Who Owns the Pastor’s Sermon? Part 4

Many of you have been following our series on the ownership of a pastor’s sermon.  For some, the discussion may seem like lawyers acting like lawyers.  But, if you’ve ever heard of The Purpose-Driven Life, you’ll have to admit it can be a significant issue.

Based on some of the comments we’ve received, we wanted to expound on a key aspect in the analysis as to whether the pastor or the church should own the pastor’s sermons.  Some people have a tough time seeing how the intellectual property created by a pastor in connection with the pastor’s sermon could be deemed “outside the course and scope” of the pastor’s employment by the church. For goodness’ sake, aren’t preaching sermons at the top of the list in a pastor’s job description? Certainly. 

However, don’t forget that a sermon doesn’t become intellectual property until it is “reduced to a reproducible medium.”  What if a pastor delivers a sermon without a transcript, or an outline, or even notes?  There are some pastors who preach without them.  Does that mean they aren’t doing their jobs?  What about the days before audio recording became prevalent?  A pastor could preach the greatest sermon since the Sermon on the Mount, but if there aren’t transcripts, notes, or recordings, there’s nothing for the church or the pastor to own.  Does that mean the pastor didn’t do his job?  Of course not, because his job is to preach, not create intellectual property assets for the church.

Spurgeon and Tozer didn’t have their sermons recorded. Were they any less valuable to their employing churches because they didn’t have anything to podcast?

The pastor’s job is to preach, teach and lead the flock, not create intellectual property assets for the church to own and exploit.  When you walk out of church on a Sunday morning, are you thinking about the words the pastor spoke, or about the format, content and the fill-in-the-blanks of the outline in the bulletin?  If there was no outline or PowerPoint, was the sermon any less impactful, any less valuable to the church and the Kingdom?  You see where we’re going with this.

We have seen a lot of job descriptions for pastors.  None of them has ever listed “create sermon transcripts” or “provide weekly to IT department a PowerPoint of no less than 8 slides before Friday at 5 PM” in the list of the pastor’s job duties.  If those intellectual properties get created by the pastor while he’s doing his real job of preparing a sermon to preach on Sunday, they are still “outside the course and scope” of his employment by the church. 

Simply put, if the creation of an item of intellectual property (e.g., a sermon outline or a transcript) isn’t part of the pastor’s job description, then you can’t very well claim that if the pastor does create that item, then all of a sudden it is part of his job, and automatically becomes something the church gets to own, control and exploit.