Plagiarism in the Pulpit (Pastor's Podcast)

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist, my name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. I'm coming to you today with a very special program. We're going to have a pastor's forum on the program today where I'm going to be joined by two other pastors and a deacon to talk about a very important subject.

Plagiarism in the Pulpit and the Greer-Litton Sermon Controversy

And that subject is plagiarism in the pulpit. And I want to introduce the panel that I have now. And throughout the program, we may have some others joining us. We've invited some others to opine at certain points, and if they decide to, we'll look forward to them participating.

But the ones that I have on the program with me beginning right away, I have Mr. Kenny Roberts. Kenny, can you introduce yourself to us and where you are the pastor?

Yeah, so as he said, my name is Kenny Roberts, and I am the pastor at Mission Way Church here in Jacksonville, Florida. Been there about two and a half years.

Wonderful. And you've been on the program before. We interviewed you just a few weeks ago. Yep. Yep. All right. And Austin is in Ocala, right?

Yeah, well, Ocala area. Technically, Summerfield near the villages. And I'm the pastor at Grace Point Church and I guess chief administrator, Grace Point Academy. And I've been here coming on 13 years.

And and you have been on the program twice. We had you on for an interview and we had you on to talk about conspiracy theories. And if somebody missed that one, that was a pretty good, pretty good show.

And of course, with me almost as always is Richard Roden. Richard Roden, do you need an introduction? Does the world need to?

Yeah, well, a lot of you don't know me. I'm Richard Roden. I am a deacon and a Sunday school teacher at Greg Ables. And I've been a member there since 2001. So I've been there quite a while and I'm bringing up the rear with the pastors today.

Yes, we've invited Richard to sort of give a non-pastoral perspective. And there are going to be certain times where I'm going to ask him from the sort of a picture from the pew. What does the pew or the church member expect?

So we're going to have you be that sort of that participant today, Richard. All right. So as we're going along, we have a few things that we're going to be going through. We have some questions that we're going to be going through.

But before we get to those, I kind of want to discuss what brought this about, what brought about this conversation. And many of you know that a video recently went viral from the previous president of the SBC, whose name is J .D. Greer, and the current president of the SBC, Ed Litton.

And the video was a compilation of a sermon that both men preached. And when you begin to watch the video, it becomes painfully obvious very quickly that both men are preaching the same sermon. They're using the same illustrations.

They're using the same notes. They're using the same outline. Even almost at certain points seem to be telling the same one liners, you know, sort of waiting on the same response from the congregation.

And so when that video went viral, people began to have all kinds of opinions. And both men wrote responses to what was happening because it was obvious it wasn't something that anyone could say, well, this was just a coincidence.

Certainly wasn't a coincidence. And what has come out is that Litton admitted to using Greer's material, but according to him, he used Greer's material with his permission. And so this has led a lot of people to say, well, then it doesn't matter.

He used his permit. He used it by his permission. He didn't have to tell anybody, according to some people. And that's one of the things we're going to talk about, attribution and citation. But he said, you know what?

He had permission. So it shouldn't be that big of a deal. But the question really comes down to the question of integrity. This is something that I have dealt with personally over the years, because on two occasions in the last 15 years of being the pastor of Sovereign Grace Church, in the past 15 years, on two different occasions, I have had churches contact me because their ministers were using my notes.

I remember specifically the first time it happened. It was about 2008. And I had written a sermon that was entitled, What Can You Do While Waiting on God? It was from Acts chapter two, when the when the disciples were waiting on the falling of the Holy Spirit.

Right. And the title was pretty, you know, what can you do while waiting on God? It was pretty catchy. And I had posted that on a website called Sermon Central dot com. It's a place where pastors can go on and share notes and share illustrations.

And I got a call from a deacon one night and he says, is this Pastor Keith Foskey? And I said, yes. He said, Pastor Foskey, did you write the sermon? What can you do while you're waiting on God? And I said, yes, I do.

I remember writing it. I was part of a series I was doing. And he said, well, our pastor preached your sermon as if it was his. He did not attribute it to you, but we knew it wasn't his work. We knew because of some other things that were going on, it didn't sound like him.

It didn't come out like him. So we looked it up on the Internet and we found your name. So we wanted to know, are you the author of this sermon? And I said, yes. And then the next thing he said was, what do you think we should do?

And and first of all, I said, because I was 28 years old, I said, well, congratulate him for having good taste. Now, I honestly there was a part of me, the sinful part of me that was like, wow, somebody thought it was good enough to use.

And I don't know if you guys have such a sinful disposition as that. But there was certainly a part of me that was a little, you know, in a sense, kind of happy in a wrong way. But at the same time, I knew that it was this deacon was calling me because this man had an issue with integrity.

He had an issue with not wanting to do the work himself, not wanting to do the work of study and exegesis and the homiletical preparation of a sermon. And the deacons were concerned about his integrity.

And that's what I said. I said, you need to confront him. You need to have a conversation about integrity and his work ethic. And what is he doing in his ministry? And again, it happened a couple of years later.

It was a different sermon, different situation. But it was still a committee called me and said, you know, we are investigating our pastor because he has used your your sermons as well as some others that we have found online.

So this is not an isolated incident with Lytton and Greer, but there's having done it has really put it out there, has made it, you know, now people are talking about integrity in the pulpit. And so I'm going to go around the panel and I'm going to ask each of you, if you would, for just a few minutes, tell me what were your initial thoughts when you were listening to the Greer and Lytton video?

What were your initial thoughts about this? Did you were you offended? Were you did you feel like this is not not as big a deal as everybody's making it out to be? I'll start with you, Austin, you've been pastor at your church for 13 years.

I'm let you maybe maybe go first and then we'll let let Kenny and Richard.

Borrowing, Plagiarism, and Integrity in Sermon Preparation

Speak. Well, when I first started in the pastorate and I left my youth pastorate to go to my first church, my pastor said something to me. We sat down in his office every day and he said, you're going to find yourself because I was 24 when I started pastoring.

He said, you're going to find yourself borrowing a lot, make it your own. But as you mature in the Lord, you'll eventually. And I have found that. But there's a difference between borrowing and a basic outline and hanging your meat on it versus preaching another man's sermon.

And when I first seen the video, I thought, OK, it's going to be his quote about that horrible, horrible quote about what the Bible whispers about and screams about. And then I started watching the video.

And here it is. This is not a young preacher. This is an elder statesman in the SBC, and he is downright plagiarizing without giving credit. That really bothered me. It's bad for a 24 year old to plagiarize, no matter what the age is.

But it really bothers me that this is an elder statesman who's supposed to have been in his Bible his whole life and has more than 20, 30 years ministry. That is what bothered me the most. A preacher should be preaching from the flow of his daily devotional life and the scriptures and the growth.

I can tell you, I listen to sermons that I preached, you know, 17, 18 years ago when I was a youth pastor and I listened to sermons I preach now, I have grown. I would think an elder statesman like him would not be plagiarizing that much.

It really bothered me personally. OK, awesome. Kenny, what were your thoughts initially?

My first thought was, I'm not surprised that this is happening and coming out now with Ed Litton taking over, being president of the SBC, but at the same time, I was also thankful that some things are being exposed, that people are finding out some of the stuff that had already happened, but nobody had known about or cared to share about before.

One of my second thoughts was how, you know, how can we change the way we how much that grieved me as a pastor to see another pastor, instead of loving his congregation enough to say, let me take this difficult issue from the scriptures and preach the word faithfully to my congregation.

He said, who preached this in a good way and how can I take what they said? And it was almost as if he was more preaching to the culture than he was preaching to his church, which that gets into the content of the sermon in general.

But that was my big problem is, not only did you plagiarize, but you didn't feed your congregation. You simply wanted to take talking points from somebody else. And as a pastor, that's hard to watch.

Amen. Amen. Brother Richard, what were your thoughts?

Initially, I was actually surprised and I say surprised by when I was watching it the first time I was trying to figure out who's plagiarizing who. And at first I thought Greer had borrowed it. And then when I found out that it was flipped, that was where I was a little more surprised because as mentioned earlier, this is an older gentleman who's supposed to been in the pulpit for ever and a day.

And he's borrowing from J .D. Greer and not just borrowing, but flat out just basically re-preaching the same sermon. What's interesting is as I was going back over the video today, I can't remember the name of the site, but you said in your introduction, Keith, that they labeled this a coincidence, but I found another video that they put out there of Romans 13, where Lytton has done the exact same thing from the introduction to his opening prayer.

I've watched about three and a half, four minutes of it where he's almost verbatim preaching another Greer sermon. So there's two times that he's done this, not just once.

So they've actually taken down all of the Roman sermons on his website. From what I understand, there was a certain amount of sermons through Romans and they've just taken them off the website.

So over 200 sermons.

And why would you do that if there wasn't an issue there or you're trying to hide something? So first, I was surprised that it was the older man borrowing from the younger, but then just disappointment because of everything else going on with the SBC.

It's just further down the drain it goes because of just everything going on with them. Just more disappointment in that whole organization. Yeah, those are my initial thoughts.

And Richard, you and I talked a little bit earlier about the interesting beginning of the sermon, how they both used an illustration and Lytton referenced it as being from Paul Tripp and Greer referenced it as it coming from his own experience.

That was another really weird thing. And of course, if you read their response, Greer said, well, what it was, was I have been on missions trips and I have experienced what Paul Tripp mentioned. And but my point is simply to say it seems like they were both taking from Paul Tripp the idea.

So it's like they're both drawing from a single source in that regard where Greer got the idea, well, this is good. And then Lytton couldn't say that because he'd not been where Greer had been mission-wise.

So he has to go and say, well, go back to the original source. It's just all so convoluted. And, you know, did you guys read the response that they gave both sides? Yeah. Yeah. Was there anything in there?

I have not. OK. Kenny, Austin, was there anything that y 'all felt like was made better?

J .D. Greer, that phrase, whatever bullet of mine works in your gun. So, I mean, there was a definite permission given. There's a difference between taking a few illustrations. And even I'll even say this.

There are some like I'm exegetical preacher, exposter. So when there are some books of the Bible, I will read one commentator and I will outline it myself. And it's like it just outlines itself. So there's going to be some outline copies, points.

But these were not those types of points. They had nothing to do with the actual structure of the verses he was using. They were typically nothing but topical verses. He was he was working through Romans one, but it was topical culture, social.

He was really pulling what he could from the text. And he there's this was not a matter of this best describes the text. This was I like the way he did it. I want to do it his way because it was popular.

Yeah. Kenny, do you have any thoughts about the responses?

One of the things that was interesting to me is I don't really I didn't really see a clear apology from Ed Litton and not bother me. I mean, I don't know that everybody here knows, but our church is SBC.

And to see the new president get called out for something that he admits is wrong. I mean, he's not he he did admit that it was wrong, but there wasn't this clear apology of I know that you all have trusted me to lead this organization.

This was a big deal. And I messed this up. And I'm really asking you to forgive me. I mean, there are people out there who which I don't know that we need to get into this necessarily, but there are people out there who are saying if a pastor does this, they should resign.

I've seen articles from way back when, from 2012, from some some men I respect to have said that for a long time. But whether or not you agree with that, this is a big enough deal to do more than say, hey, this happened.

You know, I should have mentioned Greer, but I didn't. I'm committed to integrity and honesty moving forward. There was no real apology.

Why Plagiarism Is a Serious Pastoral Problem

Yeah. And actually, that leads us into the next question, Kenny, very well, because what you just said about this has been an issue and people have written about it since you said back in 2012, because my next question was, do you think plagiarism is a problem for pastors?

And by you saying that, the answer is, yeah, there are some guys that this is a real problem for. I'll tell you a quick story and then I'll I'm going to let you guys jump in. There was there was a church that I that we received some members from the church closed because the pastor was forced to resign because of a moral issue.

But the months leading up to his moral issue, it became very clear that he was no longer writing his own sermons, but that he was simply reading the John MacArthur commentary series that he had. And they literally the people were going home, opening up the John MacArthur commentary and seeing the outline and being, oh, well, he didn't write this.

This is the he's literally using the outline that's in the commentary. And people owned it. People in the church had those commentaries so that they could go home and see what he was doing. And they said that was the first that was the first key indicator that something was wrong in his ministry.

And then, of course, it ended up he was exposed with a moral, very tremendous moral failing, which led to the actually the dissolution of the church because of his very, very sad situation. So, yeah, I mean, you know, what are you guys thoughts about how much this is a problem for pastors?

Austin, I'll go with you first.

I think the problem is, is that most pastors don't know how to study. They don't know how to outline. They don't. And what got me when I was I was reading Litton's response on his Go Redemption dot com, he says, as he said, I hold the same study process on each sermon as any pastor who preaches regularly knows.

We often rely on scholars and fellow pastors for more clarity with the goal of faithfully preaching the truth that that that's not a bad statement. But again, if I'm looking at other men's sermons, it's usually after my outlines complete it and I'm going, did I miss something?

And, you know, it's it's not it's not something I go to to write my sermon. And that's probably where a lot of the plagiarism is coming from. And it's often probably unintentional instead of becoming familiar with the text, reading the text, doing the language work, digging through it, then writing a rough outline and then building an outline, then looking at other resources.

They're starting backwards. They're starting with these other sermons and trying to move backwards. And then the outline is already set in their mind. And I think it makes it easier for pastors to find themselves plagiarizing, even if they.

Don't mean to. I love that idea that working backwards, that's that's that's a good thought. Kenny, did you have anything you wanted to?

Yeah, I mean, I think I've seen a I don't I don't know if this is a good term for it, but it's a term that comes to mind, a kind of a soft plagiarism that's almost celebrated in ministry where I get advertisements all the time for these things that say, hey, if you're a pastor and you need more time for ministry, let us do the sermon prep for you.

And and beyond that, I've been to conferences where these churches and pastors say all the time, use our stuff, don't give us any credit for it, just use it. It's all God's stuff. And I'm like, I love the heart behind that.

I mean, I have that same heart for wanting to share ministry tools and insights and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I think especially a lot of young pastors who are essentially CEOs of their churches are saying, oh, great, I don't have to put in a lot of work to this.

There's other guys that have done this. Let me let me move forward with it. And it just it easily translates into full blown plagiarism.

Yeah, absolutely. Richard, when we we say, do you think plagiarism is a problem for pastors? You write a lot of material yourself, I know, because we talk a lot about your Sunday school classes. But have you ever in Sunday school?

Have you ever used someone else's? And I'm not talking about like a workbook, because that's not that's different. Right. Wouldn't we agree that like if it's a workbook that you're working through, that.

That's that's like a leader.

Yeah, I mean, and everybody has the everybody has the student guide. You have the leader guide. That's different because you're not you're not everybody knows that you're not plagiarizing. You're using it now.

You would still be expected to read ahead and study ahead. But you're still you know, if you're using like I was at your church on a Wednesday night and your pastor was going through something, I think he wrote that what we went.

Through. But it was he was. He was basing it off of another book that he had read, but he had wrote his own material.

Yeah, because it was very well done. I mean, it was your pastor is a very skilled at outlining things. I've seen some of the stuff my wife visits their church sometimes because it's closer to our house for Wednesday nights.

So sometimes she goes there with our kids because they have a lot of stuff and really enjoy their pastor. And he's really good at outlining. So but how about you? Have you ever have you ever used somebody's material?

And how did you give credit if you did?

Um, well, I kind of go through some of the similar process that y 'all do for studying for Sunday school. I don't go as deep as y 'all do, obviously, because I have a basic outline in the leadership material in the guide to go off of if I want to follow it.

But a lot of times I deviate from it, not because I don't disagree with it, just because I come across elements that I think would be more pertinent to the Sunday school class than what's in the material.

If you follow what I'm saying there. Well, it's like I got to say, yeah, it's like what y 'all do with it. You're trying to speak to your people.

Well, I'm trying to speak to my class. Well, that's what that's what Kenny just said a few minutes ago about knowing your church, right? Knowing your people. If if if Lytton is preaching someone else's sermon, he's preaching it that was written to somebody else's people.

Right. That kind of what you were saying, Kenny? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So I didn't catch y 'all. That's fine. Um, so, yes, I've I've borrowed from other guys when I read commentaries, whether it's Henry or Calvin or Spurgeon or something. But if I'm using something from them, I will tell the class this is what Henry has to say about the subject.

And then I will read his quote and then I will go on. But I'm not. Taking what's in the commentary and then putting it on my paper and then preaching what Henry wrote so long ago as my own. Or anybody else, I understand what he was saying earlier about borrowing to some extent.

Yeah, you'll borrow a little bit, but that's not plagiarism because you might take an idea, but you make it your own in the sense of of doing that. But speaking to whether or not I think plagiarism is a problem in the church, since you wanted me to give the pew perspective, I've been fortunate enough that I've sat under pastors that don't have this problem.

And I've actually with both with Cody and with Andy before he was a pastor before, they kind of took me behind the veil, so to speak, into their study process. I actually got to see this is how they do it.

And the work and the time and the effort and the study and the prayer and everything that goes, they start with the text and then work from the text to the commentaries, if need be, especially as a difficult subject, this kind of has differing views.

I go to other guys to kind of get an idea, but it's starting with the text and working that way. I under I I can when I first started teaching Sunday school when I was real green, I made a mistake of starting with the commentaries.

And unfortunately, if you start with the commentaries, you start with like MacArthur, his commentary is just a sermon. Those ideas are those things already planted in your head before you get to the text, and it's hard to work backwards.

And then it's then you fall into this accidental plagiarism, so to speak, if you want to call it that, because you're not trying to do that, but you've been influenced in that direction. So it's always best to start with the text, work from the text and then go to these other sources as is the last part of your study to make sure that you're in line with two thousand years of church history with all these other guys that came before you.

They were a lot smarter than me, as well as, you know, there may be something or perspective that you just didn't get that you didn't catch in the text, but they did. That's that's the part of iron and iron sharpening iron.

These other guys may have something that that you didn't get from the text that could be helpful. But yes, I'm in agreement. These other guys, there probably is a problem with it. And it's because men don't know how to study and they don't have the attention span to study in this in this culture that we have.

Yeah, I I want to I want to tell that real quick. I have used I remember in 15 years, I remember two sermons that I preached that were other men's sermons. One was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

But I've done that one, too, that I just I thought I thought I could give, you know, just read it. And but we announced it, you know, tonight it was an evening sermon. I said tonight, instead of the normal study, I'm going to read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

And, you know, it was interesting. Not everybody thought it was great.

You know, you have people falling out of the pew.

Nobody fell down. Nobody nobody was grasping the back of the pews. But I also did. And this is the weird one. I was preaching through Jonah and R .C. Sproul mentioned that in the the book Moby Dick, there is a sermon that is preached.

One whole chapter in Moby Dick is a sermon preached about Jonah. And I read that to the church on it was a Sunday evening service. And it was, you know, with Sunday evening, you know, that's your small crowd kind of, you know, you can do things maybe a little different than normal.

And that was the only other time I can remember reading another man's sermon. And it wasn't even it was it was it was ours. And what's funny is that was R .C. Sproul's idea because he mentioned it. He said, you know, he loves Moby Dick.

And he said, if I ever had the opportunity and I, you know, I would read this sermon from this. So I went and downloaded it, printed it and read it. But again, everybody knew what I was doing. I was preaching the sermon from Moby Dick that was written, you know, by Herman Melville.

So those are two odd things that I've done, but I have done them. How about you guys? If you have you ever used another person's sermon? Have you ever like just read another man's sermon? If so, how did you give attribution, Kenny?

I have not read a full sermon. The closest thing I've done and I did this when I first started preaching at 2021, I I had some sermons that I I appreciated from other guys who at the beginning I said most of what I'm going to say tonight came from whoever it may have been.

And I honestly can't even remember the specific instances. I just have a recollection of doing that. But that's the closest that that I have in my ministry. But you were clear up front. Yeah, this is what I'm doing.

I appreciated this man. This sermon spoke to me. I hope it speaks to you. What's what's funny is I preached at the FIRE conference last year, Fellowship of Independent Reformed Evangelicals.

Austin, you were going to try to come to that. Remember, remind me next time it comes up.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great, great group of guys. And I was one of the guys preaching while one of the other brothers preached a sermon. And it was similar to what you just said, Kenny. It was he come up and he said, my outline tonight is from this other pastor.

And I for the life of me, I can't remember who it was. But he really made it his own. But it was you could tell the outline was very structured, specific. And he was and he kept going back to that. And but it certainly didn't feel canned.

It didn't feel like he had, you know, it didn't if he hadn't told us, we wouldn't have known. But I'm glad he did tell us, you know, he was very honest about it. And Brother Austin, you said you have done centers in the hands.

Yeah, I was like in my 20s. It was it was me, too. Yeah, I was licensed into the ministry. Oh, goodness. October of 2000. So it would have been early, early on. And I remember hearing all about that church history and thought I just I wanted to preach it.

And I just end up boring a whole bunch of young adults and teenagers for an hour. And it was not impressive at all. Yeah. Since I've been a pastor here, we have done several series. And there have been times I can think of two sermons off the top of my head.

One particular I remember because I was doing commandment number one and I was working. And I didn't do this on all the commands, but commandment number one, Thomas Watson has the best outline. And so I went to the pulpit and I said, all the main points are from a great theologian of the past, passed away years ago, Thomas Watson.

And I took the meat, just the main points, but I built my own meat around it. But I told the church up front, I'm borrowing a lot from Thomas Watson because I made this outline. And after I got done finishing my outline, I went and read it.

And I went, man, I missed. Oh, I just missed a lot. Thomas Watson slapped me over the face. I did not even know the first commandment that well. And and so I just came to the church and I was honest about it.

And I almost delayed my sermon by a week because I almost felt uncomfortable doing it. But the more I prayed about it, I just went to the pulpit very honestly. I'm using Thomas Watson's outline. I'm borrowing a lot from it.

And that's one particular one I can remember. And that was probably only about four years ago.

And it sounds like because that was the that was the next question. How do you handle citation and attribution from the pulpit? You just tell everybody. Right. I mean, that's it. You say this is where it comes from.

I like to quote people. I now I don't I don't I don't quote my whole sermons, not quotations. But the way that I the way that I do my preparation is, of course, I begin with the text. I I cut and paste the text from a from my accordion software into a Word file that I can write on with my iPad.

And I and I just double space it and I can go in and write my notes. And then I cut and paste from Lagos. One of our church members has a Lagos account with with a big, nice library that he's been gracious enough to let me have his, you know, use it.

You can put it on multiple computers. He puts it on my computer. So I'm able to do that. And what I do is I cut and paste the commentaries out. But but as Richard mentioned earlier, that's after I've already done my my writing on the on the notes and my exegetical work.

If it's in the Greek, I'm I feel more comfortable in the Greek than the Hebrew. But I try to do the exegetical work in both, making sure I'm understanding multiple translations and everything. But something else that I do, and I don't know if I'd like to hear you guys, if you do this, do you ever after you've written your sermon or maybe in the midst of the commentary portion, do you ever listen to other pastors preach that sermon on that text?

Often, often, OK, because I do I do. What about you, Austin?

I, I have. And it's usually on a text because I work through books of the Bible. And it's funny because sometimes it's like, what did R .C. Spurl say on this? Because I just feel like there has to be more.

I'm missing something here. I've dug through it. I've already done a base outline. But sometimes going back and saying, what am I missing? And again, it's important not to work backwards on this. If I listen to R .C. Spurl first, guess what I'm going to write?

R .C., I'm going to brighten an outline like R .C. Spurl, and I'm not R .C. Spurl, and I do not do well at delivering his sermons.

So, yeah, well, I think that's part of it plays back into all this, too, of in Lytton's response, you know, that whole statement that Austin read earlier where he said, you know, I am gleaming from other pastors and authors and theologians.

And I think we all do that. I mean, we're all doing that. That's great. Nobody's saying that's what's wrong here. Nobody's even saying it was wrong for him to listen to Greer's sermon and try to gain some insight from that.

What the problem is, is he preached the same sermon and didn't give any credit. I mean, it's it's a really simple problem. I don't understand. It's hard for me to comprehend why anybody would defend this and say it was OK or not a big deal.

It is a big deal. I mean, it's OK. It's OK in the sense that admit it, be honest about it, move on and do better. But at the same time, you can't just play it off and say, oh, yeah, that kind of happened.

I'm sorry, but let's delete these sermons and let's hide. Let's hide it.

Yeah, yeah. And something else, you know, I don't know how many of you caught this, but in Lytton's response, he mentioned that he has a team of eight people that helps him prepare his sermons.

Yeah, well, that's common, unfortunately.

Yeah. You didn't see that, Richard, did you? No, I said he said, yeah, he said, I. You know, I, I, he didn't say that he didn't use the word employ, but it was something like I, I gather with a group of eight men in my church and we put the put the sermon together.

And I was like, what? Just like I mean, I do have one of our elders, but we have two elders plus myself and Brother Mike and Brother Andy and Brother Mike. And I talk two or three times a week on the phone and it's often about the text I'm preaching.

So he is my sounding board, especially when there's an issue that I know that is a controversial issue. You know, I've been in Genesis, so there's been a lot. And I want to know, you know, do we agree?

And oftentimes I'll call Brother Andy, you know, where, where do you stand on this text? Because I want to make sure I'm not saying something that the three of us are going to be disagreeing about. Or if we do disagree, I want to present both sides if I can and be fair, you know, to this text.