Christians love bad t-shirts.
Nerds love bad t-shirts.
I’ve worn both.
In fact, I’m wearing a bad t-shirt right now. A Christian organization sent me a free t-shirt and my practicality got the best of my dignity. I think that’s the reason most Christians will wear a Christian t-shirt; it’s hard to turn down a free t-shirt even if it is terrible. I know that I’m more willing to wear a t-shirt if it’s free and clean. It’s much easier to wear a bad t-shirt than to do laundry.
Bad Christian t-shirts win out because practicality trumps dignity, but the same can’t be said for bad nerd t-shirts. Unless you go to a convention or work for a video game store, free nerd t-shirts can be a little hard to come by. So, sadly, that means if you’re wearing a nerd t-shirt you paid for it. You worked hard for your money and decided that the best way to spend your spoils was on that vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt from Hot Topic.
There’s nothing wrong with bad Christian or nerd t-shirts. T-shirts give us the opportunity to be walking billboards for the nerdclinations and Jewish carpenters we follow. If I wear a Battlestar Galactica t-shirt then everyone knows that I have an affinity for Cylons, Admiral Adama (spoiler alert) and the potential human genocide. And if I choose to wear a Christian t-shirt, hopefully it shows my love for a gracious savior who not only redeems my soul but transforms my life as I partner with him in his redemptive work.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Everything Jesus is, everything Jesus does, can’t be captured on a t-shirt.
When we try to boil the good news of Jesus down to a t-shirt, it usually ends up extremely lacking at best or extremely misleading at worst. Take this Christian t-shirt for example:
Simply rebranding a popular Staples advertising campaign doesn’t really capture the fullness of Jesus’ message. In fact, this shirt turns Jesus from a world and life altering savior into a genie, who is never more than the press of a button away. Jesus is bigger than that and deserves much more than that. Really, he deserves our lives and actions much more than just a simple t-shirt.
If I ever found a t-shirt that did Jesus justice, I would be more than happy to wear it; I proudly would wear it because Jesus is totally awesome. I don’t really wear nerd t-shirts anymore except for one and that’s because it fully captures the awesomeness of Star Wars.
That shirt expresses how I feel about Star Wars: it’s cool, it’s creative and it’s pretty gangster. When I find a Christian t-shirt that adequately expresses how I feel about Jesus, I’ll be more than happy to wear it, even if it’s dirty.
What Christian and/or nerd t-shirts have you worn? Which ones do you wear?
i had a red christian shirt made to look like it said coke a cola. under that it said eternially refreshing. i thought it was a lame shirt that people wouldnt take seriously. but i wore it because my father got it for me and for him to get that was a big statment. the reason i stopped wearing it was because there was a rash of people at my school who were wearing a simalarly styled shirt only instead of coke or jesus it expressed a grotesk message. that i didnt want to even be paralleled with.
*sorry about my terrible spelling mistakes, im no dictionary and the comp im on is running explorer not fire fox
I remember that shirt. I like Coke.
I’m feelin the blog article, my sentiments exactly.i may’ve found a home and some new friends.check me out at godsseed1.com. a lot of the tee’s you see on the site page’ll have come down as I’m in the process of movin over to zazzle.God bless and be encouraged