San Francisco, CA – While the common stereotype for Jewish people is to not have tattoos or else they can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery, Jews for Jesus, the leading organization for Jewish evangelism, has never been one to follow the crowd. On the forefront of an ever changing society, JFJ has always been a pioneer in developing and executing new ideas and their latest idea will shock the entire Jewish community: mandatory tattoos for their missionaries.

“It’s a new day and we need a new way to reach as many UJs [Unsaved Jews] as we can,” said JFJ Executive Director, David Brickner. “One of our missionaries, Arielle Randle, presented a paper earlier this year at the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism Conference of North America titled ‘Nothing New Under the Sun: What Jewish young adults today have in common with their parents’ generation and why they are just as open to the gospel.’ In it she stated, ‘Through culturally relevant methods, the gospel was brought to the hippies. Now we must bring it to the hipsters.’  I couldn’t agree with that more. The one thing every hipster has in common with other hipsters is that they all have tattoos! The best way to reach hipsters is to blend in with them; make them think we’re one of them. How do you do that? Have tattoos! So we’re starting to require our missionaries to have tattoos in order to better reach our #1 target audience: hipsters. Some of our missionaries already have tattoos, which is great. They’ll be the ones leading our sorties and other evangelistic events. Our other missionaries were given a year to comply, which I thought was adequate time to pick out a tattoo and artist. Not everyone agreed with this new policy. You’ll notice a lot of our staff have left recently. It was displeasure over this policy that they all left, but I can assure you I still stand by it 100%. It’s also a great way to weed out those who aren’t serious about sharing the gospel with hipsters. And don’t worry, we’re allowing everyone to choose their own tattoos, though we did strongly recommend they get the Shema tattooed upon their hands or as a frontlet between their eyes.”

Jews for Jesus is definitely venturing to go where no Jewish evangelist has gone before, with mandatory tattoos, but we trust that they know what they’re doing. If you’d like to help their missionaries pick out tattoos you may visit jewsforjesus.org and if you’d like to read Arielle’s entire article that this idea was based on you can find that at http://www.lcje-na.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Randle_Arielle.pdf