Your eyes do not deceive you – this is indeed ‘The Mills and Boon Guide to the Church’.

Click ‘read the rest of this entry’ to find out more about this book.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Dave at 11:52 pm on January 17, 2008 and filed under Books, Church, Religion.

15 Comments

A short series featuring some of the reference books I use in my day to day work. Number one:

My wife brought this back from work as it was surplus to requirements. It had been in a cupboard for (and I quote) ‘hundreds of years’.

Posted by Dave at 11:43 pm on January 16, 2008 and filed under Books, Cartooning, Church, Religion.

19 Comments

A larger version of this cartoon is here. Info about using this and other cartoons elsewhere is in the usual place.

This cartoon is taken from the Dave Walker Guide to the Church, published by Canterbury Press. It originally appeared in the Church Times.

Posted by Dave at 11:51 pm on January 15, 2008 and filed under Cartoons, Church, Religion.

12 Comments

Before Christmas I said that I had one or two announcements to make. Well, here is one of them.

The Anglican Communion Office have invited me to take on the role of ‘Cartoonist in residence’ at the forthcoming Lambeth Conference and I have said ‘yes’. My role will be to draw events at the conference as they develop. These drawings will then be displayed by various means including the internet. I will have a visible presence (unlike my usual non-visible sort) around the conference campus and will get to go to some of the meetings. We haven’t decided upon all of the details of all of these things yet.

Some background information: The Lambeth Conference happens every ten years, and about 800 bishops are invited. The 2008 conference is from the 16th July to the 4th August 2008 at the University of Kent in Canterbury, although the various bishops will be in the UK by at least the 10th of July when the ‘hospitality’ part starts. This is when different English, Scottish or Welsh dioceses host the delegates and, one imagines, provide them with sandwiches. There is then a retreat at Canterbury Cathedral before the programme on the University campus begins. The Spouses’ Conference runs alongside the one for Bishops and is for spouses.

I am very excited by this prospect. I am most definitely pro-Lambeth and pro-Archbishop-Rowan, and so it is a great privilege to be asked to be involved. I will be practicing my drawing between now and then and may even get some new pens. It is certainly a rather daunting prospect, but hopefully I’ll be OK. A planned new easel will be a help.

As you’ll remember I made a comment back in September about the ‘Marketplace’ at the conference and how brilliant it would be to have a stall. Well, I am pleased to say that I will indeed have a stall, though I will be asking other people to run it most of the time. I am fortunate in having one or two people who have agreed to help me, though I may need to recruit one or two more. I have not decided exactly what the stall it will have on it yet. One or two books perhaps. I may set aside a little colouring table for bishops and others to use between meetings.

I will of course have more to say about this over the coming months. Such posts will be gathered together here on the blog in a specially convened ‘Lambeth 08‘ category. Something will probably be said officially by the Lambeth organisers at some point, but in the meantime I am free to talk about it.

Additional information for visitors

These are some of the other Anglican events that I have done drawings about:

• The Windsor Report
• The Anglican Consultative Council
• The Primates Meeting

Also, for people who have surfed in, perhaps via the internet: The pages with my blog posts and cartoons about Anglican goings-on might be of interest, as my pages of church-related cartoons.

Posted by Dave at 2:17 pm on January 14, 2008 and filed under Anglican goings-on, CartoonChurch progress, Cartooning, Cartoons, Lambeth 08, Lambeth Conference, Religion.

48 Comments

You can see a larger version of this cartoon here, where a high resolution version version is available for licence holders. If you’d like to find out about becoming one of those click here.

This cartoon is taken from the Dave Walker Guide to the Church, published by Canterbury Press. It originally appeared in the Church Times.

Posted by Dave at 11:03 pm on January 13, 2008 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Cartoons, Church, Religion.

10 Comments

I’ve been playing around with the ‘site to bring Anglican bloggers together in perfect harmony’ idea.

I have to say I liked Joe’s idea in the comments the other day:

It would be quite interesting to have just to have a single page at Anglicanblogs.com which was a tagcloud of current tags on the anglican member blogs.

Unfortunately having spent a bit of time playing around I can’t quite work out how one would do such a thing. One would need a feed containing lots of different blogs for a start. I’ve tried various methods, such as combining feeds on Yahoo ‘Pipes’, but the number of feeds you can combine is limited to 5 and it just doesn’t seem to work very well.

On the Anglicanblogs.com domain I clicked a few buttons in the hosting panel and all of a sudden I have a ‘Joomla’ website. All very good but
(a) I don’t have time to build a website using Joomla, and
(b) Using a content management system like Joomla involves an admin putting the content together, whereas I think the way to go is a site where everyone puts the content together.

So, I followed Richard’s suggestion and made a site on ‘Ning’.

The site is at anglican.ning.com, though at the moment it is invitation only because where you can have a play around with it. I’m not sure whether Ning is the right system to use though, so I’d like a few people to test it for a day or two. Please send me a quick e-mail at dave at cartoonchurch if you’d like to have an invite to test it (or a note in the comments is fine thinking about it). You could also take a look at the Anglimergent site (site for cool Anglicans) to see the kind of things Ning does.

As I see it there are pluses and minuses of using Ning. To start with the negative aspects:

Disadvantages of Ning

• It is another ‘social network’ site. Will people who don’t want to join Facebook want to join this one?
• I can’t seem to get rid of a thing that says ‘Dave Walker created this social network on Ning’ on every page complete with my picture. Not what is required.

Advantages of Ning

• As and when the technology becomes available to do some sort of ‘tag cloud’ idea we could include it on the front page using a plugin whathaveyou.
• It means that people can add their own information rather than having a central person compile some sort of ‘directory’.
• Once people have joined the site and added their blog and perhaps joined a geographical group there would be no need for continued involvement in terms of adding friends, joining in with discussions and all that sort of thing. It would work on a ‘blog directory’ level as well as a social network.
• There is a forum area including a thread to recommend other people’s blogs so that it isn’t all about self promotion.
• None of the hassle of making a new site.

I’ve no idea whether this is a good way to go about things. One fairly important thing is that this isn’t a site about me. If we decide to go with it it would be good to have some other people doing the adminning for instance.

It could also be that there is some technical genius out there who could come up with a better way of dong things. If so please do say so fairly soon.

Let me know what you think.

Update: Miffy feels that one more site might be one more site too many. I’m sure others feel that way – feel free to say so.

Posted by Dave at 12:31 pm on January 13, 2008 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Religion.

8 Comments

This is Bishop David Walker, Bishop of Dudley. Writing in last week’s Church Times:

THIS IS the first significant Anglican Communion debate in which bloggers have played a major part. They were particularly in evidence in their responses to Archbishop Rowan’s Advent letter to his fellow Primates, which was hailed by some as a shot across the bows of the theological conservatives, and by others as a capitulation to the right wing.

The challenge, especially once a revised text is issued and subjected to their intense scrutiny, is how to harness the bloggers’ energies and passions for what needs to be a prayerful, reflective, and non-polemical search for the widest degree of consensus. Can they be part of the solution, not just part of the problem?

Posted by Dave at 10:37 am on January 12, 2008 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Religion.

5 Comments

The Anglicans Online have a front page editorial this week about the Anglican Communion, in particular talking about whether there is a danger of it being a bit like Facebook where one chooses whom one wants to be in communion with.

Christian communion is historically reciprocal, deliberate, public, duty-creating, love-impelling, and church-strengthening. As the ground of Christian life it is not something we choose, but something we are given: given from God the Father through God the Son, enlivened by and filled with God the Holy Spirit. It is a profound, ideally eternal relation with people we may never meet or befriend on this side of the veil. It is a far cry from the point-and-click ecclesiastical relationships we watch unfold week by week in Anglicanism.

It uses my cartoon and comes a few days after the formation of the Anglican bloggers Facebook group, but I think these two facts are coincidental.

Mark Harris has responded with ‘PRELUDIUM: Is the Anglican Communion as we know it … a commonweath in cyberspace?‘. He describes me as ‘the Cartoon Church madman Dave Walker’. I can’t really argue.

Some people in the comments at Father Jake’s site asked whether Facebook was the best place for such a group. ‘Maybe yes, and maybe no’ was the gist of my answer:

I wanted to set up a Anglican Bloggers Facebook group with an ‘open to everyone’ philosophy before someone else started one with the same title but only open to those sharing a particular point of view.

In the longer run Facebook may or may not be a good place to have such a group, but it’s a start. Perhaps, as some have suggested here, some other sort of blog or aggregator might work better in the long term.

In a fit of enthusiasm I went out and registered AnglicanBlogs.com thinking that perhaps a new domain name would sort out all our troubles. I’m forever doing this. I have a list of domain names to remind me of all the projects that never really quite worked or in many cases, saw the light of day.

Thus far it has been most encouraging to see over 274 people join the group from all sides of the central aisle, though perhaps a greater proportion from the liberal side (ie the one where using the kneelers is optional). I’m aware that one or two new connections have been made as a result.

There are other lists of Anglican blogs, but none as far as I am aware covering the whole Anglican Communion. For the Episcopalians there’s a blogging Episcopalians webring, but the links on Anglicans Online to blog lists are now rather moth-eared and overgrown. There is the Technorati Anglican blog list of course, but it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously for reasons that become obvious as soon as you look at it.

If you have ideas about where we go from here in terms of uniting the entire Anglican Communion using blogging and a hastily purchased domain name then do post them here or on the Facebook wall. I feel sure that cake needs to be involved somehow, but I can’t quite work out how.

Thanks by the way for the continued comments on my ‘ideas appeal’ posts. I print them off and read them in the library or a Basildon coffee shop. The cartoon relating to ‘excuses for absenteeism’ is now complete, the one relating to the ‘things carried by clergy’ is very nearly there but the ‘Fresh expressions’ one will get there eventually. I’m trying to work out a way to reward contributors in a very real way (but not too real). Seriously though – I do appreciate it.

Posted by Dave at 2:01 pm on January 9, 2008 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Religion.

6 Comments

Really quick question: What do the clergy carry around with them at all times to help them do their job? Or, what would they ideally be able to carry around with them at all times?

Thanks again – this is a real help to me.

Posted by Dave at 8:05 am on January 8, 2008 and filed under Ideas appeal.

50 Comments

As hinted at in the title, five short posts:

Unicyclist makes the 6pm service
I was impressed to read in the comments of the ‘absenteeism’ post that Sam, a reader of this blog, still made it to the 6pm service having finished his successful 24 hour unicycling world record attempt on the Sunday morning. Sorry Sam, I should have linked to your world record attempt when you were doing it back in September, but was overtaken by events. Very belated congratulations.

Walkers first rule of DIY
“Regardless of the time and energy you have expended getting the tools, equipment and materials together in order to undertake a DIY task a last minute trip to the DIY superstore will always be required within 10 minutes of starting the job.”

This time around it was the 8mm drill bit.

After many hours of toil over the weekend I now have two extra shelves in my office. We hadn’t really got the hang of things for the first one though, so I may only use it to store polystyrene bicycle helmets.

Paypal postage problem persists
After two months I’m afraid people who pay for CartoonChurch licences via Paypal are still being wrongly charged a pound for postage which I’m refunding order by order. Paypal are still unable to resolve this problem, so apologies to all affected. This also means I am delaying sending out some way way waaaay overdue licence reminders. If this is you then just keep using the cartoons and I will hopefully be able to invoice you before too long. I still want to stick with paypal as these things take days to work out and set up, and I don’t have time to do that with a new system.

Mobile phone joy
Talking of technical problems, I’ve finally upgraded my Nokia 6600 phone because if I missed a call it couldn’t tell me who had called me and also when the phone rang it didn’t tell me who was calling. Apparently mobiles should be able to do that by now, but neither Nokia nor Orange could make it do so in three and a bit years. You would think that changing from one Orange pay as you go phone to another Orange pay as you go phone would be easy wouldn’t you? Well, 4 days, several phone calls and a bit of stress and anxiety later I’m hopeful that the new phone is finally up and running. And it seems to work. I’m overjoyed.

Unusual ‘Fresh Expressions’ appeal
Lastly a small ‘idea appeal’ post. Today’s subject is ‘Fresh Expressions of church’ (do a Google search if you have no idea what that means). Have you come across any odd and unusual ‘Fresh Expressions’? Is there a hitherto forgotten group of people for whom a new Fresh Expression is required and if so, what would be different about the service / event?

Rubbish example: Church for lollipop ladies (and men these days) – extra brackets at the ends of pews for their signs and an absence of dilly dallying when crossing the aisle.

Any ideas, creative or otherwise – please do post them in the comments.

Posted by Dave at 3:57 pm on January 7, 2008 and filed under Ideas appeal.

33 Comments

Some of the UK’s Methodist bloggers have been having a gathering this weekend.

Note the dark brown cups as opposed to the pale green variety traditionally used by Anglicans. (Aside: If the Methodists and Anglicans ever join together the proposal is to have cups of a murky brown pale green colour.)

The Methodists are way ahead of use Anglicans in terms of mixing and mingling. Not only do they meet in real life, but they’ve had a Facebook group for a lot longer than our brand new Anglican one (I’ve been overjoyed at the response by the way – thanks everyone).

Dave Warnock has posted quite a bit about the Methodist bloggers get-together, as has Richard starting here and with pictures here. Other Methodist bloggers at the event included Olive Morgan (86 years old), Pam, ‘Turbulent Cleric‘, John and Will.

Finally, from Richard’s comments:

Kim Says:
When can we expect the joint communiqué?

Paul Martin Says:
Sorry Kim, but we can’t agree on one.

Great stuff. God bless the Methodists.

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on January 5, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Ecumenical matters, Religion.

11 Comments

I have decided that whilst procrastinating from my main task, that of producing one good diagram a day, I will attempt to mend the rift in the Anglican Communion using various methods.

Part one is the formation of a Facebook group entitled ‘Anglican Bloggers‘ which is for all bloggers and blog commenters with an interest in Anglican things.

A group for people who blog about Anglican goings-on. Also the people who comment on the blogs about Anglican goings-on. Also Anglicans who blog, but not about Anglican goings-on. Also those who have no idea what is going on, but want to join in.

This is a group for those who blog from the right hand pews, those who blog from the left hand pews and those who find themselves blogging in the central aisle where they might be struck down by a hymnbook from either side or be run down by the procession. Everyone is welcome.

I hadn’t planned this to be a place for in-depth debate, as there are lots of those out there anyway. But it might become a place to connect with the people behind the websites. Who knows, we might discover we’re all human after all. And where the bloggers lead the bishops follow. Or something.

If you know any Anglican bloggers and commenters then please let them know. There is a thread where you can add your own site and hopefully other discussions will develop. If you’re not on Facebook it is quite easy to sign up, but if you don’t want to do so for idealogical reasons I respect that.

By the way I have drawn the people in the cartoon wearing cassocks as I am assuming we all wear cassocks when blogging and commenting. In fact I tend to wear a dressing gown, which is a short cassock made from towelling material.

OK, let’s send some invitations to some distant (and not so distant) pews. I know all of us Anglican bloggers check our referrers on an hourly basis. To the following – you’d all be most welcome to join us:

• The Stand Firmists
• Kendall at TitusOneNine
• Father Jake
• The Mad Priest
• Mark Harris
• Peter Ould
• BabyBlue
• Mark the Newbie Anglican
• Susan Russell
• Chris Sugden
• The Daily Episcopalians
• Andrew Brown
• The Lead bloggers
• Bishop David
• epiScope

This is by no stretch of the imagination anywhere remotely near an exhaustive list, but I had to start somewhere. Simon of the Thinking Anglicans has already joined, as has Bishop Alan and a good number of others. Well, we’re into double figures.

Please feel free to use the above cartoon on your own site. Just copy and paste this handy code:


<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/anglican-bloggers.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Update:
I’ve posted a couple of responses from a few of the blogs on theFacebook group. I particularly appreciated the post from Mark Harris: PRELUDIUM: The Fulfillment of Predictions 1. Also Fr Jake Father Jake Stops the World: All You Need is Love? and from the other side it will be interesting to see the comments on Stand Firm – I Thought I Felt a Disturbance in the Force.

Posted by Dave at 9:19 am on January 4, 2008 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Blogging, Cartoons, Church, Religion.

10 Comments