Dean Gordon Johnson was serious. “Bethel Seminary students who relieve their study with laughter usually end up as the most satisfied pastors.”
I listened to that freshman orientation talk ten years ago hoping Dean Johnson was correct. I liked to laugh. As far as I was concerned, the perfect way to end a tedious day of study was a good practical joke in some corner of the library. I was relieved to know Dean Johnson also thought that humor and religion mix.
Apparently the readers of LEADERSHIP share that bias. Hardly a day goes by without our getting a letter or reader survey commending our cartoons. This one came in recently from Maureen Rufe, an evangelist with Diatheke Ministries:
“Do you have any idea what your cartoons are doing to me? They’re giving me a wonderful sense of humor. Many adorn the walls of my counseling room, and I give them to depressed counselees-they’re smiling in no time. Humor is a wonderful medicine prescribed by God to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.”
LEADERSHIPS humor druggists are the artists who supply us with cartoons. Some of them are pastors, some are not. They have different styles, personalities, and interests. In three years of publishing, we’ve used 250 cartoons drawn by over forty different artists. Three of those, because of both their quantity and quality, have become regulars.
Rob Portlock, a milkman in Lompoc, California, has had forty-five cartoons published in LEADERSHIP. Rob, now thirty years old, has wanted to be a cartoonist for as long as he can remember. He started sending editorial cartoons to a local newspaper five years ago and then realized some of the same issues he addressed in the political arena applied to church administrators.
“I think God used that time of editorial cartooning as a way to help me be more sensitive to my church life. Doing cartoons has helped me be more realistic about my own walk with Christ. And I really get a thrill when a LEADERSHIP reader gives me a call to thank me for one of my cartoons. I even got a letter from a Christian magazine in China that wanted to reprint one.”
Larry Thomas never drew a cartoon in his life before one of our staff members saw a promotional piece he did for a Christian magazine. We asked him to take a crack at some LEADERSHIP cartoons. The result has been a continuous string of well-crafted winners.
Larry is a forty-four-year-old freelance artist living in Elgin, Illinois. He was born in Kansas and spent three years in the army’s psychological warfare division, illustrating leaflets and propaganda material in Southeast Asia. Since then he’s held a variety of art jobs, the most recent as executive art director of David C. Cook Publishing Company, before going into business for himself last year.
“I think LEADERSHIP cartoons give church leaders a miniature vacation,” says Larry. “That’s how I feel when I’m working on them. I sit at my art board and start jotting down one-line descriptions of church activities-not even funny activities. After I get a number of these, I start twisting them around, looking for the humorous angle. At the same time I start doing real quick sketches, and pretty soon something clicks.”
Mary Chambers was a portrait artist three years ago when her father, Boyce Mouton, a Christian Church minister, asked her to draw some cartoon ideas he had. They sent them to LEADERSHIP, we bought most of them, and the team of Mouton-Chambers was born.
“My dad’s a minister, my husband’s a minister, and my father-in-law’s a minister,” she says, “so I love ministers dearly. But they do take themselves a bit too seriously sometimes, so I love to pick out the little quirks that show they’re really very human.”
Sensitivity to detail has always been one of Mary’s traits. She loved studying Greek at Ozark Bible College, and she also speaks French and Spanish. Right now she speaks “young child” fluently to her three- and one-year-old children.
“My dad thought up the ideas for my first cartoons, but pretty soon I started getting ideas of my own, and finally I began drawing them. The first one came from watching my husband practice his sermon in front of the bedroom mirror. I was pretty sure almost all ministers do that (especially young ones) but not one in ten will admit it.
“So I drew a dramatic minister saying, ‘Brimstone!’ with a flamboyant gesture in front of a full-length mirror. I showed it to my dad, and he said, ‘What’s this? That’s not very funny.’ But I sent it in anyway.”
We thought it was so good we blew it up to a full page, and it won the Evangelical Press Association’s cartoon of the year award.
One of the keys to growing in mature Christian commitment is the ability to see things truthfully-the warts, the petty jealousies, the failures only a fallen nature can create. Before we can do anything about our shortcomings, we have to raise them to a conscious level.
A good cartoon can make us aware of an inadequacy, and do it in such a way that the tension is relieved instead of aggravated. What a wonderful gift that is-the freedom to laugh about such deadly serious business.
Rob Portlock, Larry Thomas, and Mary Chambers love to make people laugh. But when we asked them why they like to draw cartoons, the answers always boiled down to life-changing ministry.
“God uses it,” said Larry Thomas.
We pray he’ll continue to use it in LEADERSHIP.
Terry C. Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP.
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
