Vanity link

My article in Preaching magazine is about to come out. Here’s a teaser (scroll down to the preview of the September-October issue):

In “Confessions of a Sermon Thief,” Darryl Dash shares his own experience: “I still remember the Sunday it caught up with me. I had hardly prepared, and I stank. I knew I stank. Everyone knew I stank. I went home that day and repented for my shoddy sermon preparation. I knew that I wasn’t living up to my calling, that I was a workman who needed to be ashamed. You could say a lot about my sermons since then, but you couldn’t say that I hadn’t prepared. “In January 2000, I attended a preaching seminar that changed my approach to preaching. The speaker encouraged us to be ourselves, but his method was so compelling, and his sermons so available, that I adopted his method. My sermons started to sound a little like his. They weren’t his, but they sounded like his. I then began to go even further. “I never knowingly stole a whole sermon. I did, however, begin to get series ideas from others. I began to borrow sermon titles, even though I would develop the sermon differently. It was easy to begin the preparation process by looking at what others had done on the topic. I might or might not use an outline or a point. My sermons were becoming more of a collaborative effort. “I never stopped putting lots of time into my sermons, usually at least ten hours. I never significantly borrowed material without giving credit. I was open with my leaders that I consulted other people’s sermons as I prepared my own. But