound biblical preaching. They now hold workshops in various parts of the U.S., and there will be one in Chicago in November.

In case you missed the article in the print edition of Leadership journal, Skye Jethani's "Glimpses of Glory" is now an abbreviated post on Out of Ur. I'd love for you to take a look at what he has to say and then make your way back to the PT Blog to leave a comment or two in reflection. Does Skye have a point about the difference between preaching and teaching? How does this challenge the dichotomy we've often created between visionary preaching and "regular" expository preaching? Is this something you've been wrestling with as a preacher? If not, how would you contest Skye's thoughts? If you have been, how has this challenged and even changed you as a preacher?

Hopefully you've been able to check out the Preaching Today interview with Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken on preaching for spiritual formation. Mark your calendars: the second part comes out this Friday. In the meantime here's something from the cutting room floor...

How did the topic of spiritual formation in preaching become important to you?

Kent: Our interest in preaching for spiritual formation is directly related to the story of our church. We were a seeker-targeted church that had experienced rather rapid growth in our area. We were having great fun and, in terms of attendance and decisions for Christ, were experiencing great success. By 2000, we were finally in our first permanent, large building, so we no longer had facility demands. This gave us flexibility to evaluate where we were and listen more carefully to what God was saying.

In his book Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner offers this definition of preaching:

Basically, it is to proclaim a Mysery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also to proclaim this Mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with. It is to try to put the Gospel into words not the way you would compose an essay but the way you would write a poem or a love letter - putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life. It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding but of new life both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you.

Another great article from our sister site, Leadership. Check it out and feel free to come on back to the PT Blog to share your reflections.

Yesterday I sent you off to part one of a two-part article by John Ortberg called "Speaking from My Holy of Holies" (remember: part two comes out tomorrow afternoon on PT.com). Today I think I'll guide you to another great article by Ortberg that's featured on the Leadership journal site. This one concerns the sometimes agonizing, always rewarding discipline of birthing a sermon.

At this rate our motto for the PT Blog should be "All Ortberg, All the Time."

If I could direct you one place today, it would be here.

Read it slowly. Read it carefully. Read it humbly. Oh - and make sure you read Part Two (coming out this Friday afternoon).

Ortberg has some deep, meaningful thoughts to offer you as a preacher and, most importantly, as a simple follower of Christ.

Clark Cothern, a regular contributor to our weekly batch of illustrations, shared this short, but intriguing story. Take a moment to read it, and I'd like to offer just a few words on the other side:

Would you consider yourself successful if you had written a novel a year for 52 straight years? Would you feel successful if you had written shelves of books on mythology, biography, folklore, theology, and travel? One man did all of the above—and in only one lifetime. I kid you not! This one man wrote 85 books in his 89 years on Earth. And get this: the same man even once rescued a young girl from drowning!

But I doubt seriously that you know his name.

Last Sunday I preached on Ephesians 5:15–20, which includes the call to "be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."

One of the most important things pastors do is teach believers to worship.

Between the preacher and his goal of strengthening Christ's church stands a gauntlet of formidable obstacles. For example, life in a media-driven society pressures ministers to knead into their sermons equal parts content and entertainment, while short attention spans mean they have less than half an hour to strike the perfect balance. If the sermon's dull, the preacher will be called a bore; if it's too exciting, he'll be called a showman. No one should envy the preacher's vocation.

The good news is, you're in good company. I was encouraged by a little book published many years ago that confirmed for me that preachers have faced the same challenges since the very beginning. John Chrysostom's On the Priesthood, completed sometime before 386 AD, is the author's attempt to talk his superiors out of ordaining him for the ministry—John has read the job description, and he doesn't want anything to do with it. His reasons may sound familiar.

About a year and a half ago, we had a weekend at our church where we explored spiritual formation, and Dallas Willard was one of the people who spoke to a group of our leaders.

After he was done, we walked out to the car, and he was just shuffling along, singing to himself a hymn.

What struck me as I watched him was how different he was than what I'm like after I speak. There was nothing inside of Dallas that was asking the questions I tend to gnaw on: "How did I do? What went well? What didn't? Did people like that?" Why do I dwell on such things? Because if they liked it, I can feel good about myself, and I can feed off of that. And if they didn't like it, then that's bad, and I'm kind of sad.

An upcoming issue of Preaching Today Audio (Issue #289) features a workshop by John Ortberg on preparing your soul for preaching. Because of limited space on the disc, I had to cut quite a bit of great material. Wonderfully enough, the folks at Leadership have put together an article of some of the material we weren't able to use! Here's something ripe for reflection that Ortberg shared early in the workshop:

The theologian Abraham Kuyper likened the human soul to the tabernacle in the Old Testament. You have an outer court, which is the public domain. That's where you work, where you shop, and where you go to school. Preaching is often done as an outer court activity. I prepare the words ahead of time. I think through what I want to say. I'm very aware of the fact that I'm doing this as a public activity.

You also have an inner court. This is the place where you invite family, friends, and people that you love deeply. You share a deeper level of your life in the inner court. Not everybody gets to the inner court, certainly not your whole church.

In one church that I pastored, we had one large family with a divorced father who struggled with drunkenness. He had a warm and humble spirit, and I liked him very much. When he came to church,

FaithVisuals has just posted a provocative interview with Shane Hipps (author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church). The conversation is guided by this centering question: "Is video technology in church manipulative?" At the midway point, Hipps – who has a history in the world of marketing and advertising – makes this observation about the use of media:

Visual multimedia are probably the favorite medium of the greatest manipulators in world history: advertisers. And I know because I was one! One of the things we discovered was that the absolute best way to move people against their better judgment was through emotion, not reason. Everything we did was to try and give emotional experiences, evoke emotional impressions, and basically ignore the nuts and bolts of the superiority of our product.

For several months I have been doing an in-depth study of Malachi. As a pastor charged with the responsibility of feeding the people, one passage that seized my interest the more I considered it was 2:1–9, which discusses God's covenant with Levi as it rebukes the priests for failing in their responsibility to properly teach the Word. It is a sobering and relevant warning for preachers today, for as much as we should talk about proper methods in preaching we also need to talk about the heart issues of how we faithfully discharge our responsibility as God's spokesperson.

"What do you want to do when you grow up?" my father asked me over dinner.

"I want to go door-to-door and sell apples," I answered (with as much machismo as a five-year-old can muster).

When you're a kid, answers to such questions are usually pipe dreams—girls want to be ballerinas, and boys want to be astronauts (or Johnny Appleseed). Though some buck the trend and dance their way through Carnegie Hall or fly upward toward the moon, most of us have to learn to aim our lives in other directions. So I'm incredibly thankful that God literally answered my vocational questions in a piece of mail I received during my sophomore year in high school.