Holy Shirt: Wearing Your Faith — And Letting It Speak
OKLAHOMA CITY — What’s your most evangelistic T-shirt? I’ve got a bunch from my church — youth camps where I was a counselor, mission trips, Leadership Training for Christ. But the T-shirt that gets the most comments simply says “Jesus ♥ You.”
“Jesus loves you, too, sir!” said the TSA agent as I stepped into the airport scanner and held up my arms (a posture of surrender, appropriately enough). As I stepped out, the agent said, “If more people believed that, this world would have a lot less problems.” Preach!
I got the shirt while visiting The Park Church of Christ in Tulsa, Okla. Church members, non-members and high school kids were doing a service project for Feed My Starving Children, bagging up nutritious meals for families in Africa while yelling, “PROTEIN! VEGETABLES! SOY! RICE!”
It’s become my airport shirt. Every time I travel, someone points it out — mostly airline employees, and our time together is so brief that I don’t get the chance to say more. But maybe it sparks a thought or plants a seed that will one day grow.
T-shirts need not be overt to be evangelistic. I remember a singer/songwriter named John Fischer who spoke to the Savannah Christian Church (now Compassion Christian) when I worked for the daily newspaper in Georgia. He talked about the Christian’s call to be “in the world, not of the world” and the difficulty of striking that balance.
Some believers, in an attempt to reach the lost, act so much like them that it’s hard to tell the difference. I had friends in college who thought that accompanying their friends to bars was a chance to witness to them by practicing moderation, setting a good example. It never worked. The result: “In the world and of the world.”
There’s an opposite temptation as well, Fischer said, and it’s a struggle for me right now. Sometimes, our only close friends are Christians.
We wear Christian T-shirts and listen to Christian music as we jog to the Christian bookstore. We’re not “of the world,” but we’re barely even “in the world.”
Fischer, like me, has a lot of Christian T-shirts. But his most evangelistic T-shirt doesn’t say anything about Christ. All it says is “Zildjian.”
That’s a brand of cymbals. He got the shirt free when he bought some for his drum kit. Once, when riding a subway and wearing the shirt, a fellow drummer pointed it out.
“What kind of music do you play?” the drummer asked. And a conversation about Christ followed — brought to you by the good folks at Zildjian.
Our T-shirts are more evangelistic than we realize, whether they say something about Jesus, “Star Wars,” knitting, the Texas Rangers or the NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
Are we willing to let them speak — and to take the next step when they do?
This article was first published in The Christian Chronicle.
Erik Tryggestad is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.