Being The Friend of Sinners – Fundy Style

Hello, Candidate for Soul-winning, would you like to be my friend? You can tell by my smile that I’m the friendly sort. And why else would I be stopping by your house at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?

“Hi, I’m here from Grace Fundamental Bible-Believing Baptist Church and wanted to know if you go to church anywhere?” I already know that you don’t.

We can’t be real friends, of course, as I perceive by your clothes that you are a sinner ripe for destruction. I can practically see the evil creeping out of your tattooed pores. I’ll bet you listen to rock music and drink beer when Christians like myself aren’t around to make you feel guilty. I’ve decided to care about you anyway.

“If you were to die today do you know where your soul would end up?” I do. Don’t pack a sweater.

No, we will definitely never hang out or have a meal together. I would never let you or your public-school indoctrinated spawn within a mile of my children. Every friendship has its limits.

“Say, we’d love to have you visit our church!” You can sit in special section reserved for those we judge. We love fresh fodder for the judgment bench.

Why do you look so annoyed? I’ve done nothing but be perfectly nice. Is anybody else enough of a friend to care as much about your soul as I do? I doubt it very much.

“Well it was really nice to meet you. Let me leave you a gospel tract as I go.” I know you won’t read it but it’s my duty. It’s what friends like me are for.

66 thoughts on “Being The Friend of Sinners – Fundy Style”

  1. Fun times, D2D. Sad times, too. I remember once as a F.I.T. (thanks, @Don!) going to a house with one of the deacons in our church. Nice people, wife spoke English, dad and two kids didn’t. Dad excused himself from the room while the rest of us crowded in the kitchen. Deacon said a few things, don’t quite remember much but I do remember the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Once he was done saying whatever he was saying (presumably some distillation of the Gospel), he asked the mom if she wanted to get saved. She said yes, then instructed her kids to bow their heads because “we’re all going to pray now.” After a little repeat-after-me action, she informed her kids that they were all saved now. Me being the junior partner with a deacon, I didn’t say anything, but even then, 15 years ago, I thought something was seriously off. But he was a deacon, so maybe this was the norm, maybe they’d cover the fact that only the person praying gets saved, or something, later on down the road in that wonderful (or wonderfully absent) practice of “discipleship.”

    I never saw the woman or her kids again.

  2. @Don: My Dad told me the story one time of how one time he was going door to door with someone (back in the 70’s) and a woman actually came to the door naked. Woman took the tract and thanked them .Afterward the guy with my dad (kind of awkward and dumbfounded ) said”Bro. she had no clothes on. My dad: Soo? You’ve never seen a naked woman? Guy: No I’m not married.(BTW My dad was a cop for twenty years and the city in which he worked was crazy and he sometimes had to arrest women who were running around naked. )

  3. At least the door-to-door fundies have a little courage to talk to people in person – unlike the cowards who stuck anti-Catholic tracts on the windshields of our cars while we were at Mass one morning.

  4. Ooooo, I LOVE the Chick tract about Catholicism. He obviously knows nothing about it. He says that, in the Eucharist, Catholics are actually worshiping the ancient Egyptian sun god.

  5. @Dan Keller: despite my experience with Chick tracts (*shudder*) I actually thought you were exaggerating (I must have blocked out this little gem from my childhood), so I did a little digging, and you really weren’t making it up!

    http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0071/0071_01.asp

    Yikes. I grew up reading that trash and somehow *still* was surprised by what I saw there. Blech. Apparently Catholics also worship the “wafer god,” whatever that is. Unsurprisingly, the tract also gets Protestantism wrong when it says that “Protestants believe the Lord’s Supper is symbolic.” Um, I’m Protestant (Presbyterian) and while I acknowledge that there is a symbolic aspect to the Lord’s Supper, I believe that it IS a sacrament, as do other branches of Protestantism. Oh wait, I forgot – we also believe in infant baptism and follow a liturgy, which would make us practically Catholics. My bad!

  6. My other favorite Chick tract had Satan rejoicing as “Bewitched” closing credits were rolling. Yeah, that show sent me over to the dark side. :/

  7. @Jessica–that is the most horrible “witnessing” tool I’ve ever seen! So wrong on so many levels!

  8. The Lord works in strange and mysterious ways….. 🙂
    His wonders to perform…
    even Jack Chick can’t prevent that…

  9. God can speak through a donkey. For me, it was a singing doll-shaped pile of sawdust. . . .

    That’s how cool God is.

  10. Ugh, that chick tract aimed at black people was cringe-worthy. Although, that could be said about all of the tracts. Still, it’s like the person writing it has never met a black person, or been to any neighborhoods. Maybe they watched the movie “Airplane” and figured the “jive talk” was the way things were communicated.

    The other obnoxious thing about that tract is that it is basically saying that you should never have differing opinions. The guy trying to convince the kid not to accept Christ was making some valid counterpoints, but in a crazy exaggerated way. Of course, it turned out to be the devil doing it. Which means, anybody telling you a “different story” must be the devil in disguise, so don’t believe what anybody else (but me) tells you is the truth. Such bad information there!

  11. Actualy the guy who drew the blacks in the Chick series was a black man. I wish I had the link to the Chick Tract Movie…. look it up in the SFL archives… we discussed Chick in length here somewhere.

  12. @Jessica: There is a version with white people called Somebody Goofed. it has the character saying the same exact things except its more cartoonish.

  13. There was a Crusaders comic that poked at BJU. Anybody remember that? I might have it upstairs.

    I have a big stack of those comics upstairs. I should scan ’em in. . . .

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