Dear Friends,
Almost forty years ago, when I was a student for the ministry, I worked with a wonderful minister who used to say ’Why use your own brain when you can use one that belongs to someone else?’ In saying this, he was encouraging me to read as widely as possible and absorb what I read. What he did not mean was that it was right to plagiarise. In our modern digital age, plagiarism, or using another person’s words, ideas, or work without proper acknowledgment, has become much more of a problem, especially in academic institutions, when it is so easy to lift information off the internet.
In my first charge I had members really who thought that it probably took about an hour to prepare a Sunday service because I could lift a sermon off the internet! And of course, I could have done so. But I never have. Studying the scriptures and allowing them to speak through what I say takes an enormous amount of time and prayer and discipline. Indeed, my father used to say, preaching was like having an exam every Sunday!
We are not all called to preach, but we are all called to be disciples of Jesus Christ, and to show through our lives, what it means to belong to him. And we are all called to share our faith. We can only do this effectively as we absorb the life and teachings of our Saviour and they become part of our own prayerful thinking. When I began studying for the ministry one of the first things we were told was that all of us, from the new first years to the professors, were on a journey to seek after truth. It was just that we were all at different stages of the journey. That is an important truth for all of us as we do our best to be genuine disciples of Christ.
With love and blessings,
Marion
Categories: Minister's Blog