Week 32: Third Appendix drafted

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	50,286
Words typed this week:	2185
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	2

Right it looks as if I can't add up! The simple answer is that I have been working on an appendix this week and appendices are a bit different from other parts of my thesis. This one in particular I had to rebuild from my notes and my the other things I got while doing field work. I am not claiming that it is 100% accurate, working with my notes I can easily see points at which I have had to make intelligent guesses and then my field notes are not detailed closely written notes, but are things to make me recall what was going on.

I was trying to reconstruct the behaviour around Baptism within a single congregation. One congregation had very little activity at all around Baptism, I think that there were three or four baptisms in the whole time I was there; there were a few comments on when the minister was willing to baptise but as his policy was stricter than the congregation might have desired this was minor and that was it. In the other congregation there must have been around twenty baptisms, there was debate both in church meeting, in house group and privately. What is perhaps surprising is that theologically there probably was very little difference in the theology of the ministers, there was some in the congregations, one took paedobaptism as normal the other there was a strong element that did not.

Writing description like this, is actually pretty easy, you just need to spend time checking facts with your notes, going through the detail and so forth. The result is that even though I had only managed to write on two days, when it came to writing this up this weekend I did it pretty fluently. It can be very tedious. I spent a couple of hours going through service sheets to see if there was any mention of baptism on them. The rule seems to be not usually but there were a couple of exceptions. One of which was an important find because I had forgotten that the notice had actually been given.

What this really means is that I am writing the last of my three congregational-data based chapters, the one on worship. If you had asked me how much worship mattered for congregational identity I would have been semi sceptical about its role.  However as I have gone on them more and more it has become clear that actually congregations put a lot of effort into worship and into trying to influence how worship is received. People are not passive recipients but are actually engaged participants.

Anyway this week the challenge is to write the re-creation of a particular Baptismal service which to me seemed to step between two discourses that were active within this particular congregation. Also I have booked my train ticket to the Reformed Spirituality meeting at Westminster.