Ranting to /dev/null

It skews with age. Baby boomers and up still read the paper. Younger generations only read the "best" papers (NYT, WSJ, WaPo), and get the rest of their news online. So, you're partially correct.

When we lived in Fort Worth we got the Star Telegram every day.

I respectfully dissent from your assessment. While random handing out of literature isn't my style of evangelism, I see nothing wrong with this approach. I certainly like getting the Word of God out there better than I like handing out badly-written pamphlets. And the commentators in the article are right; how is this more offensive than a pack of Quaker Oats? I can imagine a lot of people cracking open the proffered New Testament half out of boredom because the news is slow and half out of curiosity over a culturally important book.

The Lord works in mysterious ways...

May He have mercy on my industry, then. Because the demographics are not working in mysterious ways.

Josiah: While younger people do read newspapers from time to time, I'd submit that most of us, to the extent that we do read them, do so online anyways. And even the big boys are feeling the hurt: WSJ just got acquired after narrowing its page width, LA Times is on the block, etc. If viewed as a campaign by boomers and pre-boomers to reach other boomers and pre-boomers, then perhaps, but with circulations declining across the country...

Becca: Let me start with agreement: there's nothing "offensive" about this in the sense that people in the article meant. It's advertising like for any other product. But the Spirit hasn't promised to work through advertising. It's at best silly, but I think it bespeaks a deep misunderstanding about the nature of evangelism and the gospel. Go straight back to Acts, chapter 8 in particular. Read the epistles. The normal pattern for evangelism is preaching. Always has been, always will be. Doesn't have to be the formal, lecture-style sermons that we associate with preaching today, but it does involve personal communication, not anonymous, high-altitude literature bombing. It's not like there's anyone in the US that doesn't have access to the Bible anyways.

This current campaign smacks of superstition: "If we send out enough Bibles, certainly the Spirit will work then," all the while abandoning the means by which the Spirit has said that He works: preached Word and administered Sacrament. They aren't even sending out the whole story, just the New Testament, which, without the Old, loses the bulk of its meaning.

It's difficult to believe that in 2007 there's people a) old enough to think including a New Testament in newspapers for free will win enough converts to be worth the expense, who b) aren't yet dead. Of course, it's not as though the money will be wasted. These same nonagenarians will derive so much delight from the free New Testament someone sent them with their newspaper that the mysterious absence of several hundred thousand dollars from their various retirement funds probably won't trouble them a bit.

Agreed, it's not the best way to evangelize, but there is power in the Scripture alone. Hezekiah reading the law to the people was alone enough to bring them to their knees. Yeah, I think it would be far more effective to actually live out the Scriptures in the presence of others, but I'm not going to waste time attacking them for this. At worst it's harmless. At best perhaps someone picks up a NT they wouldn't otherwise have read.

And I don't think you can quantify souls in a cost/benefit analysis.

Becca: Your mention of Hezekiah proves my point. The Word was being preached.

But otherwise I'd tend to agree. There isn't anything wrongwith what they're doing, just misguided and wrongheaded.