Frequently Asked Questions

Does Docent Write Sermons?

The short answer is that Docent does not and will never write sermons. We started Docent to help pastors become better preachers, and pastors will never become better preachers with someone else writing their sermons. We have received requests from potential clients to write sermons in the past, but we have declined to work with those pastors because writing sermons violates our core values.

To put it affirmatively, we believe that pastors are called to write their own sermons for their flocks.

If you don’t write sermons, what do you do?

Pastors who engage us give us specific instructions based on their own theological commitments, ministry context, ministry philosophy, gifts and weaknesses, and the Lord’s leading of their ministry. We work hard at matching researchers with pastors based on shared commitments.

Docent provides sermon research, which is a broad category that includes standard “academic” or commentary work as well as what we call “Connective Tissue.”

The “academic” research includes things like word studies, commentary synthesis, NT/OT background and cultural context research, biblical and systematic theology material, and other similar kinds of material that a pastor might reference for sermon prep. Our Researchers dive into the material, synthesize, summarize, and curate the best existing content (with meticulous citations), and provide a “brief” to pastors that gives them a jump start when they sit down to write their sermons.

What we call “Connective Tissue” refers to any application focused material that connects the theology of scripture to the average person in the pew. It includes things like word pictures, analogies, stories from history, literature, current events, business, and sports, statistics, pop culture references, interdisciplinary connections from psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and anything else that will help illuminate a biblical concept or theme.

Shouldn’t pastors be doing their own research?

Yes! We ask the pastors we work with every so often what their preparation process is like and how much time they spend in sermon preparation. Over the years, the answers have ranged from 10 hours to 25 hours, and the majority state they spend around 15–20 hours a week in study and message crafting.

Docent researchers don’t replace a pastor’s time in the scriptures, biblical studies resources, and theological studies resources. The pastors we work with spend a lot of time doing these tasks because they LOVE to study God’s Word and they love preparing sermons for their people.

To say the same thing again in a slightly different way, we don’t replace pastors’ time studying for their sermon, but rather we extend their reach.

How does Docent know its clients are not plagiarizing?

Unfortunately, there is no way for us to know with certainty that our clients are not misusing the material we provide them with. However, we have taken a number of steps to ensure that our material is used ethically. First, all of our Researchers are trained to cite the sources we summarize, synthesize, and curate with care and precision. If we give a pastor a quote or mention a fact, we want them to know where it comes from so that they can properly attribute their use of it. Second, we have our Researchers do weekly reviews of our clients’ sermons where we compare the sermon that was preached to the research brief we provided. This helps us make sure our clients are finding our material useful, but it also gives us a chance to notice red flags if a client is regularly using too much of the content from the brief.

How does Docent give pastors illustrations?

Some people have worried that we provide first person stories to pastors (e.g., “One time this happened to me…”) for them to put into their sermons. This is not the case. The most frequent way we provide illustrations is by finding a news story or cultural item that illuminates a particular point or biblical concept and provide a brief description of how the story might be used. Sometimes our clients use these stories in their sermons but apply them specifically to their congregation’s needs. Other times our clients use the illustrations as launching points to get them thinking about other similar stories from their own experiences. Occasionally, a pastor will ask a Researcher to provide the Researcher’s own first-person experiences, but we do not encourage pastors to pretend things happened in their lives that did not happen; that is called lying. Any such illustrations we provide are intended to help a pastor think about similar things that might have happened in their own lives that could be good illustrations to use.

Does Docent do “ghost writing”?

Docent occasionally works on book projects with our clients to transform sermons they have preached into a book manuscript. We require our clients to provide us with the content that we can edit, and we frequently do additional research to help them with their writing. If a client asks us to do more than editing work (aka, “ghostwriting” original content), we require that they list the writer they worked with as a co-author to give the Docent writer sufficient credit.