The staff and students from the Campfire Creative Community were asked to contribute to their online publication. This article is from Jake. He’s awesome…
During the summer of 2024, I did a Discipleship Training School (DTS) in Osaka, Japan. I had an amazing period of growth, I learned what it means to share my faith with others, and the importance of the last thing Jesus told us to do while he was on Earth. This was a very important experience, but when I was asked to write for Campfire, I knew I wanted to focus on what I did afterwards, and how my time in the DTS could apply to that.
After My DTS, I was told there was an option to do a Frontier Comic Seminar. It didn’t take that much convincing; I loved applying my artistic skills, and any excuse to practice more was a good one. I signed up as soon as I could for it, unaware of how much I would be learning about applying art in the missions field.
The first few weeks were spent building up our skills. We’d do live studies, walk around town and draw landscapes, training our eyes for perspective drawing. This sort of training was expected; however, every week we would have a guest speaker, and they would be sharing with us how they use art in missions. I’d never really considered how I could use my art to fulfill what I had learned during my DTS, but I was told that this is something people do! One of the speakers had a gallery in a Muslim country, where art is typically shunned, another was writing evangelistic comics for Unreached People Groups. One speaker even covered what Jesus looks like, and how he can be portrayed in various cultures to share him in the most appropriate way.
One day, one of our teachers caught us off guard with a couple questions; what was our favourite genre, and what was our favourite parable? Without much thought I told him I really liked sci-fi art. I wasn’t sure about which parable I liked, so I just chose the one about the sower and the seeds, it was the one I remembered the most. I didn’t think much about these questions until at the end of practice that day, when he said we would be writing our own personal comics, using the parables and genres we chose. This was honestly one of the best challenges I’ve ever taken on in art. Not only was it difficult to plan out a comic that followed the parable, but to also make it fit a genre that didn’t even exist when Jesus shared the parable. It was quite the task! In the end I wrote a comic about an explorer that was visiting various planets, hoping to start a colony. I don’t think the message of the parable survived the creation of my comic, but the seed of the idea was planted in my mind; comics can be used not only to share stories from the Bible, but also to share the Gospel in ways that are culturally relevant, and easier to read and digest visually.
This brings me to our final project; we were tasked to work on a comic as a team, a request from a ministry doing missions in India. This was really cool, we had a pipeline to work through, which is something you don’t always have to think about when creating by yourself. I would ink backgrounds based on sketches done by one of the staff, another student handled main characters, and the third was handling background characters and filling in the scenes with smaller details. Having backgrounds in art helped, and we got through a majority of the comic by the time we graduated; we were definitely not expected to have gotten as far as we did.
Sometimes when we think about missions, we think about handing bibles out, planting churches, and preaching the gospel. This is good and it needs to happen, but what if we could present the stories of the Bible in culturally relevant ways, that’s easy to pick up and read through, even exciting? How many more could we reach? I for one would really like to find out.
For more information about the Campfire Creative Community you can visit their Substack Site.