- doing a food drive
- gathering prayer requests
- taking a "spiritual inventory" for the purpose of sharing the Gospel
I thought I'd make a list of the items that are useful.
I take a cart with me when I go witnessing door to door in the neighborhood. The primary purpose of the cart is to carry the food that is collected for the food drive. However, the cart also holds additional tracts, Bibles, books and plastic bags to give people to put their food donation in. Don't forget to put in a bottle of water for each member of your team, especially if it is hot. These are available at Staples. The cart folds up for easy storage when not in use.
Plastic Bags
When asking for food donations, sometimes it is handed to provide the person with a plastic bag to put their donation in. Some people will have their own plastic bags handy. However, some will not. My wife saves the plastic bags from when she shops at the grocery store. I take these bags with me when I go door to door. When I approach each door, I bring one bag up to the door with me. That way if the person would like a bag, I can simply hand them one.
Clipboard
I carry a clip board with me. You can get a clip board at any number of stores. This one at Office Max is less than $5. On the clip board I put the following items:
- Several sheets of blank paper for taking notes, tracking the number of houses and one on ones, etc
- Several prayer request cards. In a future post, I will provide you with the prayer request cards that we use.
- Several copies of the information sheet from MetrcoCrest Social Services about the food drive. If you are in the Dallas Metroplex, this sheet may be useful to you. Otherwise, ask your local food pantry for a similar sheet.
Tracts
Since it is our primary objective to share the Gospel with each household in the city, we must carry a supply of Gospel tracts with us when we go door to door. We have decided to use the Good News / Bad News tract that we developed at Bezeugen Ministries.
This tracts contains a number of scripture references on each side. This tract is the size of a business card with good news on one side and bad news on the other. The card provides links to our outreach web site with additional information.
You can use any tract that you like. We decided to use this one because it eliminates cultural boundaries that may be found with many tracts. So, if we leave a tract on the door and we don't know who the person is, we may not otherwise know which tract to leave that is well suited for them.
Business Cards
We have printed business cards for many of the people involved with our ministry. If we have a conversation with someone and they would like to contact us, then we will leave them with a business card which provides our contact information. If you make business cards, then I recommend at least providing your name, email address and phone number. Our also include the web site of our ministry. Then on the back our business cards provide some of the more popular links within the site that people may be looking for. This way, let's say someone is looking for a church, we can point them to a link on the back of our business card which points them directly to the section of the web site that contains that information.
Bibles
It is helpful to to have Bibles and scripture portions to hand out to people that may not have any. We buy our Bibles from BiblicaDirect. We have found that we can get good pricing when buying these per case. We have used and recommend the following resources:
- Gospel of John - You can choose two different covers. These can be purchased in bulk for 30 cents each.
- Pocket New Testament - The cover comes in four colors. There are actually less expensive options, but these are very nice because they fit in a shirt pocket or the pocket of your jeans to have them with you. They run $1.60 each when purchased by the case.
- NIV Outreach Bible - Choose from five attractive covers. These run $2.35 each when ordered by the case.
In addition to these Bibles, I have found that Christian Book Distributors offers an ESV New Testament for 79 cents a copy when you order at least 10. This is a wonderful price. The format is slightly larger than the Pocket New Testament above, but it is certainly an inexpensive ESV option to try. We will likely order some of these once we use up the New Testaments we have already purchased.
Booklets
As with any witnessing conversation, it is often good to have resources to provide the person that you have witnessed too. Two resources that I carry with me are:
- Why Christianity? - this is a wonderful resource to provide people who practice other religions, especially if they practice Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam.
- Scientific Facts in the Bible - this resources is wonderful to give to intellectuals and atheists. One time when I was witnessing, I actually had a teen aged girl say, "it's not like you can prove any science from the Bible." I said, "oh, yeah, would you like to read this?" and handed her one of these booklets. She started reading it immediately.
Books
If finances allow, you may also like to stock a few books that you can provide to people who have more questions and interest. A few of my favorite books to give out in these circumstances are:
There are many other wonderful resources available. These are the basic set that I use when witnessing, especially door to door.
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