Fact-checking sermons

An urban legend is one of those fascinating and sometimes inspiring anecdotes that are presented as true, except they aren’t.  One of the ways they are often spread is by sermons.  Christian Journalist Bob Smietana had to promise his daughter to stop fact-checking the sermon on his cell-phone during church, but he wrote an amusing and instructive blog post on the subject.From Bob Smietana, You might want to fact-check your pastor’s sermons:

Take this lovely story I heard in a sermon recently:

A gardener was working a nobleman’s English estate when he noticed that a young boy had fallen in the pool and was drowning. The quick-thinking gardener dropped his tools, leapt into the pool, and saved the boy from drowning.

The boy, as it turned out, was a young Winston Churchill.

Churchill’s father was so reportedly so grateful that he made this offer to the gardener: I will pay for your son to go to college.

Years later, Churchill was afflicted with a terrible case of pneumonia and was near death. Fortunately, a new miracle drug called penicillin was available, and it saved Churchill’s life.

Here’s the best part: That miracle drug was invented by Alexander Fleming, the son of a poor gardener — the very same gardener who had saved Churchill as a boy.

It’s great story about the power of a good deed. There’s just one problem: Almost nothing about this story is true. It’s one of the most popular myths about Churchill, according Snopes.com and the Downers Grove, Illinois-based Churchill Centre.

How do I know this?

During the sermon, I stopped listening to the pastor and instead turned my eyes on my cell phone. Something about the story just didn’t sit right — it was too good to be true. So whatever spiritual lesson I was supposed to learn in the sermon was soon overshadowed by the wisdom of a Google search.

Things get even worse when a pastor starts quoting statistics.

I’ve heard most of these in church or seen them in the pages of Christian publications. You may have heard a few of them, too:

• Church members get divorced at the same rate as anyone else.
• The church in the U.S. is dying.
• Most Christian young people are shacking up and having sex.
• Half of ministers want to quit their jobs.
• Youth groups are driving teenagers out of the church in droves.
• A third of divorces in America are caused by Facebook.

None of these statistics is true.

[Keep reading. . .]

To be sure, listeners to a sermon are not supposed to be in the role of critics, and they need to realize that the point of the story is what is important.  I agree that it’s not a good idea to fact-check the pastor’s sermon, especially while he’s preaching it!  But pastors would do well to fact-check their own sermons before they preach them!  (A good resource that tracks the urban legends going around and also indicating what popular anecdotes are actually true is Snopes.com.)

HT:  Carl Vehse