July's Supervision - Another Chapter in Main Draft

Showroom Cinema from the station on my return to Sheffield

Somehow the way storm and light were playing over the Showroom seemed to me rather evocative of today hence this picture. Well the community chapter can now go into draft status which means I am free to get on with the one on worship. There are problems with it, and the major one is that I need to find a way of connecting description with theory. I have the theory, I have the description and I even have the theoretical understanding of what it going on in the description but I am not managing to get the final part down on the page. Some of this I know is due to scale, I sort of know how to use description to balance an argument in an article of 3,000 words, but when it comes to across a chapter of say 15000 words I am struggling, let alone across a thesis of 70-80,000 words.

I am beginning to have some idea of how to cord that might run usefully through the thesis and connect it, and it comes back to the tradition intriguingly and stray comments at the Exploring Reformed Spiritualities conference. David Cornick commented that the Reformed tradition was a very “we” tradition in passing. I happen to agree with him, at least with respect to the URC take on the Reformed tradition but something troubled me about his need to assert it.

Sitting back I was aware that I experience rather a lot of credulousness when I express this view in ecumenical setting. The normal response is the Reformed tradition is anything but a “we” tradition. So self perception and external perception differ. The answer, as my fellow “we”-Reformer will have guessed, is the group that normally is seen as Reformed and loudly proclaim themselves as that, often being very sure that they are the one true interpreter of the tradition. 

These often have a very evangelical and very “I” take on the Reformed tradition. Often this includes an emphasis on the conversion experience, personal morality rather than social and the individual interpreting the Bible in a personal and surface manner. They are loud, they are arrogant and they get up our noses more than any other sort of Christian as they hotly question our Reformed credentials. At times it is hardly surprising we want to return the compliment. However in actuality they get under our skin part because they are Reformed, in some sense we understand what they are saying in ways we do not understand what others are saying, your highly ritualistic Anglo-Catholic where everything is by the book seems to us ridiculous in a way these never do.

My conclusion is that we have to take seriously this “I”-Reformed Spirituality and see if we can actually work out why the “I” reading of the tradition is so very different from the “we” one. The other challenge is that it is too simple to see one congregation as “I” and one as “we” rather they are balancing the two strands which are actually very twisted together in English Reformed Dissenting tradition, there is nothing pure about us. Thus both congregations are finding different ways to understand who they are in relationship to the tradition and creating their own balance between the “I” and the “we”.

Apart from that I have largely dodged the showers and found that one of the shops on campus sold liquorice toffee, so bought a small amount. Next challenge is to get a rough draft of worship chapter and to read up on sociology of worship, now can I find my supervisors book?