A disgruntled church member just exposed his pastor's habitual sermon plagiarism
An anonymous ex-congregant compiled more than 100 examples of Pastor Josh Whitlow plagiarizing other preachers. Several examples are now up on YouTube.
This newsletter is free and goes out to over 23,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe or use my usual Patreon page!
There are people who leave churches and never come back. And then there are people who walk away knowing where all the bodies are buried.
Like the anonymous person who left Heights Church in Glen Allen, Virginia and then contacted a reporter saying he knew of “more than 100 sermons” delivered by Pastor Josh Whitlow that were plagiarized from other Christian preachers.
That person (or at least someone familiar with the story) just uploaded many of the videos showing proof of the thefts on YouTube under the name Stealing Sundays.
For example, in 2010, Pastor Chris Hodges of Alabama’s Church of the Highlands gave a sermon in which he joked about being a C student. (“Where are my C people at? Yeah, baby, yeah! Love you, man!”) His son was an A student. One day, his son was distraught because he got a B. That’s when Hodges came back with the punchline: “That ain’t nothing. I never made a B in my life either.”
In 2015, Whitlow delivered the same story as if it happened to him. A few details were changed, but it’s nearly identical down to giving a shout-out to fellow C students and ending the story with: “Well, I ain’t never made a B in my life either. So what?”
You see Whitlow first in the video below:
How about this one: In 2019, Hodges gave a sermon in which he recalled getting into trouble with three of his friends for pulling a prank back in school. He was at a Christian school but it turned out “they ain't got no Christians there.” (Cue laughter.) He then had to “assume the position” before getting spanked with a paddle by a guy who now serves on his church’s staff. Hodges was angry at first, but he learned his lesson, and he soon began sharing the Gospel after that, becoming a leader of Christians at the Christian school.
In 2025, Whitlow delivered a sermon in which he also recalled getting into trouble with three of his friends back in school. He was at a Christian school but it turned out “there weren’t no Christians in it.” (Cue laughter.) He then had to “assume the position” before getting spanked with a paddle. Thankfully, his youth pastor knocked some sense into him. Whitlow was angry at first, but he learned his lesson, and he soon began sharing the Gospel after that, becoming a leader of Christians at the Christian school.
There are also videos where both men talk about having panic attacks, buying two cups of lemonade from a neighborhood lemonade stand, almost stepping into a fake cab, and having the same thoughts during a traffic jam. Whitlow always tells the story after Hodges, sometimes months later and sometimes years later. Whitlow also steals a joke from comedian Jim Gaffigan, bigotry from hate-preacher Mark Driscoll, and other sermons from well-known pastors Andy Stanley and Robert Morris.
In no world is any of this an accident.
And it’s not like it happened during a particular stretch of time when Whitlow was busy; it’s been going on for years. This is just how the guy does sermons now. He finds what other people have said, then steals it for himself without giving any due credit, even when they involve personal anecdotes.
Reporter Luca Powell wrote about all this for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and got some incredible quotations from both Whitlow and Hodges’ churches defending what Whitlow did. Kind of.
Representatives for Whitlow and Hodges suggested that any borrowing by Whitlow is being done consensually, even if the material is being presented as his own to his congregation. A representative for Whitlow stopped responding when asked if Stanley and Morris also consented for him to use their material.
…
In an emailed statement, the executive director of Whitlow’s church said the material was used with Hodges’ consent.
“Pastor Chris [Hodges], who is a mentor and friend of Pastor Josh Whitlow, has encouraged him and many others to use his content when it is helpful. Pastor Josh and the team here diligently pray about message themes, series, and content that would benefit our congregation, and sometimes that may include content researched and written by other pastors,” said Brandon Whiting, the executive director of Heights Church.
…
A spokesperson for Hodges appeared to confirm that the sermons were being shared consensually, stating that Hodges encourages other pastors to use his content.
“Pastor Chris Hodges has always made his teaching content available to pastors and churches to help resource and support the broader body of Christ,” said Isy Goodman, the creative director for Hodges’ church in Alabama. “Many pastors choose to draw from these publicly available messages as a resource in their own study and sermon preparation.”
Goodman did not answer when asked if Hodges expected his pastors to tell their congregations if they were using his stories.
It’s no surprise Hodges doesn’t want Whitlow to get in trouble. Whitlow is part of a scandal-prone church-planting network called the Association of Related Churches, which Hodges helped found. It would be bad for business for a supposed success story like Whitlow to be derailed like this.
But notice how the two sides speak about this matter.
Whitlow’s side says Hodges gave permission for pastors to use his sermons for inspiration—which Hodges admits is true. At no point, however, does Hodges say people have a blanket permission to lift his speeches almost verbatim and pass them off as their own.
(Silly me, I thought pastors using ChatGPT was the bigger problem.)
Hodges’ position makes sense to me here. He has plenty of experience in the Christian world and he wants to be a role model to new pastors. If you want to know how to create a sermon series, or you want want to know how to structure a compelling talk, you can look to his examples which are freely available online.
But there’s a world of difference between using those sermons as templates and stealing the literal illustrations within them.
All Whitlow had to do was give proper credit if he wanted to use a particular story. Instead, he made it seem like everything he said came directly from his own experiences.
He lied. He lied while telling his congregation to follow Jesus if they want to live moral lives. He lied while bad-faith right-wing attention seekers accuse liberals of plagiarism at every turn.
It’s hardly the first time Christian pastors have been accused of plagiarizing from other Christian pastors, though. It’s deeply funny that this is happening at a time when one of the biggest religion stories in the country involves a University of Oklahoma student who failed an assignment because she can’t write worth shit. (But even in that situation, Samantha Fulnecky didn’t plagiarize! She proudly just turned in her own garbage and we should salute her for that.)
At this point, you have to wonder why churches aren’t teaching future pastors how to write a damn sermon. If they can’t preach, maybe they shouldn’t be running a church. But when the goal is to launch as many churches as possible, quality control becomes a lower priority. So many pastors these days treat sermons as “content” and their success is measured in attendance, baptisms, and donors. Who cares about honesty at that point?
The irony is that there’s now a generation of Christian leaders who preach authenticity while quietly outsourcing it.
To be clear, this is not the biggest problem in the evangelical world right now. It is, however, a perfect encapsulation of how people with unoriginal thoughts are routinely elevated because they talk about Jesus.
If Whitlow’s own congregation ignores or downplays all this, will it even matter? Maybe not. That’s all the more reason people outside his bubble need to call it out. In any other profession—journalism, academia, comedy, politics—this would be treated as career-ending fraud. The only reason it may go unpunished, if it goes unpunished, is because we’re talking about a Christian pastor. As we’ve seen far too often, conservative Christians love using their faith as a shield against basic accountability.
That has consequences. We’re living in a country where Republican leaders face no accountability right now because they know how to use their platforms to promote Jesus, a guaranteed way to make sure GOP voters won’t give a damn about their corruption and incompetence.
Whitlow’s biggest mistake may have been that he upset someone at his church—someone who decided they’d had enough of the lies coming from the pulpit. At least I hope that’s the situation. We don’t know who the whistleblower is, or why they left the church, or whether they’re still a Christian. (The YouTube channel cites a few Bible verses as justification for why plagiarism is wrong, for whatever that’s worth to you.)
In any case, that person decided they were done with Whitlow’s bullshit. They were done with Whitlow constantly failing upwards.
Wow. A liar for Jesus lying? This is my shocked face :-|
Really, it was only a matter of time before straight up plagiarism happened. They've only got so much to cherry pick from.
To P-ass-tor Josh Witless...
Stop me if you've heard this one: Thou shalt not steal.