The UCCF are encouraging Christian students to help illustrate the gospel of Mark using doodles. The scheme is called ‘oodles of doodles’ and is explained here. 400 000 copies of the doodled-upon gospels will then be given out to students this September.
An example of a good evangelistic doodle is shown above. One assumes that the three lightening bolts represent the wrath of God, the heart represents the human condition, and the five stars represent astrology. I don’t know about the seaweed – I haven’t worked that out yet.
The doodles must not use words or letters as explained in the downloadable instructions, reproduced below. It would appear that numbers are OK. Punctuation is a grey area, and therefore discouraged. Non-literal gospel drawings are encouraged, but not outside the box.
I for one am in favour of encouraging people to doodle so I think this scheme has my hearty backing. It is my opinion that pens and paper should be given out on the way into all church services. If everyone did more drawing the problems in this world would be cut by about 10-12%.
Monks have been illustrating gospels since early times. This is also relevant, but I forget why.
Background information: The UCCF is a conservative evangelical university Christian Unions organisation. See here to see the posts I’ve written about them in the past.
Posted by Dave at 5:28 pm on January 25, 2008 and filed under Art, Cartooning, Ecumenical matters, Religion.
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I am tired and morale is down 25-30% on the usual levels, so I am just posting links:
The Old Argued Cross
If you’ve enjoyed the posts here about Spring Harvest and UCCF and the like you might enjoy this song by John of Sprowston (posted in the comments below). Very good. Click the link and then click the picture. It is a bit under 2mb.
Noah’s Ark finished
The Dutch version. This is the website of it, mostly meaningless to me as I do not speak the language.
Blogs4God
Blogs4god was the main centre of Christian blogging back in the 2003-2005 sort of time or thereabouts. Dean is getting it going again – this is the story of why it failed and how it will be coming back.
Gospel Procession Video
Raspberry Rabbit of Scotland posted this. I gawped when I saw it. I suspect some of you may gawp too. There will be gawpers everywhere.
Posted by Dave at 10:27 pm on April 30, 2007 and filed under Saturday links.
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…as if we should do things his way
[Sorry, evangelical worship song joke there.]
The Spring Harvest / Word Alive split was not all about Steve Chalke and the penal substitution issue, writes Bishop Pete Broadbent on the Ship of Fools forum website. Here is his post in full:
It’s quite hard to produce an understated response to UCCF’s propaganda. The Word Alive Committee had 3 partners; UCCF, Keswick, and Spring Harvest – though it was always SH’s event. There had been a 4th partner – Proclamation Trust – but they walked some time ago. There were also a number of independent members on the committee, one of whom was Wallace Benn, who chaired the committee.
It’s been an extraordinarily difficult relationship to sustain over a number of years. Keswick have always been easy to work with. UCCF and the independent members have been a constant source of arguments and disagreements – over the charismatic movement (Word Alive has been an event where the charismatic has been deliberately played down); over the nature of the Kingdom of God, where some of the partners were unhappy with anything other than a “spritual”/”Johannine” understanding of the KOG; over the understanding of the atonement; over the precise meaning of exclusivism/particularism in relation to interfaith issues; over whether the only way to do bible teaching is to preach through a book sequentially; over speakers who’ve wanted to produce their own “sound” notes, rather than use the Study Guide we produce and ask people to teach from. We’re talking several years of painful walking on eggshells to try to keep these guys on board and produce an event that would serve the breadth of evanglicalism.
In the end, we couldn’t sustain it, because it was too much like hard work. We had a formula for ending it well. We could have said much more about why, from the Spring Harvest side of fairly normal evangelicalism, it wasn’t working. We didn’t. We tried to end graciously. But they didn’t want to. The result has been gut-spilling all over the place. So be it. I’ve told them that if they continue to go public on their propaganda as to why it’s all about Steve, I’ll continue to go public in refutation of what they’re saying. But if they belt up, so will we.
All quite illuminating. UCCF really aren’t coming out of this looking great at the moment.
According to Tom (in the comments section below) UCCF are meeting to discuss their response to events on Monday. Bishop Pete (in the same comments section) notes that Spring harvest have not been invited to this meeting, and he hopes they will ‘cease the press releases and shut up‘. I think really they all need to sit down with a glass of fortified fruit juice and have a chat about it and hopefully sort the whole mess out.
To hear what the more conservative people are saying about these goings-on you could follow the links at this post. But only if you have been blessed with a bit too much spare time.
If you have only slightly too much free time you could see the preceding posts on the subject on my blog:
- Word Alive is no more
- More on the Spring Harvest / Word Alive kerfuffle
- Unusual Word Alive sightings: Women speakers and Steve Chalke books
Posted by Dave at 11:23 pm on April 27, 2007 and filed under Ecumenical matters, Religion.
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If you’re bored of my continual blathering about the Spring Harvest / Word Alive story feel free to click ‘next’ or ‘close’ or ‘no’ and be done with it. I probably wouldn’t have posted again on the subject had I not thought of a cartoon about it. [See 'Word Alive is no more' and 'More on the Spring Harvest / Word Alive kerfuffle' for my posts so far on the topic.]
I don’t normally link to forum posts, but this seems to be the only place that this information has been posted. Bishop Pete Broadbent on Ship of Fools:
I can tell you that:
1. Steve Chalke has never been proposed by the Spring Harvest Leadership Team as a speaker at Word Alive
2. Spring Harvest are not in partnership with Fusion.
3. UCCF have never allowed women speakers to speak on their own on the main stage at the Student Celebration, despite SH requiring it as policy
4. We never said we were putting “personality ahead of partnership”
5. We did not end the partnership over Steve Chalke, though it suits UCCF’s myth-making to pretend that we did
I have no idea why UCCF have released this press release. It looks very much like a piece of machismo propaganda to puff their new event.
Point 3 inspired the following brief scribble:
If you think I’m being unfair go and have a look at the endorsements page of the ‘Pierced for our Transgressions’ book and tell me how many of the 45 or so endorsers are women. (‘Tremper’ and ‘Lindsay’ are both men’s names on this occasion. I’ve checked.)
On a (sort of) related note, I was intrigued by Graham’s post in my comments that Wesley Owen staff were forbidden from selling Steve Chalke’s books at Word Alive:
We were passing the Wesley Owen stand when some one asked if they could buy one of Steve’s books. The assistant told the enquirer that they were not allowed to put Steve’s books out at Word Alive.
It seems to me there might have been some money to be made by someone selling Steve Chalke books in brown paper wrapping to passers by, but I digress. I tend to think that attempting to silence the opposition’s point of view through censorship might not be a great strategy in the long run. Let both sides of the debate make their points and allow people to make their own minds up.
Posted by Dave at 10:56 am on April 26, 2007 and filed under Ecumenical matters, Religion.
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Dear me. A lot is being written and said and it is a bit hard to keep up. I’m posting these without any in depth commentary as I have to get on with work today.
1) UCCF: Statement about the Word Alive situation (Update: original source)
It is basically saying that can’t work with those who don’t hold to ‘orthodox Christian teaching’ and that Spring Harvest ended the relationship.
2) Bishop of Durham, Dr N T Wright: Article on ‘Fulcrum’
Lengthy, but worthwhile article. It doesn’t address the specific Spring Harvest / Word Alive situation, but is talking about the theological whathaveyous behing it. He has harsh things to say to both Jeffrey John and the authors of a book ‘Pierced for Our Transgressions’, which is a conservative evangelical take on penal substitution by IVP and Oak Hill College types.
3) Bishop of Spring Harvest, Pete Broadbent: Statement about the Word Alive situation (Update: Bishop Pete has posted the statement in the comments of this blog too)
It’s terribly sad that UCCF are now coming out with an official statement that simply isn’t true to what actually took place. I don’t want to get into a public row with UCCF, whose ministry among students I support. But this is just simply to say that I dispute most of what is contained in the statement as being either misunderstanding (willful or otherwise) or total fabrication. I could hope that they would withdraw their statement and hold their peace.
Further update:
The ‘Pierced for our Transgressions’ authors respond to Bishop Tom Wright.
Posted by Dave at 7:55 am on April 24, 2007 and filed under Ecumenical matters, Religion.
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The organisers of the ‘Word Alive’ Bible study holiday have decided to remove themselves from the ‘Spring Harvest’ Christian Butlins holiday because they do not like Steve Chalke. Instead they are setting up a new more Biblical Bible study holiday in Pwllheli and Steve Chalke will not be invited. Well, that is my amost certainly flawed understanding of the situation based on this statement from the UCCF on Adrian Warnock’s site:
“Steve Chalke has made his dislike of penal substitution very clear by likening God’s act of punishing Jesus in our place to a cosmic child abuser. In good conscience, we simply could not allow Steve to teach during the Word Alive week. We’re very sad that after 14 years of fruitful ministry, Spring Harvest has decided to end the Word Alive partnership because we feel unable to shift on this position.”
This all might seem terribly uninteresting to many readers, but I look back with fondness on my various trips to both Word Alive and Spring Harvest during my time as a human being. It is sad that they cannot get along. I would very gladly go back to Spring Harvest given the opportunity. Spring Harvest organisers (if you are reading) – if you would like me to come and talk about doing drawings or draw during the sermons I will do so. I am prepared to stay in a budget chalet, though those ones that look like log cabins look quite nice.
This is a picture I did back in 1997 whilst at Spring Harvest. Warning: by today’s standards it is not very funny, and it is not very good by any standards.
Links for those who want to read further:
Website for Spring Harvest
Website for Word Alive as it was
Website for the ‘New, more sound and biblical Word Alive’
Dave 42′s site, where I found out about this. He makes good points about why this is a sorry state of affairs.
Update: UCCF Statement
Further Update: Bishop Pete Broadbent has posted a response in the comments below.
Posted by Dave at 10:21 am on April 20, 2007 and filed under Ecumenical matters, Religion.
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Some commenters yesterday remarked upon this story, whereby various University Christian Unions are in dispute with Student Unions for assorted reasons. Once again Bishops have waded in: Bishops warn students over Christian society bans says the Guardian. If anyone finds the actual letter with the list of signatories I’d be interested to see it. If you have time and / or energy you could look at earlier comments from Ruth Gledhill and her colleagues: Ruth Gledhill blog: Students and Christians and Times Online: Hallelujah, they’re standing up for Jesus.
Here is my take.
- First of all as Simon said yesterday this is nothing new at all. I imagine it has been going on as long as Christian Unions have existed. I was at Loughborough University in the late 1980s / early 1990s doing a degree in trams. Our Christian Union was, as Simon reminded me, banned from the Student Union because were were too exclusivist, insisting that everyone signed a doctrinal basis so that everything was kept Sound. It seemed to work – I have largely refrained from heresies from that day until this. I am sure we were not the only University where this sort of thing happened.
- Secondly, Christian Unions are overseen by the rather conservative UCCF. As an aside, the UCCF once tried to headhunt me by buying me lunch. A very good lunch it was too. It was the only time I have ever been headhunted, but I said no as it was a bit high pressured (and the pay was rubbish). Back to the point: I think the CUs vary a lot as to the strength of their affiliation with the UCCF, but at some Christian Unions the UCCF play a major role and therefore the Christian Union ends up being at the conservative end of the theological spectrum. That being the case it does not surprise me at all that there is the odd scuffle between the CU and the Student Union.
- Thirdly, the Christian Union is not the only Christian Student group on a University campus. There is often one or more of the following: an SCM group (more liberal), Fusion (more Charismatic), MethSoc (more Methodist), AngSoc (More Anglican), CathSoc (more Catholic), not to mention groups aligned with the chaplaincy which may or may not include some of the above. Even if ‘the Christian Union’ is excluded from the Student Union it does not mean that Christians are.
What I’m saying is that whatever the rights and wrongs of the individual cases (and I don’t really know enough about any one to make an in depth comment) I don’t think that these disputes are something to get too concerned about. Once again I think these Bishops have waded in where staying nice and dry and watching from a distance from the bank would really be the more sensible option.
Once again this cartooon can be freely reused on blogs if you put a link. This code will do the job:
<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/christian-union.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: Bloggers talking about this today and recently:
Further update:
Additional further update:
Posted by Dave at 11:10 am on November 23, 2006 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Cartoons, Church, Current events, Ecumenical matters.
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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. (
