Free Tibet in the Pool
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008Peter Nicholson’s cartoon at The Age, in Melbourne, provides a timely challenge to Olympic competitors preparing for the Olympics in Beijing.
Thanks to Mart the Rev
Imposter Emerging Church Blogger Caught In Cartoon by Dave Walker
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006I found this cartoon recently at Tall Skinny Kiwi’s blog. Andrew said that he found it at Mixed Moss. Mixed Moss told us she found the cartoon at Charity Hamilton’s blog. Charity Hamilton found it on Johnny Baker’s blog. Johnny Baker gave us the name of the original artist: Dave Walker at Cartoon Church.
Dave explains that he’d been listed in a dissertation blog on the Emerging Church. He defines ‘Emerging Church’ as “People who are going about being ‘the church’ in a bit of a different way to the way that most people are going about it”. Dave connects the ‘Emerging Church’ scene in the UK with alternative worship, a scene he’s been involved in. He discovered a comment on Emerging Church Research from Mark Berry, a fellow blogger who says that Worship Matters, as wonderful as it is, is not a leading voice in the Emerging Church. And so the cartoon. As it turns out, Mark was critiquing the idea of listing ‘emerging church’ blogs according to the number of times they’re listed in Technorati with the Emerging Church tag.
See the rest of Dave’s explanation. See the rest of Mark’s explanation.
Whatever the case, Dave’s provided an excellent critique of the angst over who’s influencing who in the Emerging Church conversation. I was at a seminar on missional church recently when the session leader suggested that Andrew Jones was the equivalent of the Pope in the international Emerging Church conversation. Surely!? The nature of ‘emerging’ is that most people involved in the grassroots could not care less about who is blogging, publishing, speaking, or leading excellent worship experiences in high profile events.
Tags: Art, Blogging, cartoons, Dave Walker, Emerging Church
We have met the enemy
Thursday, December 15th, 2005An article I wrote for Journey in 2003…
As I walked into Ignite, the regional youth event held at Redcliffe Uniting last month, I was recruited as a professional soldier. I was handed a Berserker sub machine gun, given a combat outfit to wear, and introduced to two fellow soldiers. Our task was to engage in guerrilla warfare with teams of three young people at a time, taking out our opponents by shooting just above the eyes.
These weren’t real guns or real bullets. We were playing Laser Skirmish, firing infra red rays like those emitted from television remote controls. On the backs of our orange t-shirts someone had plastered the words hatred, apathy and greed. Young people were being challenged to fight against injustice rather than against people.
So what do you think? Was this a great way to get young people talking about the issues behind war? Or was it just another way of feeding and exposing the blood thirst in all of us?
I must admit I enjoyed myself. I coped fine with the adrenaline rush of keeping myself alive by taking out members of my youth group and their peers. I nearly lost my voice as I rooted out resistance in the trenches with my battle cries.
But afterwards I got to thinking. These young adversaries may have taken on the cause of defeating all kinds of evil. But too readily it was us against them. The people in the orange shirts wore the labels and so had to be eliminated.
Labels are tags we give people from what we see of them, from where we stand. Some people use labels to fit others into a box. Some people use labels to explain quickly what they believe.
Labels hardly ever describe accurately who we are. People are human and don’t fit into boxes without being squashed and reduced to a caricature. Likewise God is divine and does not fit neatly into any box we might dream up.
The very act of pinning the weight of evil on a character, be it Saddam Hussein or the molester in the news, prevents us from dealing with our own shadow - our own capacity to distort God’s gift of life.
In the time of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the enemy was communism. Individuals and groups were singled out for harsh treatment and rejection - because of their perceived lack of loyalty. I’ve seen the same dynamic at work in churches sick with mutual suspicion and fault-finding.
“Yes, son, we have met the enemy and he is us”. Famous words from Pogo, a cartoon character possum created by Walt Kelly in the middle of last century. Pogo sighs out those words not in the battlefield but at the edge of a junk-filled swamp. Walt Kelly’s words below remind us to dedicate our resources to the battle raging within each of us.
“There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.”
Tags: cartoons, Reconciliation
