My Comics
OPP (Other People’s Parish)
Happy moving week all you itinerant people! One of John Wesley’s most famous quotes is “the world is my parish.” A lot of people have re-purposed this phrase to mean, “the world is my mission field, so I’ma go out and plant seeds of faith everywhere!”
John Wesley was getting a lot of heat for preaching in other people’s parishes, or territories. Priests were responsible for the care of all the people in certain geographical regions, and really only preached in their church building. But George Whitfield taught John Wesley to preach outdoors, wherever you could draw a crowd. Since John was not a pastor of any church (he was a Fellow of Oxford), he suddenly felt the freedom to preach outdoors (which automatically put him down with O.P.P. -Other People’s Parish). He was getting a lot of heat for this, and his response was basically panel two of the comic above.