Would they actually remember to do it? Tinklenberg wasn't sure. So she approached the brother of a friend from church who worked for nearby Lesco Corp., which specialized in branding everyday products with corporate logos or names. Tinklenberg was searching for a tangible item that would prompt her students to pop the question. She considered pens, pencils and T-shirts, but rejected them all because the items were likely to be too easily discarded.

And then she thought of W.W.J.D. bracelets.

"At the time, 1989, beaded friendship bracelets were popular," says the 47-year-old youth pastor. "I figured a bracelet was perfect: They could wear it all the time and it was even kind of cool."

Tinklenberg had no idea how cool the idea really was -- or how much money a whole host of entrepreneurs and corporations would make off her original brainstorm. But she does now. There's Lesco Corp., for example, which has sold 16 million bracelets to date. There is Zondervan, a Christian publishing imprint of HarperCollins, which publishes nine books related to what it calls "the W.W.J.D. movement." There are hundreds of Christian bookstores too, stocking over a dozen items with the W.W.J.D. label. There are even Giorgio Armani and the NBA -- both of whom have ordered thousands of text-imprinted bracelets from Wordstretch, a Minnesota company started by a former actor named Ave Green who admits that she didn't come up with the idea until she saw the W.W.J.D. bracelets at a Nebraska truck stop.

But Tinklenberg's own bank account contains no proof that she played any role in the commercial marketing of four little words. She hasn't received a single cent from any of these ventures. This summer, she did manage to win control of the W.W.J.D. trademark, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled that because the logo had already become so prevalent it was now part of the public domain. She would never have been able to copyright a phrase only four words long, but if she had trademarked it back in 1989, she would have been owed a royalty for every sale of a product bearing the W.W.J.D. logo. Today, however, Tinklenberg can only sue companies that market products that defame her idea -- such as the parody advice column, "What Would Journey Do?"

Some people consider this a sin. "She got totally screwed if you want to know the truth," says Mike Yaconelli, the founder of Youth Specialties, a for-profit provider of books, videos and other ministry materials. "Even if it's legally right, it's morally wrong."

"We've now reduced the Christian faith to buying a $10 T-shirt," says Yaconelli, who in 1971 founded the Wittenburg Door, a magazine dedicated to calling evangelicals on the carpet. "Christians are very quick to point out pornography and drunkenness and a lot of other sins, but they're very slow to recognize that there is another sin in their midst that they're ignoring -- and that's the sin of consumerism."

Tinklenberg herself eschews any black-and-white condemnation of W.W.J.D. exploitation. Perhaps she's mindful of the history of the book "In His Steps," itself unprotected by copyright registration and consequently republished numerous times without any compensation for the author. But is profit the point -- or distribution? On one hand, by waiting until 1998 to seek a trademark on W.W.J.D., Tinklenberg helped the idea proliferate far and wide, thus fulfilling the Bible's mandate to "spread the Good News." On the other hand, as several critics of Christian copyright violation have noted, she also failed to enforce Luke 10:7, which states that "a worker is worthy of his wages." What would Jesus do with these alternatives?

Not even Tinklenberg is sure. But who could be? The interplay between copyright protection and distribution is a complex one, even when issues of faith and evangelism aren't involved. From Napster to fan fiction to the software code that allows your DVD player to work, the tension between how intellectual property is protected and how it is distributed is one of the defining issues of the new millennium. It shouldn't be much of a surprise then, that the W.W.J.D. saga -- with roots stretching back a good two millenniums -- reflects the same confusion.

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