The Rev. Cameron

PROVIDENCE — Even before his formal installation five months ago as the senior minister of the city’s prestigious First Unitarian Church, the Rev. Donald Cameron was impressing many with his thought-provoking and often powerful sermons that spoke of poverty and race, and how to be a more caring community.

One member of the 440-member congregation was so moved by one of the minister’s sermons at the 190-year-old Meeting House that he began to check whether he could look up the sermon on the Internet. It led to a disturbing discovery that may very well end Mr. Cameron’s career.

What the church member found was that the sermon, which was delivered Jan. 28 with the title “To Be Religious is To Be Aware,” was drawn almost entirely from words used by the Rev. Richard Gilbert at a Unitarian church service in Rochester, N.Y., in 1997.

Further research by the same member, whose name has not been disclosed, found two other sermons that were drawn almost verbatim from sermons delivered by other ministers, including a sermon on the Rev. Martin Luther King that had been preached in 1996 by one of the denomination’s most gifted preachers, the Rev. Galen Guengerich, the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, in New York.

Mr. Cameron, who described himself in a newspaper interview on the eve of his installation last fall as being “more of a sloppy mystic,” has told church leaders that he is sorry for what he did but that it was all a mistake: he says that when he originally delivered those sermons — roughly 10 years ago at his former church, Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church, in Camp Springs, Md. — he was careful to give proper credit to the real authors. But upon taking his old sermons with him to Providence, he said, he “forgot” that the material came from other sources and believed it was all his own.

But some church leaders aren’t buying his explanation, and after first confronting him with the stolen sermons in a series of meetings that began the Monday after Easter, called on him to resign.

Mr. Cameron at the time agreed that he would, and speaking from the pulpit last Sunday, he announced that he would be leaving First Unitarian Church. The nub is that during a wide-ranging “conversation’ with 200 members immediately afterward, in which he apologized and fielded questions for nearly three hours, he left open the possibility that he might stay after all.

He said he would reconsider his decision to resign if a substantial number of the congregants at the church’s annual meeting, on April 29, voted to give him another chance.

Bill Twaddell, the congregation’s president, says that he does not know how the vote will go. He says there’s no question that a segment of the congregation wants Cameron, 52, whose experiences included living through three years of racial fights and riots at his hometown high school in Wilmington, N.C., to stay.

“This has been a very remarkable year for us in a lot of positive ways. We’re moving forward and getting a much better sense ourselves and the possibilities,” Twaddell says. “A lot of the impulse came from Don Cameron. He did shake up our thinking about our involvement and commitment to the things we value.”

But Twaddell says there are also a great many who are so angry and upset by the plagiarism that Mr. Cameron has shaken the essential confidence and integrity that are bedrock to leading a Unitarian congregation.

In a letter sent out to the congregation Tuesday, Twaddell, president-elect Neil Bartholomew and past president Rick Richards said that as they saw it, the question was whether Mr. Cameron could ever again lead the congregation after betraying its trust.

Their minister betrayed the congregation’s faith that he would always be scrupulous with the truth, especially from the pulpit, the three said. In this light, they said, the problem with the lack of attribution is that “it is a form of lying, of misrepresenting reality.”

And there’s more. The three said that during their meeting with Mr. Cameron, they asked him whether the three sermons represented all of the plagiarized material, and he replied, “Yes.” But since then, they’ve learned that the sermon Mr. Cameron delivered the day he knew he was being watched by a search committee had also been lifted from another source.

Mr. Cameron, when reached yesterday, replied that he did not want to “participate” in any interview but said he was still “working on” what he would do at the annual meeting.

The Rev. Beth Miller, who directs the Office of Ministry and Professional Leadership for the Unitarian Universalist Association, said there was no specific reference to plagiarism in the denomination’s code of professional practices, “but it obviously falls under the definition of honesty and integrity, which are part of our principles.”

She said the problem of plagiarism was “new for us” but that she was reading an article just yesterday that with the ready access to other people’s materials through the Internet, the problem is becoming more widespread.

The Rev. Tarasa Cooley, the district executive for the denomination’s Massachusetts Bay area, said it is one thing for ministers to share sermon ideas, and another to lift whole blocks of material from someone else’s sermon without attribution or permission.

She said she spoke with one of the ministers whose material had been lifted, who told her he had not decided what to do. “Certainly there is the ego thrill of knowing someone thought so much of your material to decide to use it. But ultimately, when someone has taken a sermon you’ve written and delivers it under his own name, there’s a sense of violation.”

rdujardi@projo.com