What would Jesus do?

", often abbreviated to WWJD, became particularly popular in the United States in the early 1900s, following the 1896 novel In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?

[1] The phrase saw a resurgence in the 1990s as a personal motto for Christians, who used it as a reminder of their belief in the moral imperative in a way that demonstrated the love of Jesus through their actions.

[5] The Roman Catholic Church emphasizes the concept of Imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), which is summarized in the English phrase "What Would Jesus Do?

"[6] Charles Spurgeon, a well-known evangelical Baptist preacher in London, used the phrase "what would Jesus do" in quotation marks several times in a sermon he gave on June 28, 1891.

[7] In his sermon he cites the source of the phrase as a book written in Latin by Thomas à Kempis between 1418 and 1427, Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ).

Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, wrote both the lyrics and music of a Gospel Hymn "What Would Jesus Do" with a copyright date of 1891.

The homeless man has difficulty understanding why, in his view, so many Christians ignore the poor: I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night,

It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and sin.

At Calvary Reformed Church, [14] in Holland, Michigan, a youth group leader named Janie Tinklenberg began a grassroots movement to help the teenagers in her group remember the phrase; it spread worldwide in the 1990s among Christian youth, who wore bracelets bearing the initials WWJD.