Ship of Fools (website)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An appropriate infobox needs to be added to this article, or the current infobox needs to be updated. The template to use is {{Infobox Website}}.

Ship of Fools is the name of a UK-based Christian website, which was first launched as a magazine in 1977. The magazine folded in 1983, and was resurrected as a website on April Fool's Day, 1998. Subtitled "the magazine of Christian unrest", Ship of Fools pokes fun and asks critical questions about the Christian faith, "which we love but also question". The site is partly a magazine and partly a web community.

Ship of Fools was founded and is edited by Simon Jenkins (editor) and Stephen Goddard (co-editor). Jenkins is an author, designer and cartoonist from London, while Goddard is a journalist and public relations consultant; both have formal theological education. They also perform a show, Ship of Fools Live, in churches, universities and elsewhere, with excerpts from the site's featured content (see below). The show toured in the USA in February 2004.

The website presents itself as ecumenical / pan-Christian, but the prevailing ethos is mainline Protestant, leaning towards the Church of England. Several features specify belief in the Trinity as a necessary element of Christianity as the website organizers understand it (thereby marginalizing non-Trinitarian Christians).

Some notable features of Ship of Fools are:

The Mystery Worshipper—Reports on churches made by users of the site. The intention is that churches can find out how they appear to outsiders.
Discussion Boards—Where registered members can debate issues. The boards are divided by theme. There are currently 10 boards which are permanent fixtures. These are:
- The Styx—Ship's News, Announcements and Deck Swabbing
- Heaven—Idle Creativity and Tangents
- Purgatory—Space for Serious Debate
- Hell—Asbestos Underwear Recommended
- All Saints—Ship of Fools Unplugged
- Ecclesiantics—The Rite Stuff
- Kerygmania—The Bible And Why It Doesn't Apply To Me
- The Circus—Get Your Game On Here
- Dead Horses—The Old Nag's Derby
- Limbo—Where Deserving Threads Go When They Die (This board also includes "Oblivion" a repository for all the unused and unarchived dicussion threads)

Other temporary boards sometimes are opened such as Tits N Testicles (Dealing with Sexuality) and The Laugh Judgement (Looking at Religious Humour). Unusually, the code of conduct can vary by board but all are held to The Ten Commandments (the rules which govern the boards) but slightly more leeway is given on the Hell board than others. The boards have been praised for the amount and variety of discussion they generate.

Gadgets for God, Fruitcake Zone, Signs and Blunders—Humour sections, showing examples in the Christian world of, respectively, kitsch products, strange websites and weird church signboards and unfortunate slips of the tongue.
Columnists—Various people writing about various topics, with an emphasis on the bizarre, though usually with a genuine point and not just for comedy value.

Activities sometimes leave the site to take place in the real world. There are frequent Shipmeets, where shipmates get together at different locations around the world, and Ship of Fools also ran a Ned Flanders Night at the Christian festival Greenbelt.

The site is completely free (there used to be a charge for registration, but no longer) and is funded by advertising and donations to the Organ Fund, often in exchange for custom avatars or subtitles.

Ship of Fools' most recent project was Church of Fools, a unique 3D online interactive church.

Most recently on the bulletin boards, "The Laugh Judgement" [1] was run, a competition to find the most offensive and funny Christian jokes. The results of this were revealed at a seminar at Greenbelt.