Week 59: Worship Chapter in Full draft

Most of the week I have been off colour and this weekend it snowed again so I did get slightly more reading done that I hoped. This meant that yesterday I had only a chapter to read of a book. There is an interesting phenomena in much anthropology; anthropologist seem to often write the theory very separate from the book. This is kind for me as quite often all I need to gather is the theoretical bits and I can ignore the descriptive bits which are often of very different cultures and done by people with a very different relationship to the culture than I had to the congregations I am studying. They may also be interested in very different things.

The problem is that I need to process things very quickly in order to integrate them into my thesis. Now I could sort out what the two authors I were reading were doing, which was really to describe two ways in which we can distinguish public ritual. However I then had to apply this to the worship carried out in the congregations and the way it was understood. The problem I suspect is that a lot of the knowledge of worship in the congregations is implicit and therefore they are not always able to make it explicit. I am suffering from much the same sort of experience.

Anyway I had some extra time yesterday, I suppose I should have changed my bed, sorted the washing etc. I was not going to go out as it was snowing heavily. So instead I decided to paint a labyrinth. It is not a particularly complicated one but it is the first one I have painted.

Today I have had quite a successful day, I have edited the stuff I wrote last weekend and put in another 1,500 words which draw on the models I was exploring and Reformed Worship theology to create a synthesis that looks at what is going on in worship. The intriguing thing is that there are some many binary formations that seem to almost line up: Visible-Invisible Church, Christ-Culture, Divine-human, the struggle is to make clear the subtle differences and the way this leads to an oscillation.

week 58: Major restructuring of Worship chapter on a snowy weekend

These bikes weren't going to go anywhere over the weekend. Neither was I and I used to snow as an excuse to go out as little as possible. The result is some progress with the worship chapter.  It has also meant I have torn the guts out of it and installed new ones. Actually my supervisor is used to this. My writing method seems to be to write a detailed theory sensitive description. Then to sit down and think what theory is relevant here. I then discard large portions of the chapter and re-write it so that it makes theoretical rather than descriptive sense.  I still have quite a bit of theory to put in however. I am going to have to look at a three fold relationship between what I saw, what Reformed theology says is going on and how it is interpreted sociologically

I am also realising that there is an interesting model difference between the way non-conformists lay are constructed and the way higher traditions do. I think you could imagine the lay were sports journalists. In high traditions they are the devoted fan, who goes to every match and knows all the statistics backwards. In non-conformist tradition they are the amateur player who understands the game played from the inside even if they are not that good. Now if you are a person interviewing such people about their understanding of the game they are likely to answer in very different ways. The fan may well give you very precise details about who won what when and by how much. The amateur player might well talk about how it feels to be on the field, how specific plays work on the field and what sort of training is involved. They are both talking about the game they love but they are talking very differently.

Minor Redraft of Introduction

coffee table chaos while
preparing for redraft

After my supervision on Wednesday I realised I needed to pretty quickly do a small revision on my introduction chapter. To do this I needed to revisit stuff I have not looked at for some time. That is I had to talk about the theorists I have not used in my thesis to try and place the theorists that I have.

It is an intriguing thing to do as actually quite a few of them do appear but they are bit players rather than major theorists. The major ones are those that I have returned to again and again. This is not to make it in any sense a thesis about them.

Anyway I have got to deal with the worship chapter now. So far I have printed out a copy of the chapter which needs to be shorter and also to decide how to make the argument flow through it rather than have it at the start and the finish. There is now something interesting to say, something which needs to be dealt with but how am I going to deal with that. What does the tension between "I" locus and "we" locus of worship? Does it matter whether the congregations sees itself as gathered individuals or a team. If so what does this imply about worship being a mirror 'of' or 'for'. Plenty of questions to answer and an argument to create. I better get reading my Geertz.

A Bright Sunny Day for a Supervision

I set off to Birmingham on a cold foggy morning and arrived there to a day that felt it had got misplaced from April, not too worried about that, there are normally several days in April that could well have been misplaced from January, it is nice to have some traffic in the other direction as well.

The train down was emptier than usual although I ended up sharing a table with a mother and two girls.  There was clearly a technology divide with the mother, who was around my age, asking her younger daughter about working of an Ipod. I happened to mention Open Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office for her older daughter.

Anyway I got to University of Birmingham easily enough and went into Waterstones where I found OS maps on sale including the one for Glen Luce. Since mine had gone missing I bought a copy. Actually had an odd minute when I "knew" the store better than the assistant. A guy came up and asked about a statistics book, he was directed to the bottom of the mathematics section. My brain was  going "Hang on a tick, some of your statistics books are in research methodology". He fortunately said that he wanted the book by Andy Field and I said "R or SPSS", by this time another guy was joining in. Guess what it was in Research Methodology. Yes Andy's books are good and I soon will be developing a second course that uses them as a text book.

Any way I got to my supervision.The seriousness of Supervision has increased markedly even from December’s. That is it is now becoming focussed on getting things right, rather than getting things down. This meant a couple of serious editing suggestion but today was very useful. Before Christmas I had sent in a theory piece for the worship chapter.  The main reason for writing this was it was the missing gap in my thesis and I knew that it was becoming a hurdle I was feinting at writing. That is I was continually looping in circles around writing it. It was more useful than I thought, because it allowed my supervisor and I to discuss in depth the argument from that chapter. It is one of two tricky chapters in my thesis. It is technically labelled a “data” chapter but it has strong theoretical elements in it. The other tricky chapter is labelled theoretical but has strong data elements within it. No, a direct swap of classification does not help! In the worship chapter the description of worship is the central part but there is far more than just that. What I am doing is theorising the nature of tradition based on the character of the Reformed tradition. This is more difficult than with a tradition with a strong central core. There is however a huge amount of synergy between sociological theories of ritual and Reformed theories of worship or rather each often mirror each other with respect to tensions. This is despite the fact that the meaning in Reformed worship is not really contained within the ritual. Rather ritual is the vehicle onto which meaning is mapped. This explains why despite wide diversity within the tradition and no central core yet the ritual form of worship remains surprisingly similar.

The other thing that is becoming clear is I am battling the multi-headed hydra theology who thinks that my thesis should be all about her. In Sociology the suggestion is normally to pretend she does not exist. This is simply not possible for someone like me who is working on the Reformed tradition but if I give her too much attention she swamps the whole thesis with her workings and it will take me another ten years to complete as I have to go back and sort out credibly the Reformed tradition as a theological tradition. Even our thinking of worship is in the form of a theology of worship. The argument is get your theology right and you will get your worship right. However it became clear that the tensions within worship are often reflected in tensions in theology. So you just end up tackling the issue at one remove instead of directly. Another area she is raising a head is through the tension between Culture and Christ. Now Culture does not mean what I mean by culture but can be mapped onto surround secular society; if that is the case then Christ somehow refers to that in the church that is not of secular society. I really must check Richard Niebuhr’s definition of terms here because they are almost certainly stretching both the concepts of Christ and Culture.

The schedule I now have is a very tight one and if I keep to it, it will be June before I finish. This is later than my congregation would like but is going to really involve me in working very, very hard to reach it. What I am hoping with my plan is that by tackling the big tasks first, then the other parts would start falling into place and the editing would become more straightforward as I progress.

Return after New Year

Sorry no picture this time. I have however been busy. The thesis length now stands at just below the 100,000 mark at 99,888, what is 112 words between friends. Well it means that I have 19,888 words too many for my thesis! I could loose a chapter without difficulties and I still have one to write. However the last few months I seem to have recovered my ability to write to length. Therefore I wrote under 5,000 words for my introduction and if I am honest I already know that some of that is waffle and needs trimming but in the end it was get it down so I continued writing. Actually I am pretty sure there is something else that needs dealing with as part of the preliminaries so that might well replace some of the waffle.

I also have written out a timetable for completing my thesis. Unfortunately this pushes me towards June, which is unfortunate but I cannot see anyway that I can do more than two major redrafts of chapters in a month. My plan is to tackle the most tricky first and get them out of the way, hoping that by doing this when I get to the easier ones it will go more quickly. The only snag being that I have to leave Methodology to pretty late on and it will need vicious editing.

Other than that I get to see my supervisor on Wednesday.