During one visit to the diary room he happened to mention that young people
Posted in General on 09. Oct, 2010
During one visit to the diary room, he happened to mention that young people in his church had taken to wearing WWJD bracelets and wristbands in an effort to make sense of the world.Cue much excitement on the show’s companion programme, Big Brother’s Little Brother, when the presenter Dermot O’Leary began wearing one of the wristbands in tribute to Cameron and his church group. Cue a swooning reference in Heat about how O’Leary had been “pioneering a new look”. Cue 500 readers’ letters and e-mails to the magazine, begging for the chance to win one.No sooner had Cameron made his comments than reports appeared in the Scottish press of a run on the bracelets at Christian bookshops. Little wonder that Heat’s editor Mark Frith predicts that they could become the latest in “kitsch, ironic fashion”.So where did the bracelet appear from? In 1896, the Christian novelist Charles Sheldon wrote a book called In His Steps.
It’s the tale of a church minister, a businessman, a newspaper editor and a vagrant. One day the Rev Henry Maxwell is preaching at his pulpit when he is confronted by a tramp He and his parishioners are thrown into confusion The appearance of the stranger leaves them deeply shaken. How should they deal with him? A great amount of soul-searching goes on, until they alight on a solution. All they have to do when confronted by an ethical dilemma is to ask: “What Would Jesus Do?”Fast forward almost 100 years and to real life. In the small beach town of Holland, Michigan, a place boasting little other than a factory making wooden shoes, Janie Tinklenberg, a youth worker at the Calvary Reformed Church, is recalling the book, which had been a family favourite since her childhood, with groups of young people She is intrigued by its central question. One day in 1989, she finds herself in conversation with a congregant who works in the merchandising business. Might she and he be able to come up with a gimmick that could act as a prompt to young Christians to lead the good life?Today, Tinklenberg is still spreading the word.
Speaking from Toledo, Ohio, where she is on a mission trip, she recalls: “We looked at T-shirts and hats. But this was the time when kids were making braid friendship bracelets with coloured thread…” So bracelets it had to be. “And we just used the abbreviation because kids wouldn’t have time to read the four words.” The conversation was to have an astonishing outcome. Estimates about how many bracelets have been sold in the United States range from 15 million to 52 million.But the whole thing started on the tiniest scale.