Resources

Below are some tips, suggestions and resources for organizing a creation evangelism outreach booth of your own.

The news of soft tissue being found in dinosaur bones can be eye-opening for many people. It can should challenge the millions-of-years age of dinosaurs people have been taught.

A large chart with photos (taken with microscopes) of dino soft tissue is very useful. This chart came to us from Genesis Apologetics and may have been part of their collaboration with Brian Thomas of ICR. This small copy of the chart is handy for emailing: dino_soft_tissue_sml.jpg

And this large, full-resolution copy is good for enlarging to 5′ square – dino_soft_tissue_lrg.jpg

You can have a 5′ square vinyl banner made from the large full-res image, made with grommets and reinforced borders, for mounting in a fair booth or elsewhere. A 10′ length of PVC pipe cut in half and with holes drilled in each end is useful for then using zip ties to attach the banner. In this photo of our 2021 booth you can see the chart on the right – chart_in_booth.jpg And here is the same chart inside the Mount St. Helens Creation Center – chart_in_hallway.jpg

Just a few details I will point out about the chart include elastic tissue that is supposedly millions of year old? Right, uh-huh. In addition, DNA erodes after some thousands of years, but limited DNA has been found in some dinosaur bones indicating an age in the thousands of years, not millions. Measurable traces of Carbon-14 should not be detectable if the bones were a fraction of a million years old. And lastly, since the chart was produced, and this may have been only since 2021, fragments of actual nerve tissue have been found in dinosaur bones! Feel free to email me if you cannot find this on the web.

Some sort of dinosaur model is great for drawing attention to your booth and you may find some online at Lowes by searching for the three words “design toscano dinosaur”. Lowes apparently has a greater selection at time of writing than Home Depot, but you might check both.

We do not want to merely draw interest to the booth but also send something away with visitors – something edifying, and the Answers in Genesis booklet What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs is excellent! Most importantly, the gospel message is presented in it.

That booklet is for people that pause long enough by the booth to talk. For people just walking by, with whom we likely would have no other contact, we offer them a gospel tract. The two that we really like at this time are 101 Funniest One-Liners which are really funny AND include the gospel message and the other is Giant Money which is 18″ long and popular and about the same price as other tracts. What we are careful to do at the moment anyone accepts a tract from us is to then mention something about “the great message about Jesus Christ on the backside!” We do not want people to take a tract, see that it’s about Jesus and feel they were tricked into taking it. With the Giant Money tract, we might say something about “money is losing value over time but the message of Jesus Christ is good for eternity!”

There are many gospel tracts available, and the above two are just two of our favorites. We do NOT hand the $1,000,000 Million Dollar tracts at fairs because we’ve had some unscrupulous young people order food from a vendor, have it cooked then offer to pay with one of the Million $ tracts claiming they were unaware it wasn’t real. That makes enemies of us among food vendors!

To have actual dinosaur bones (or fossils) in your booth for young people to touch and hold is great. Actually obtaining some can be a challenge but one possible source for purchasing some – and I hope they do not mind me mentioning them – might be the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Glendive, MT.

A video of the 2017 Oregon State Fair organized in the name of Design Science Association is on YouTube at https://youtu.be/dopztjdQogM

Some simple, practical tips would include trying to reserve a booth that is not facing the sun so that your booth volunteers are not baking in there. In any case, taking a sun hat with you is a good idea. Providing bottled water kept in a cooler is nice. Comfortable shoes and with cushioned insoles make a big difference over the course of a long day. We personally like to stand to greet someone walking by rather than sitting comfortably in the back of the booth waiting to see if visitors are interested enough to come approach us.

A printed Holy Bible from which we might read certain passages to someone is more effective, we personally think, than merely reciting a verse from memory or even looking it up on a smartphone. The Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword.

Be aware that the most common question in the minds of people walking by your booth is “What cult are they?” Which is a very good question – one I would ask myself at a fair. So we try to graciously dispel that suspicion as quickly as we can.

If you have specific questions, please feel free to email us. And we hope to add more ideas soon.

May God bless.