Bezeugen Tract Club

Finally, a “tract” to give to your friends that don’t think that Evangelism is for them! Sadly, many people who call themselves Christians don’t see the need to share the Gospel even though Jesus has commanded them too. The Get Out of Witnessing Free card is a subtle reminder that is actually an ad for Bezeugen Ministries. On the back is a Spurgeon quote and a Bible quote and the web site where people can find Evangelism training and resources.

These cards have not been sent out in the tract club but have been made available on request to those that wanted them. Additional, quantities can be ordered from the tracts page.

Virgil Stuck made a video about using this card. Thanks, Virgil!

We try to send seasonal tracts in the tract club. We also have found that getting people to name “ten things” makes a quick way to lead into asking if someone knows the Ten Commandments. This tract also taps into what nearly everyone is thinking about around New Years Day – New Year Resolutions.

One thing about the Can you name ten of the top New Year Resolutions tract is that nearly any answer for the question is acceptable. We did list some popular choices on the back. But the whole idea is to get people thinking about ten resolutions so that we can explain the Gospel and then suggest that getting saved should be first on their list!

For the last four years we have witnessed at the Dallas Children’s Christmas parade. One year we printed a couple thousand of the Living Waters Christmas Trivia tract that can be downloaded for free and printed on standard paper. The next year we got tracts from One Million Tracts. Since there are a lot of people coming to the parade year after year, we wanted to have something new for 2009. So, we designed this Christmas Trivia Tract. We handed out about 7,000 of them at the parade along with another 7,000 of the Naughty or Nice Santa tract.

The tract also went into the tract club in December 2009.

We found the tract to be popular with the parade goers as well as people who we witnessed to one on one at other occasions. The Trivia Questions promote curiosity and cause them to read the back. Plus at Christmas it is a great time to share the Gospel because you can simply tell people why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.

How do you combine Easter, Taxes and Reverend Fun all together? By using the Nothing is Certain except what and taxes? tract!

I’ve known about Reverend Fun for years. I’ve always enjoyed reading the comics. So many of them are so funny. As I was looking at the comics one day, I realized that for a low cost we could purchase the rights to an image and put it on a tract. I began looking at the comics with an eye on finding some that could be used for tracts.

This one really struck me. Easter was in mid-April in 2010. So it made it possible to put a single tract together that would be applicable for Easter and tax day.

If you choose to order more of these tracts, then please be sure to check the royalty schedule and send money to Reverend Fun to pay for the use of the image.

Having already printed out Easter tract using a Reverend Fun comic, I was looking for artwork that could be used on another tract featuring Reverend Fun. I found one that really communicated the Gospel well. A picture of Jesus receiving a bill for lies, cheats, steals, etc and saying “I’ll get this one.” I beautiful picture of the Gospel!

I decided to post the image on my Facebook profile. When I did, a Muslim commented on it and what broke out next was a thread of over 125 comments of people commenting on the picture and witnessing to this Muslim.

I figured that if the post on Facebook could create that much attention that it would get much attention when handed out as well.  What is unique about this tract, is that the message on the back is entirely made up of scripture strung together to make a Gospel message. There are none of my own words on this tract at all.

If you would like to order this tract, please be sure to check the royalty schedule for Reverend Fun.

One night I was spending some time on Facebook exchanging some messages with a friend, Tim. He sent me a message saying that he had been thinking of creating a Gospel tract that just said “why?” on the front. I told him I thought it sounded like a good idea. After praying for a few minutes, the Lord gave me an idea of how to word it. So I jotted down my thoughts in a private message on Facebook and sent it to him, ending the message with “you mean something like this?”

He replied back and said, “yes!”

Over the next couple of days we refined the text and then sent the tract off to be printed.

When I hand out the Why? tracts, I will use the question “why?” in terms of “why do you think I am handing these out?” or “why do you think Jesus had to die?” or “why did Jesus have to be God?”

The story of the Why is this man on a cross tract is really an amazing testimony to the power of God and how He is at work orchestrating what He wants done to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the Earth.

Bezeuegn Ministries primary mission field is to our Jerusalem (Acts 1:8) right here in North Texas. With that said, our primary mission is taking the Gospel to English speaking people. However, there are parts of the metroplex where people speak Spanish. And there are people in the area who only speak Spanish. Typically we carry Spanish Million Dollar Bill tracts from Living Waters or One Million Tracts to hand to these Spanish speakers that we come in contact with.

Mike and Alma Rios live in the metroplex and are doing ministry with Spanish speakers. They were also planning a mission trip to Mexico. As we are sometimes able to do with mission trips, we agreed to send them with some tracts.

As I prayed about what tracts to get to send with them on the mission trip, the Lord showed me that it was far more economical to develop our own tract. This would also provide us another Spanish resource to use locally. I called Mike and Alma and invited them to pray about the idea of developing a tract. They were excited about the idea. A couple weeks later we meet over lunch to discuss some ideas. At that meeting we came up with three ideas, with this tract being the main one.

Since we all three, obviously, knew English, we wrote the draft of the tract in English over that lunch. We also drafted the God’s Way / Man’s Way tract at that lunch.

Mike’s idea for the tract was to have some Catholic image on the front so that the Spanish speakers, who are mostly Catholic, would connect to the tract and keep it. We tossed around the idea of Mary, but settled on the idea of Christ on the cross. The text on the back connects the dots of why we know that Jesus is not on the cross today!

Alma did the initial translation into Spanish. I sent that text to a couple of people that I knew knew Spanish and got a few comments back. Unfortunately, I was not able to edit the text, because I don’t know any Spanish.

We were at a seeming road block. I spoke to several people who said we could hire a translator. But for our small ministry, hiring someone to do it was not financially practical. Time was ticking until Mike and Alma left on their mission and still we had no final version of the tract.

In February 2010, I flew to Miami for the Super Bowl Outreach. On the plane, I was handing out Million Dollar Bill tracts to everyone as they boarded the plane and passed my seat. The woman who would sit across the aisle from me had a bag that she needed to put in the overhead bin. I got up and helped her put it in there. Somehow in the midst of helping her, I neglected to give her a tract.

Eventually the plan was flying and she and I got to talking. Turns out that she was on her way back to Venezuela. She was raised by missionary parents and had returned to Venezuela as an adult, married a native Spanish speaking man who was also a pastor of a thriving Christin church there. I told her about the Spanish translation project. She said, “I’d be glad to help, and I’ll even have my husband check it!”

WOW!

God came through big. I got her contact information. When I returned home from the trip, I emailed her the text that we were working on. A few days later I had a Spanish translation from her. We sent that off to be printed.

Mike and Alma took about 3,000 of the tracts to Mexico in March 2010 and the tracts were well received there.

We plan to put these tracts into the tract club sometime soon.

It’s an age old saying “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” This tract is designed to get people thinking. You must fall on one side or the other. Evolution teaches that as things evolved, eventually a chicken egg would come and hatch a chicken out of it. However, the Bible clearly states that God made all things according to their kind. Hence God created the chicken first and gave it the ability to lay eggs to reproduce.

The Which Came First tract plays on this idea by showing a chicken and an egg in a race to the finish line. Neither has crossed the line yet, so the question remains “Which came first?”

The tracts are fun to hand out to everyone. I especially like handing them out to atheists and scientists. But, I also like handing them out at restaurants where they serve Chicken. I simply would ask, “do you serve chicken here?” When they say yes, I say, “here is some important information about chickens” and hand them the tract. This leads to an interesting discussion starting with the creation/evolution topic. From there you can move the discussion from “if there is a creator, what does he want from you?”

I am not an artist. If I were, this might have been the first tract that Bezeugen Ministries produced. However, it took some time to find an artist who could draw the image for the front. And in the meantime, we made the This is the Verdict tract first. Eventually, through attending the Living Waters Ambassadors Academy, I met Michelle Miano, who drew the picture for us. The rest, so to speak, is history!

One Million Tracts has several riddle tracts that are fun to hand out. I heard this riddle one day, “when is 90 greater than 100” and thought it would be a fun riddle to put on a tract. The idea of the riddle tract is to get people thinking. If you can make them realize that they might not know something trivial like the answer to a riddle, then they might not know the answer to some of life’s most challenging questions, like “what happens when you die?”

We put the tract together. The first major usage of it was during the Super Bowl Outreach in Miami (February 2010). The tracts went over fairly well. The next month we put them in the tract club.