"Teach every creature" is the responsibility of Christians in every generation. Faithful Christians will seek to utilize any scriptural method of reaching the lost and erring.

Communists spend $6,600 to our $1 to spread their doctrine to all nations of the world. Jehovah's Witnesses consume 50000 pounds of paper per day to spread their doctrine in the printed page.

G. Christian Weiss said, "The battle of men's minds will be won by printer's ink." Gospel tracts are a highly effective means of reaching the lost. We have a large assortment of good tracts but experience indicates that certain principles must be observed if the best results are to be obtained. A. G. Hobbs, author of 43 tracts with total distribution of over nine million, offers the following suggested uses of tracts.

1. Tracts can be mailed to all prospects on a regular basis -- one each week or one each month.

2. One church used the plan of mailing a tract each month to every home in town.

3. Some churches stamp or print an invitation on the cover and then put a tract in each home before a gospel meeting. This way they serve to teach and also to invite and thus take the place of circulars.

4. Use tracts to prepare those who are interested in doing personal work. Then let them carry an assortment of tracts with them. There is one to meet nearly every objection; also some are designed as basic teaching tracts, such as "How to Understand the Bible" and "How to Become a Christian."

5. One will find tracts as splendid guides for men's training classes. A number of preachers have said: "I used one of your tracts as the basis for my first sermon."

6. Tracts serve to strengthen the saints. One congregation mailed to each home in the church the tract "Can a Child of God So Sin as to Be Eternally Lost" and sent along a letter asking that it be studied in their family devotions. The next month, the elders had the tract "If Any Err from the Truth . . ." mailed to each home and asked that it likewise be studied.

7. Keep a good supply on hand and a rack in the back of the church building. Not only can visitors take the ones to read in which they are interested, but also the members who need them to hand to their friends can take what they need.

8. Tracts make good Bible class material: Sunday mornings, for cottage Bible classes, and personal work classes.

9. Another plan that has proved most rewarding is to put tracts in a rack in bus stations.

There are, of course, many other suggested uses of tracts. They may be placed in, business or personal letters, in paying bills, with greeting cards, distributed from door to door, and placed in books you loan or give to friends. Mail them in envelopes even to people you don't know. Put them judiciously where they are likely to be picked up and read. Be original and try to think up ways of your own to effectively use tracts.

How effective can tracts be? One example concerned a man who preached for a Christian Church in the Philippine Islands. He thoroughly studied a tract on instrumental music and persuaded the entire congregation to abandon the use of instruments in the worship. Later, he persuaded two other churches in the Philippines to do the same thing.

Good gospel tracts are tools that both young and old can use. By properly using them, everyone can be a soul winner for Jesus.

TRUTH MAGAZINE, XV: 37, pp. 12-13
July 29, 1971