Judge Rules in Sermon Sharing Scandal

Learn about the sordid tale that began with pastors stealing Tim Keller’s material and has led to the end of Southern Baptist church planting and the Christian blogosphere:

After an intensive three year investigation the justice department uncovered an extensive network of  pastors, seminary students and other church workers who downloaded hundreds of sermons by Rev. Keller, distributed them and preached them regularly in churches across America…

Every Southern Baptist Church that has been planted in America since 1995 has either been planted by the Rev. Ed Stetzer or by someone who was following the script of one of his books.  But Stetzer confesses “frankly I lift all of my material from Tim Keller, with this ruling I’m done”…

Geoff Hammond, President of the Southern Baptist’s North American Mission Board (NAMB) is upbeat.  “Yes, losing Stetzer was big…We are moving forward with a new vision of hosting more Beth Moore conferences.  In fact, on January 2, 2008 Broadman and Holman will publish Beth’s newest book ‘Become a Moore Better You,’ to coincide with her much anticipated ‘Your Beth Life Now,’ nationwide bus tour.  So yes I am upbeat – who needs Stetzer or Keller when you’ve got Moore?”

The internet was the arena where most of Keller’s sermons were shared, amongst Christian blogs and social networks.  But these are being hit just as hard as the denominations.  Famed Keller blogger and minister Steve McCoy of the Reformissionary blog has shut down his blog and left his church and is pursuing his dream of becoming a member of the Hollywood paparazzi.  The leading Keller blogger on the internet, D. J. Chuang believes this is the end of the “Christian blogosphere.”  Chuang says “when it comes to ‘Christian blogging’ 50% of the bloggers out there were either blogging Keller’s words or commenting on them.  The other 50% were arguing with them.  Now 50% of Christian bloggers have nothing to say and the other 50% have no one to argue with.”