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Introducing

I wrote this a while back…

…for my church’s website. I’d been asked to write something to promote discussion and also introduce the idea of online writing to the unblogged masses. I had thought it was launch the blog section of the relaunched website, and had anticipated comments and whatnot (hence the title). However, this was not the case, and for a variety of reasons the final paragraph ended up being cut altogether, which was a shame.

It’s basically a trawl through some of the church-related blogs which would appear on my roll, but I haven’t updated that in ages either. (I thought I’d said this, but wordpress ate half of what I wrote.)

First Post

I have been asked to write the first post on the new Church Blog and it seemed like it might be a good idea to immediately point you in the direction of other blogs by way of an introduction to the medium (not just to distract you from the amature nature of my contributions). For now, I’ll only be including Christian and church-related sites, although there is a vast amount of good, thought-provoking, controversial, entertaining, well informed, but not specifically Christian writing out there for your delectation.

First up, I take great pleasure in introducing The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus – a blog in which Jon Birch produces cartoons commenting on various aspects of church life and the Christian Faith. His most recent post, features The Daily Mail, Quentin Letts, Graham Kendrick and the top fifty worst people for Britain.
Jon is a creative artist, who along with Jonny Baker, runs proost, a company providing multi-media resources for churches,

From ASBO to Absolute Story, written by a friend of mine in Germany. He runs a drama-based ministry team in his local church, and talks about his experiences with that, his life in general, and also his cycling habit – at the time of writing, the most recent post rabbits excitedly about how much shopping he can fit on the back of his bike, (but does regularly feature posts about spiritual and church stuff).

Letters from Kamp Krusty is a blog written by a guy somewhere in Florida (I think – he’s hard to pin down). He also writes about life in general, and is American, but don’t let that put you off. Gasp as he explains how he can single handedly neutralise Al-Qaeda, be thrilled as he tackles deep ethical, moral and theological issues in a clear and easy to understand fashion, and marvel at his grasp of Biblical Scholarship.
He might not be entirely serious most of the time, but in all the time I’ve been reading the blog, he hasn’t mentioned the Simpsons once.

Mad Priest, the author of Of Course, I Could be Wrong… turns out to be somebody I used to know, nearly a decade ago. He’s a priest in a church north of the Coast Road, and his computer has just broken down. Until then (and hopefully once it gets well, things will pick up again) he wrote prolifically, on a number of subjects: faith, justice, sexuality, humour, music, community – in fact, I’d almost say that all life was there. Oh, he likes dogs too.

Dave Walker, author of The Cartoon Blog was recently Artist in Residence for that quaint gathering of our Anglican brethren, the Lambeth Conference. He draws more gentle cartoons than Jon Birch, most of which are centred around church practice. Following recent controversy pertaining to his coverage of the new management of the SPCK bookshops link Dave has been blogging and cartooning away merrily.

Please let us know what you think, and if you have any recommendations of your own, please leave a comment below.

Happy reading

Since this post went up, Jon Birch’s internet connection broke, leaving ASBO with no entries for quite some time, Dave Walker vanished, Brant – the guy who wrote from Kamp Krusty – went full time with his radio show and had no more time to write, and Mad Priest’s computer died leaving him stranded in the frightening netherworlds of the web. Dave is still missing in action.

11/11/08 23.40 edited to put in a bit which wordpress ate.