Christian Tracts? Brad Jersak

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Question:

 I have just finished reading your book A More Christlike God and found it thought-provoking and wonderful. I have been deconstructing my Evangelical faith. I am contacting you to ask if you know of any tracts with this Beautiful Gospel on them. I don’t like most of the tracts evangelists use, so I thought I would check with you before trying to reinvent the wheel! I feel burdened to reach the “ripened harvest:” but everyone I know is preaching a gospel of fear dressed up in love! I don’t find it easy to stop and speak to people, but I want something I can confidently hand out to them.

Response:

Thanks for reaching out. I do have a few thoughts about the use of tracts in sharing the beautiful gospel.

First, I’ve discovered that tracts are largely ineffective in bringing people to faith, regardless of how good or bad they are. Most people who come to faith do so over several years in relationships with people who live their faith in a beautiful way without an elevator speech, sales pitches, or putting conditions on their friendship. That seems more humanizing to me, too. 

Second, tracts have a terrible habit of reconstructing the gospel into formulas, rules, lists, and diagrams to replace the actual narrative of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We don’t seem to trust the story and prefer a set of propositions that are, again, comparatively ineffectual. Trust the story. That’s where the Holy Spirit moves to attract us to God’s love and grace.

Third, tracts are an attempt at distilling the gospel. Fair enough, but there are several ways Scripture shows us how to do that: (1) Paul distilled it in his preaching to the basic message that God sent his Son, we rejected and killed him, but God raised him from the dead, so Jesus is alive and you can be too (see 1 Corinthians 15). (2) Jesus distilled it into his parables… for example, anything we need to say about the gospel can’t be said better than the parable of the lost sons (Luke 15). And (3) you won’t find a tract as beautiful as your own story of redemption… “Here’s the hope in Christ I found and how it touched my real life.” 

Finally, if you still want to create a tract, you could share the above in picture form since some people learn visually. You could reference or even blend the parable of the lost sheep or lost sons. If you used the traditional image of the chasm, I would picture us with God, then how we fell into a chasm, and Jesus followed us down and carried us out… then how God welcomes us to a homecoming feast.

I’m grateful for your question because we need to keep rethinking how we share the Good News (tract or not) without making it our obsession to “close the deal.” People are on a journey with Jesus (whether we see it or not) and our role is to accompany them on the way rather than pitching a product at them. If we use tracts at all, let’s bear that in mind.

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