5 Links:
Come Home For Christmas
The Catholic Church has a campaign called Come Home For Christmas to encourage people to go back to church at Christmas. It is a bit like ‘Back to Church Sunday’, but the name is different. There is a downloads page where you can get resources such as ‘A Leaflet For The lapsed’.
Sorted Magazine
You might remember that the other week I mentioned ‘Sorted Magazine’, the UK’s first Christian magazine for men. Well, there is now a website and also a Facebook group. I have not seen the magazine yet so I am thin on particulars.
Just This Day
The Just This Day campaign encourages places of worship to open their doors so that people can be quiet on November 28th. The main event in the UK will be at St Martin’s in the Fields where ‘a 3 minute stillness will take place on the hour’. The rest of the time there will be an unholy racket. Sorry.
Affirming Liberalism
Affirming Liberalism is ‘a new network for all Christians, ordained and lay, Affirming Anglican Liberal Christians and Christianity, in the Oxford Diocese and beyond’. Sounds pretty inclusive. All we need now is an ‘Affirming Evangelicalism’ and we’ll have the set. (Thanks to Richard for this.)
Sophia Network
The Sophia Network is a network for women in youth work. I wish it every success as the people behind it are good people. I note that the ‘who we are‘ page mentions that Sharon Prior (who interviewed me when I went to Biblical college) ‘loves walking on the beach and eating Chinese food’. Ah, multitasking. (Thanks to Sarah for this.)
Note: Picture may not relate to article.
Posted by Dave at 12:57 am on November 12, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Church, Religion.
10 Comments
There is now a new feature on Facebook called ‘pages’. Pages are a bit like ‘groups’, except they allow third party applications to be installed, which in theory means that pages are far more modifiable than groups. The very good church and technology blog ‘digital.leadnet.org’ (no idea what the name means) explains how a church can use this new feature to set up a page. It involves clicking the ‘Businesses’ link at the bottom of a Facebook page.
I tried setting one up for the Parish of Langdon Hills – the page I made is here. I have to say I remain to be convinced, as the pages seem to lack certain features of a group, such as the ability to appoint admins, the ‘recent news’ section and the ‘posted items’. Pages also have ‘fans’ rather than ‘members’, which is a little odd for a church. I suspect though the advantage of a page will come when you add third party applications, which I haven’t got around to yet. If any of you technical whizz kids can make better use of this pages feature then please do show us.
So, in summary: Interesting, but not that interesting.
Posted by Dave at 1:24 am on November 11, 2007 and filed under Church, Religion, Technical.
2 Comments
Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, has died.
From an article. ‘Why Samaritans started‘ on the Samaritans site:
I wasn’t suicidal. I wasn’t at a loose end. I was busy and needed as Vicar of St Paul’s Clapham Junction, Chaplain of St John’s Hospital Battersea, Staff Scriptwriter/Visualiser for Eagle and Girl strip cartoon magazines and Scientific and Astronautical Consultant to Dan Dare!
When I wasn’t running an ‘open’ youth club, or bawling prayers at geriatric patients, or teaching in my Church School, or cycling around giving Holy Communion to the sick, I was pounding my typewriter up to 2 or 3am earning my living, as my stipend was only enough to pay my secretary. There was no time to discover whether I was happy or not, and I’ve managed to keep it that way.
Posted by Dave at 10:36 am on November 9, 2007 and filed under Current events, Religion.
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The putting on of the white headphones is a symbolic gesture meaning ‘I do not want to talk to you’. Not that people in London talk to each other anyway. I have heard that there are still places in the world where people greet each other and strike up conversations for no particular reason.
I don’t blame people for the wearing of headphones. Personally though I prefer to look out of the window at trees and fences. This helps me to think about the various things that need thinking about.
And now the Notices:
- I had a really great time at Holy Joes talking a bit about cartooning and church. It was more ‘discussing’ than me talking, which was ideal really. Most enjoyable, although I endured some mild persecution for my technological ineptitude. I’m still interested in other such speaking gigs by the way, especially if they are within a train rides distance from Basildon. I’m aware that there are one or two people I haven’t got back to about this – will do shortly.
- Talking of getting back to people – I’m only 209 e-mails behind at the moment. Will try to catch up tomorrow. I’m out today mingling in the community.
- Some people have been paying an extra pound postage when ordering licences from me via Paypal. Continued apologies for this – there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it without changing to a different payment system, which is a lengthy exercise that I do not really want to undertake. I’ll send out some refunds very soon.
- We need some more people for the coffee rota. If you can help please see Mary or Joyce.
Posted by Dave at 11:37 am on November 8, 2007 and filed under Cartoons.
7 Comments
I was flicking through cartoons looking for some for my talk at Holy Joe’s tonight and hoped that no-one would notice if I repeated the odd one or two here on the blog. I think as long as I don’t draw attention to it I can probably get away with it.
I’m sorry once again that there has not been a lot of new material on the blog. As I have said before it is an interesting time for me workwise and so there are things to be thought about. This is in addition to some mild illness, trying to do my regular cartoons (see diagram), and the SPCK issue which has taken a bit of time what with one thing and another.
Posted by Dave at 4:11 pm on November 6, 2007 and filed under Mundane.
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In the third month they began to lay the foundation of the heaps, and finished them in the seventh month.
This verse, 2 Chronicles 31:7, is the 30638th most popular verse in the Bible out of the 31101 verses that make up the Bible. This is according to TopVerses.com, a site that ranks all of the verses in the Bible in order of the number of times they appear on the internet.
I am hoping that by posting about 2 Chronicles 31:7 it might be possible to push it up the rankings a bit. To my mind it is quite an informative verse, telling us as it does:
- Building heaps is a good thing to do.
- A good heap should always start with a foundation.
- It can take up to about four months to build a decent heap.
- ‘They’ built the heaps. Building heaps isn’t a one man job.
- You need to finish your heaps. There’s nothing worse than an unfinished heap.
Of course it is not a verse without controversy. The preceding verse (slightly more popular – ranked 28320) seems to suggest that cattle and sheep were included in the heaps. Whether they were alive or dead we don’t know.
Top verses is a very interesting site – and thanks to Inspire for alerting me to it. As well as the top verses it includes the top 10 books, the top ten chapters, the top verses in each book and the top verses containing particular words.
The failing, of course, is that one could be led to believe that the verses most often published on the internet are therefore the most important verses. My own view is that the most important themes in the Bible come not from picking individual ‘soundbite’ verses out of context, but by looking at the overall message of entire books. Surely that is how it was intended to be read.
Feel free to post your own devotional thoughts on 2 Chronicles 31:7. It would be great if we could bump it up to the top 5. This would perplex a lot of people, which I’m all in favour of.
Posted by Dave at 1:11 pm on November 2, 2007 and filed under In-depth analysis, Religion, Spirituality.
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Dave Walker's blog. Dave is a freelance cartoonist who draws a weekly 'Guide to the Church' for the Church Times. (
