Week 54: First Draft of the final substative chapter done

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these week:	3,555
Words lost these week:	0
Total increase:	3,555
Days I managed to write this week:	3

There is an incredible feeling of having got to this stage. I have a thesis and what is more it written down on paper. The last chapter has been more of a big dipper ride than most. The big question was could I bring it altogether to make sense at the end. I feel I have done so, but I found as I tried to make progress that with wanting to create an argument I had first to go backwards and state things that would otherwise have been irrelevant to this thesis. It was also scary that although I had an idea I did not know that I could bring it off. What had to happen was a whole host of diversions and excursions that seemed to be going off at all sort of tangents had to be pulled together in a synthesis that made them to fall together into a whole. In the last section (apart from the concluding paragraph) I finally get to one of the big issues that has driven my thesis. It is there but I am struggling towards it. Technically I have tomorrow on my timetable to get to this point. A day under the timetable is as good as week at the moment.

This does not mean I am finished. I have a substantive first draft and means I am finally on the writing up stage. I have some major work to do on at least two chapters. The one on worship needs a theory section put on the front, intriguingly I think I am going to have to draw more on the tradition than in other chapters and it has occurred to me that this might be right. The other one is that the chapter on the tradition needs a complete rewrite with the description and theory integrated. My methodology chapter needs to be cut by half at least. There are some obvious cuts and I will need to remove some arguments I am indulging in. Then there are the Introduction and Conclusion to do. Oddly enough I began to realise some of what I needed to put into the conclusion only as I got to the final part. I need to discuss to the extent to which I think the Reformed Tradition is similar to other traditions, I am pretty cautious of generalising from it.

Another intriguing is that once again I have ended up dealing with theorists of globalisation and nationalism. This doctorate is about the small scale and the local but theorists who have been most useful through out were working on a much bigger scale.

Ever so often I want to answer the question are you postmodern with the response no I am Reformed. There are surprising reflections from one to other that it is difficult for me to tell what in my thought is there because I was raised Reformed and what has come because of my more recent engagement with thinkers who are often characterised as Postmodern through working with social theory.

Week 29 : Preliminary Draft of Community Chapter Produced

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	52,368
Words typed this week:	2670
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2670
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well progress has been made this week. Admittedly some of that only because I have a supervision next week. If thesis writing was hiking then this week has been scrambling over a bolder strewn rise. It has not been sticky like mud but there were just so many challenges to get over to make progress. The work has been tough but progress has been made. I am slowly getting the feel of this thesis and this last week there have been several "aha" moments when I have stumbled on something and realised that it was important for my thesis. On the other hand I have had to try and digest a couple more theorist who have applications for my thesis.

One of the real oddities of this thesis is that while I am working with fairly small local groups/organisations called "congregations" quite a bit of the stuff I am drawing on with respect to identity is normally used for groups such as nationality. This time I have been looking at the work of Fredrik Barth a Norwegian anthropologist who in looking at ethnicity changed the focus from the individuals to the actions that sustained the identity. So I have two Barths in my thesis, from different strands and I am using an anthropologist as a theorist rather than a methodologist. I think the thesis is the stronger for it. Actually the whole theory region I am using is mid-way between psychotherapy and theorists of Nationality and I seem to work with pretty broad brush across the whole range of those although there are a couple of sociologist in there who do not seem to have done too much work in either camp.

The one group that I seem to be light on is the theorists of sociology of Religion whether congregational studies or ethnography of religion. With the Congregational Studies people I know to some extent why it is. The area has a broad stream of rather simple approaches from organisational studies. The problem is that the simplicity of many of them makes me cautious. This is less so of UK ones than American. It is also not true that all organisations studies are simple, I have also been looking at the work of the Tavistock Consultancy who work psychotherapeutic models to understand how organisations work, in particular the early work of Eliot Jacques and  the nursing studies of Isabel Menzies-Lyth.

Oh well the papers went off for supervision today and this week I will need to try to write about the tradition. I expect I will spend the next bank holiday I will be doing a major redraft of this chapter.