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Japanese WWJD stands for “What would Jesus do?” Christians ask it before a choice, to act as Jesus would in their place. The question comes from Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps, first printed as a serial in 1896, and the WWJD bracelets began with a church youth group in Holland, Michigan, in 1989.
The letters are English, so in Spanish the question is ¿Qué haría Jesús? and in Italian Che cosa farebbe Gesù?
Sheldon took his title from a single verse: “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). Peter was writing to Christians who were being treated unjustly, and he showed them how Jesus walked through it: “when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.” Three verses later he says why that example is more than a good pattern: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:23–24). We follow the steps of the One who first walked them for us.
Where did “What would Jesus do?” come from?
It came from a pastor in Kansas. Charles Monroe Sheldon (1857–1946) was the minister of Central Congregational Church in Topeka. To draw young people to his Sunday evening services, he wrote stories that he read aloud a part at a time, each Sunday evening ending at a dramatic moment so that people would come back the next week. One story in particular caught his congregation, the one in which Sheldon asked, “What would Jesus do?”
A religious magazine in Chicago printed it in weekly installments in 1896, and it came out as a book, In His Steps, in 1897. For sixty years it was “the largest-selling book in the United States after the Bible,” according to Britannica. Sheldon was inspired by the Social Gospel movement, which sought “the betterment of industrialized society through application of the biblical principles of charity and justice,” and his book carries that concern: jobs, tenements, drink and the poor.
What is the story of In His Steps?
It begins on a Friday morning, with the Rev. Henry Maxwell writing a sermon on 1 Peter 2:21 in the comfortable town of Raymond. A shabby stranger knocks at his door asking for help finding work, and Maxwell sends him away. That Sunday the same man walks up the aisle of First Church after the sermon and speaks. He has tramped the city for three days looking for a job, he says, and his wife died four months ago in a New York tenement. “What do you Christians mean by following the steps of Jesus?” he asks. “But what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps?” Then he collapses.
Maxwell takes him into his own home, and a week later, before his little daughter can arrive, the man dies there. His last words are, “You have been good to me. Somehow I feel as if it was what Jesus would do.”
The next Sunday Maxwell asks his people for volunteers who will pledge “for an entire year, not to do anything without first asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’” and then “follow Jesus as exactly as he knows how, no matter what the result may be.” The rest of the novel follows them: a newspaper editor, a singer, a railroad man, an heiress, each finding what the pledge costs.
Sheldon tried it himself. In 1900, the Kansas Historical Society records, the Topeka Daily Capital let him run the paper for a week “as Jesus would do,” and its circulation rose from 15,000 daily copies to more than 350,000.
How did the WWJD bracelets start?
Nearly a century later, a youth group at a Reformed church in Holland, Michigan, studied In His Steps and wanted a way to remember the question. They asked Lesco, a promotional-products company in Lansing, to put the initials on cloth bracelets. Baptist Press reported in 1997 that the bracelets “first produced in 1989, caught on,” and that Lesco said it had sold nine million by that October, four million of them that year alone. Soon W.W.J.D. was on mugs, T-shirts, key rings and bumper stickers.
Christians were divided about it even then. One Oklahoma youth minister told Baptist Press, “I think it is more fashion than a true witness,” while others said the bands gave teenagers a reason to talk about their faith. Some young people changed the letters. A waitress told a youth specialist that for her they meant “Walk With Jesus Daily,” and one Oklahoma City youth minister’s teenagers rewrote them as “Why Would Jesus Die?”, which they found a better way to witness. Another youth minister put it simply: “The idea is to wear the bracelet to remind us to ‘go and do likewise.’”
Is “What would Jesus do?” in the Bible?
The exact words are not, but the call behind them is everywhere in the New Testament. “He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked” (1 John 2:6). After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus told them, “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15); there is more on that night in why Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. Paul wrote, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1), and “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Jesus himself put it most plainly of all: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
Did Christians ask this question before Sheldon?
For many centuries. The best-known book on it is The Imitation of Christ, written in Latin early in the fifteenth century and most probably by Thomas à Kempis, who spent seventy years in a monastery in the diocese of Utrecht. It opens with Jesus’ words, “He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness,” and goes on: “These are the words of Christ; and they teach us how far we must imitate His life and character.” The introduction to one English edition says that, apart from the Bible, “no Christian writing has had so wide a vogue or so sustained a popularity.”
Sheldon’s Henry Maxwell stands in the same line. Even his sermon, before the stranger interrupts it, speaks of Jesus’ sacrifice and his example together, and ends on “the necessity of following Jesus in His sacrifice and example.”
What are the limits of asking “What would Jesus do?”
One limit is that there are things Jesus did that no one else can do. He “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). He is our example because he is first our Savior, and a faith that keeps only the example has lost its heart. Some teenagers rewrote the letters as “Why Would Jesus Die?”, and that says it better.
Another is that the question is easy to answer with our own wishes. A person can ask “What would Jesus do?” and hear back exactly what they already wanted. The only cure is to know what Jesus actually did and said, which means reading the Gospels and letting them correct us. And we cannot follow him in our own strength. “Without me ye can do nothing,” he said (John 15:5), and Paul could only say, “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).
How can we ask the question well today?
Start with what he did. He washed feet. He stopped for the blind beggar at the roadside (Mark 10:46–52) and the woman who touched him in the crowd (Mark 5:25–34). He told the story of a Samaritan who stopped on the road to help a wounded stranger, then asked which of the three passers-by “was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves.” When the lawyer answered, “He that shewed mercy on him,” Jesus said, “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:36–37). The parable of the Good Samaritan may be the best answer to “What would Jesus do?” that he ever gave.
He also told us where to find him: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). Sheldon’s stranger saw it as he lay dying in Maxwell’s house: kindness to one tired man was what Jesus would do. By Jesus’ own words, it was also kindness to Jesus. There is more on that verse in who the “least of these” are.
The bracelet craze has passed. The question stays, and so does the One who asked us to walk with him: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34).
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