Jed Ostoich needed a job.

He and his wife had bills to pay while they were in graduate school. But his undergraduate degree from Moody Bible Institute left him with few professional skills outside the ministry.

Then a friend offered him what seemed like the perfect gig. The job paid well — about $20 an hour — and allowed him to put his Bible skills and his graduate studies to work.

That’s how he became a sermon ghostwriter.

“I thought this was great,” recalled Ostoich, who wrote research briefs, sermon outlines and other content for pastors from 2010 to 2014 through the Docent Research Group.

Faced with having to come up with new material every week and sometimes several times a week, preachers have long used “pulpit helps” in writing their sermons. They often rely on magazines and websites to provide anecdotes, topics and other fodder for sermons. (At least one megachurch even sells “sermon kits” — complete with outlines, graphics and promo videos.)

Some preachers hire researchers to do the Bible reading and background and interpretation on a specific text — known as exegesis — or to provide insights about cultural trends affecting the church. Others find a ghostwriter to help them put it all together.

The content produced with the help of services such as Docent has a wide audience.

“Docent’s work reaches over a million people every month who are blessed by pastors better equipped to do their work and backed up by excellent research,” the group’s website claims.

Ostoich thinks sermon ghostwriters and researchers can serve a valid role in the church, under the right circumstances. His first gig as a ghostwriter involved helping the interim pastor of a Texas church. The man had been on a church’s board of elders and was put in charge

after the previous pastor resigned. He’d come out of the business world and had no formal training as a pastor.

Ostoich was asked to lend a hand. He would go through the Bible text for that week’s sermon and summarize the main points, then add some background about the context for the passage.

From there, the pastor would go on and write his own sermon.

“I felt I was helping a guy who needs help,” Ostoich said. “This is in my wheelhouse and if I can provide resources to help him grow and be a good servant at his church, great.”

Ostoich eventually would go on to do ghostwriting projects for Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll, including blog posts that ran under Driscoll’s byline. That made Ostoich uncomfortable — as if he was misleading folks who thought they were reading Driscoll’s words.

Gary Stratton, dean of the school of arts and sciences at Johnson University, a Christian school with campuses in Tennessee and Florida, says pastors, who are busy raising money, visiting the sick and teaching classes, are often under tremendous pressure to write compelling sermons every week.

The rise of podcasts and streaming sermons from megachurches have made things worse, with preachers of local churches often being compared with celebrity pastors. For many, preaching a sermon felt as if it became a kind of performance art rather than a spiritual activity, Stratton said, and led some preachers to outsource their sermon writing to others.

Stratton thinks that in doing so, they miss out on the spiritual side of writing a sermon.

“If you’re going to prepare a sermon, half your time should be in prayer,” he said. “Praying for your people, praying for the anointing, praying for the Spirit to be present to work in people’s lives, and the other half on preparing the actual words.”

A pastor in a Kentucky-based megachurch said he sought help in doing research for sermons a few years ago.

After pastoring for two decades, the pastor, who asked not to be identified, said people in the church had “heard all of his stories” by that point. And he didn’t want to end up just recycling material from the past.

So the church brought in another pastor to share the preaching load. The two set up a weekly meeting with a team from the church — younger and older, men and women — to help with the brainstorming process for sermons. The preachers then take that input and get to work when it’s their week to preach.

At least one ghostwriter that RNS spoke with wishes pastors would be more transparent when they work with ghostwriters or a “sermon crafter.”

The prayers and creeds and liturgy each week often are written by other people. So why not allow a pastor to use a sermon someone else wrote — and be open about it?

The ghostwriter, a former pastor who made between $300 and $900 for crafting a sermon package — with theological background, a list of major themes in the text, as well as a list of illustrations — took the job of ghostwriter during a crisis when their family needed more income. It paid better than other jobs and allowed the person to use their ministry skills and education to benefit a church.

“I thought, ‘If this is how I could help serve the church right now, that’s what I will do,’” they said.

Author and theologian Scot Mcknight argues that pastors who use ghostwriters or researchers without telling their congregations are “cheating.”

The congregation, he said, believes the sermons are written by the pastor and come out of the pastor’s own interaction with the Bible and prayer.

Finding out a preacher used a ghostwriter or researcher is “a betrayal of their trust and expectations,” Mcknight said.