Bezeugen Tract Club

The This is the Verdict tract was the first tract designed, developed and printed by Bezeugen Ministries. The idea stemmed from using John 3:19 in witnessing. The verse actually tells why any person will not be saved; because they choose their sin over the savior. The gavel makes a nice way to connect people to the court room analogy where we show people that if they stood before a human judge and confessed to a crime that the judge will find them guilty.

Several people have told me that they like to hand out these tracts at the court houses.

The idea for the Reject the Gospel tract originated from my friend Adam Evans. We were out doing a witnessing event one weekend in Dallas and we noticed that some people would throw the tracts away. Adam thought it would be fun to have a card that just said “throw this away” on the front of it. We discussed the idea that we could hand them out and then have a trash can for people to actually throw them into. Of course at this point, the idea made absolutely no sense. After praying about it for a couple of months, the idea to put the image on the front of a man throwing crosses into the trash and the message “To Reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ, please dispose of this card” was born!

The original plan was to only use these cards for witnessing events. But, once we got them and started showing them to some people in the tract club, the questions were coming in of “when will this be in the tract club?” So, we printed more of the cards and put them in a tract club mailing.

The rock band Rush has a song called Freewill. In the song there is a lyric that says “even if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” That is the exact purpose of this tract. Every single person that we talk to about the Gospel makes a decision. They either choose to decide to follow Christ. Or they choose to reject Him. But choosing to do nothing is the same as choosing to reject Him!

The response on the street has been really interesting.  We have seen people take this tract, tear it into little bits and throw it into the trash can. We have also seen people take it, look at it, and then say, “oh, no, I don’t want to reject Jesus” and then put the card in their wallet.

Here is a video of my youngest son reading the Reject the Gospel tract in the open air in Dallas.

Tom and Michele Burgee assist with the tract club by mailing out the welcome packs to people who enroll in the club. They were making plans to do an outreach at the St Louis Arch and asked for some assistance in creating a tract. We agreed to help make the tract, send it in the tract club and provide them to them for their outreach at the arch. They are now doing outreaches at the arch about once a month.

If you are going to St Louis and plan to do some Evangelism there, then you may like to order some of the Gateway to the West tracts.

Even though the tract is geared towards being a souvenir for people visiting the arch, I even was able to hand them out around Dallas by just telling people, “here is some interesting information about the St Louis arch.” They would take the tract and say “thanks!”

I asked Tom his memories of creating this tract and he wrote:

Probably the most important reason we wanted them made was it was considerably difficult to hand out Million Dollar bill tracts at the Arch, Brother Eric Corrick came up with the idea. It’s been amazing, nearly everyone takes one (of the arch tracts). We seldom see any laying around (that people dropped, or discarded) and they’re equally popular with the people who go out with us.

Our initial experience with making tracts to send overseas was with the Good News / Bad News tract. After printing thousands of these and sending them overseas, we got word from our missionary in Uganda that it would be helpful to have some tracts in their native languages: Swahili and Ugandan. Around the same time, we were working on some ideas for Spanish tracts. Praying about all of this lead us to develop the God’s Way / Man’s Way tract. The idea was a tract based on the format of the Good News / Bad News tract but with text that could be translated into other languages. The tract still had no cultural ties, so should be applicable in a number of countries. While the tract was still an idea in our heads, we also got a request for a French resource for use in Cameroon.

We wrote the English version first. I have a friend who lives in the south of France. I asked him to translate into French and he did. We have another friend who had done a Spanish translation for us, so we asked her to translate the tract to Spanish.

We were searching for someone who could translate the tract into Swahili and kept coming up empty. One day I was talking to Pastor Tony at Empowerment Christian Center in Farmers Branch. He asked me what was new with the ministry. I started telling him about this tract and the dilemma of translating into Swahili. He said, “Brother Carl, Swahili is my native language, if you don’t let me do this translation, the Lord will chastise me!” Two days later we had the text in Swahili.

My son did the layout of the tracts in English, Spanish, French and Swahili. We sent the English, French and Swahili to the printer. By the time they arrived we also had other requests for the tracts in Swahili. First, Pastor Tony himself was going on a mission trip with his church to Kenya. So we sent some of the tracts with him. Another brother in Christ would be going to Kenya later in the year on a separate trip. So we gave a thousand of the tracts to him to take with him. The reports I’ve had from him are “I should have brought more of those Swahili tracts!”

One night while putting on the Basic Evangelism Training Seminar, one of the participants said, “what resources do you have in Portuguese?” I said we did not have any, but explained we had this tract that we had already translated to some other languages. She offered to translate it into Portuguese. Those tracts were printed and delivered to her Brazilian church here in the Dallas area.

We have sensed a need to have a tract in Arabic. And then some brothers in Christ on Facebook have asked for tracts in Urdu. Again, we started praying for the people needed to do these translations. Eventually, I connected with a pastor who leads a service in Urdu right here in Carrollton. Through a connection within that church, I met a man who can oversee the translation to Urdu and Arabic as well. God is so good to keep providing these resources. We hope to have the Urdu and Arabic versions soon and then will get those printed.

It is really exciting to see how God is moving. The translators have come along just when needed. God is clearly moving in ways that we can not have orchestrated on our own.

We still have an outstanding prayer request to find someone to translate into Ugandan. If you can do it, please contact me.

A few years ago Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman made a movie that popularized the idea of The Bucket List in which they play a couple of terminally ill patients and make a list of things to do before they die. After doing some research it seems that this is a fairly popular popular concept. Many people think about and make bucket lists. And by asking them about their bucket list, you can easily swing a conversation to the spiritual.

Betty, her daughter and I exchanged a few messages kicking around the idea of making a tract based on the Bucket List idea. We wrote up the text. I researched some popular bucket list items. Marv at One Million Tracts did the artwork. A real team effort.

The Bucket List tract has been a popular addition to our tract line up. They are easy to hand out and to strike up conversations about things in the natural. I normally will asked people “what is on your bucket list” and then follow up with “do you think you will ever do any of those things?” Then I can easily swing to “so what do you think happens when you die?”

There are a number of tracts out on the market that talk about being good enough to go to Heaven. Proverbs 20:8 says that a man will declare his own goodness. The real question about goodness is whose standard of goodness we use. When a person compares themselves to other people, it is easy to find people that they are better than. Just compare yourself to Hitler, for example. However, when we use God’s perfect standard, the Ten Commandments, we don’t look so hot any more.

The card is a bit of a gimmick. On the front is instructions to put your thumb on a square and information that says if you are good the square will change colors. However, since according to God’s standard, there is no one who is good, the color will never change.

The Good Card tract was adapted for Bezeugen Ministries based on a design that One Million Tracts had previously published.

In the beginning of 2009, I received an email from a man in Uganda asking for evangelism resources. We mailed him a couple of hundred “good person comic” tracts. He was thrilled to have them. He indicated a great need for many more tracts. Realizing that many (or more likely all) of our tracts have some kind of cultural tie, they probably would not go over too well in Uganda.

We bathed the project in prayer and were lead to develop a tract that was pure scripture front and back. Since the people that the man was witnessing too in Uganda could read some English, we selected the verses on this card. The initial printing was 5,000 tracts of which 4,000 of them were shipped to Uganda.

International mail to Uganda is very slow. It took several months for the tracts to arrive in Uganda. When they got there, there was another issue with picking them up at the post office. But eventually he had the tracts. Since then, these tracts have been handed out all over the United States and in other countries as well.

When I stated doing door to door ministry, I choose this tract to use to leave on people’s door if they were not home. The same cultural issues could apply even door to door since we don’t know who is there.

God’s Word will not return void, but will accomplish the task that God has for it.

An easy way to hand out the Good News / Bad News tract is to ask people “if you go to the doctor do you like to hear good news first or bad news” and then hand it to them with the appropriate side up based on their answer. If they say “good news” then I will usually add, “the good news will make a lot more sense after you read the bad news.”

The Get out of Hell Free card tract has proven to be very popular. When I first started engaging people in spiritual conversations, I found that the Ticket to Heaven tract from Living Waters was very effective and easy to hand out. That tract really plays on the idea that many people have that everyone goes to heaven, or if you simply have your “ticket” then you get to go.

As our ministry grew, we were handing out more and more tracts. We bought a stamp and were stamping our website onto the back of all of the tracts that we handed out. As we handed out more and more tracts, labeling them became more and more work.

Around the same time we were looking at how we could print our own tracts. We like the concept of the ticket to heaven. So after much prayer, the idea of “get out of hell free” playing off of the Monopoly card came about.

These tracts are easy to hand out. You can simply ask someone “do you have your get out of hell free card” and they will take it. A lot of the time, people will ask for more to give to their friends.

While witnessing in Dallas one day last year, I was handing out tracts at the DART station. One man said he had seen me before and wondered if we had any more of the “get out of hell free tract.” I said that I did. He pulled out his wallet and he had the tract in there. He told me that he had shown it to some friends and they had asked for one. So I gave him a couple of them to give to his friends. He had read the tract, but had not received Christ. We discussed the meaning of it and had a nice conversation.

The bailout tract originated as a response to the government bailing out banks and other businesses. The term “bailout” became synonymous with government activities. People were constantly thinking of the idea of the bailout. So it made moving a conversation from the natural to the spiritual very easy. These tracts were designed to help move those conversations along.

The point of the tract is to point out that all men are born as enemies of God, dead in our trespasses and sins and in need of a spiritual bailout. The spiritual bailout is far more important than any financial bailout that could be provided.

Each tract has a story behind it. In the case of the 2+2 tract, the purpose is to show people that logic applies, even to the After Life. Many people have their beliefs about all kinds of things. This, of course, carries over to the spiritual realm. But, when we ask the question, “what happens when a person dies” there must be one right answer. It does not make sense that just because one person believes on thing and another believes another thing that different things would happen to them. Try it in the physical world. If I say, “I don’t believe in trucks” and then stand in the middle of the road. When the truck comes it will run me over.

The idea of this tract is to show people that that simple logic also applies to the After Life. What happens to one must also happen to another. There must be one truth!

You can view the tract online.