Tonight I was working on the network at my church, running cable to a room that’s currently being used to store lots of miscellaneous crap. While I was moving some stuff around to make room for my ladder, I found a small pile of Jack Chick tracts sitting next to a large pile of matches. I thought to myself, “if this isn’t a sign from God, I don’t know what is.”
If you’re unfamilar with Chick tracts, here are a few examples from what I found and from the catalog on his website:
I don’t know how they got there; I’m hoping they’ve been there since before we moved in to the building a few years ago, but there’s a small part of me that’s afraid someone actually brought this trash into our church. But, no worries, it’s been taken care of:
“It is finished.”
1) AmyLea »» April 12th, 2005 @ 9:58 am
Ian, that is just GREAT! :-)
Ha! I can almost hear their tiny shrieks of rage as they’re consumed. “Heretic! Peacenik! Jew-lover! See you in hell! Arrrrgh…”
Nicely done! My ex used to work for a Christian guy at a resturaunt, and the guy used to put Chick tracts (along with mini-Bibles, church pamphlets and the like) in the restrooms. I got extremely excited to see one when I went in there. And by “extremely excited”, I mean “take it so no one else does”.
In the bathroom?! I can see it now:
“Well, I was at Skyline and that fifth Cheese Coney wasn’t really agreeing with me. So, I went to the bathroom to… uh, you know, and I found a small book that told the story of how a little girl named Heidi, who was dying of some terrible illness, got saved on Halloween. I decided to accept Jesus into my heart right there with my pants around my ankels!”
lol! I despise chik tracts! As a Christian it makes me angry to see crap like this spread around. It makes it harder for those of us who are sincere to be taken seriously.
“ankels”?
Sheesh. I really do need to remember to check my spelling when being judgemental. Otherwise it just looses its effect, ya know?
Did you notice, that on the second to last picture there… The only tract that didn’t burn the front cover was “the beast”… and it looks like a dog’s face…. holding it in his teeth. The one below it (the last one) looks very angry… almost freakish. And I’m not really one to believe. That’s too weird.
Well, even you find the tracts offensive, you should not burned it. By burning it, you are just no difference from the world, the non believers who also do the same thing. As a christian, you should put yourself in Jesus’s shoe not your pope’s shoe.
Hi “Love everyone,” would you mind leaving your name? I feel silly referring to people by aliases…
I’m a Protestant, so when I defend Catholics it’s not self-interest. I sincerely believe that a practicing Catholic is a Christian and the kind of anti-Catholic rhetoric exposed by people like Jack Chick is not in the spirit of Jesus, but rather is base, human ignorance and bigotry. (Obviously there are plenty of Catholics for whom it’s just a religion and who aren’t following Jesus, but that could be said just as much about Baptists, or Presbyterians, or Episcopalians, etc)
I think people like Chick are one of the big reasons that Christians have no credibility in our culture. Instead of preaching the Gospel that Jesus preached — that God loves us, that we are His children, that he will redeem us from our brokenness — he preaches his own gospel of hatred, judgementalism and bigotry. I’ve heard Tim Keller — a pastor in New York — talk about non-Christians who come to him with anger and disgust towards who they perceive God to be, and he says, “Tell me about the god you hate, I probably hate him too.” Because the god they’re talking about, the god they’ve been shown by people like Jack Chick, isn’t God at all. It’s a distortion and a lie.
So I think Christians should agree with people who look at us from the outside and see judgementalism and bigotry rather than Jesus. Just like Jesus turned over tables in the Temple when people were distorting the religion and manipulating the people, we should publicly denounce people like Chick and burn the un-Christian propaganda he spreads.