It’s noontime on Michigan Avenue, and the lean young man in the Nike basketball shoes is fighting his way through the current of moving bodies. His pace slows; the kid, who is about 20, scowls as he bounces left and then right, trying to avoid a collision.
“God loves you,” says John Kesler, an open-faced man in double-knit pants and sports shirt.
“Here’s a free gift,” says Roger Britton to one skeptical woman. As the lady puzzles over the tract, wondering if it’s an offer for free french fries, Roger sets her straight: “A free gift, yes ma’am, eternal life from Christ Jesus.” The woman walks off angered at the trick. “Junk,” she hisses through her teeth.
The use of tracts to spread the gospel goes back centuries, to the Reformation. John Calvin and Martin Luther relied on the little books, but John Wesley, the Englishman who founded Methodism, was their most ardent proponent. Wesley, an Oxford-educated preacher born in 1703, grounded his denomination in the belief that salvation can be attained by faith alone. It fell to societies of true believers to convince the masses of Wesley’s wisdom, a mission in which Wesley saw tracts as a powerful tool. “I sometimes wonder that all our preachers are not convinced of this,” he wrote one follower in 1764, “that it is of unspeakable use to spread our practical tracts in every Society.” Give your sermon, Wesley advised his follower, “and, after preaching, encourage the congregation to buy and read the tract.”
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The root of every tract is chapter three of the Gospel of John. There Jesus talks to Nicodemus, a Jewish leader. “With all the earnestness I possess I tell you this: Unless you are born again, you can never get into the kingdom of God.” Jesus explains: “For only I, the Messiah, have come to earth and will return to heaven again. And as Moses in the wilderness lifted up the bronze image of a serpent on a pole, even so I must be lifted upon a pole, so that anyone who believes in me will have eternal life. For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it.”
For all the simple uniformity of the message, tracts come in different styles. You can distribute a Cadillac or a Ford. Kesler orders most of his from a Ford dealership, the Fellowship Tract League in South Lebanon, Ohio, a small town 25 miles from Cincinnati. Fellowship Tract was begun by a man named Wash Pennington, a country pastor who says that one day in 1978 he received an instruction from God that he’d better get busy producing tracts. Today Fellowship Tract churns out 90 million of the leaflets a year, the funding coming largely through donations. “We just pray,” explains Steve Bankhead, Fellowship’s associate pastor, “and the Lord brings the money in.” Subscribers like Kesler can order as many tracts as they want for free.
Good News’s biggest seller, “You’re Special,” resembles a Mother’s Day card, with the photograph of a big pink rose on its cover. Within there’s a sunnier argument for coming to Christ. “Yes, you are invaluable to God!” says the text. “If you have never trusted in Jesus Christ for your salvation, you can accept His love upon you.” Explains Bill Swain, in charge of tracts for Good News and the author of many company favorites, “The idea behind ‘You’re Special’ is to say ‘You’re a unique creature and God loves you.’”
