Well I think Worship Chapter may at last coming together

coffee pot

This week I have been working on the draft of the chapter on Worship. This has been one of the difficult chapters to get into focus. It was already in second draft but there was a feeling of it being unsatisfactory and the style of my writing has changed in my data chapters where I discuss the congregations since I put it into draft. I therefore have pulled it out.

First challenge was to pull it to pieces and reshape around the narrative of a single event in this case a quite remarkable baptism service that happened towards the end of my time at my second placement. This balances the community chapter which centres around a remarkable church meeting that happened at my first congregation. The initial data chapter uses scenes from both congregations.

However when I use a single narrative the structure of the chapter changes. For instance in the original I had ministers role and congregations role in creating the worship. Now I have the role of hymns and the other parts of the service and in both cases I look at the ways tradition, congregation and minister combine to create the final act of worship. It is quite something to explore the dynamics of worship creation within the Reformed tradition. It is so different from those in others where there is a Rite to followed. For us the rite has become a grammar rather than a play. It tells you the way things fit together but does not determine what is actually said.  What is said is rather a matter of prayer, the character of the congregation, the gospel and the tradition. In worship the tradition pulls against the individuality of the community.

Oh and the coffee pot, well that is my mid way through a writing session treat at them moment. It will change with time, in January I was not drinking coffee at all, then I started making myself a single cup of Millicano to keep me awake when I was loosing concentration. However as I am coming to this stage I am finding that actually spending the ten to twenty minutes that it takes to make coffee this way is a good break. It is as much about the ritual as it is about the coffee. It is one pot a day otherwise its tea or water.

December 12 Supervision: I am officially writing up

The photo was taken as I was leaving Birmingham University Edgebaston Campus. The tree was a casualty of last winters storms and has since been carved. Today it worked as a focus of this photo in the increasing dusk as after 4:00 pm I headed to University Station. I rarely see the dusk in Birmingham as my supervisions are middle of the day, so this and the January ones are the limited.

Actually this supervision was a lot harder work than many of mine since I started writing up. That is not to say my supervisor thought the work was not good enough. If anything he thought that what was coming was good but there is a huge gulf been good as an idea and right for submission and he wanted to go through the ways what I was doing was not right on the page. This included my need to interact more with the theorists. It now appears that it is only some theorists that I need to do that with and those are the crucial ones. I can do it with a couple a lot better than what I have done quite easily and that will make it a stronger thesis. Then there is developing what the thesis is dealing with. Part of me wants to go back and do that right now but I think I have other items that need removing off the to do list..

This chapter as my last substantive actually means that I am now officially writing up, and  that means the finishing line is in view. The only snag is that due to changes with my home congregation, our minister is leaving, my decision to return to the eldership no longer looks as if it is soft but as if it is hard. I also may have other responsibilities that may come out of this event that may need fitting in around what I am already doing although I suspect they will not start until the Autumn if they do. Therefore I am really needing to get this in a state to submit around Easter. This I know is optimistic given the work involved. Some of it is still drafting, indeed I have a piece of drafting that I need to do before Christmas. This unfortunately means that I will give less time to St Andrews Sheffield at present than they would like. This is coming particularly hard for them as we are going through a period of other losses and expect will continue to until our minister leaves.

So this year Christmas will be another working Christmas. I still have to decide what work I will take up with me at New Year but I know I will need to as I have a supervision on 9th January.  Before I stop for Christmas I need to write a piece on what the Reformed tradition "thinks" it is doing in worship. This is intriguing mix of theology and sociology but I think is possible to pull off. The problem being that most sociology of worship concentrates on ritual. Reformed worship is not without ritual and symbolism but the style is Rational, which makes an analysis based on the ideas of ritual difficult to use as analytic tools. So if it is not ritual, what are we doing? I think I have an answer but that draws on theology.

Week 38: What do you call services that aren't main services?

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	64,103
Words typed this week:	2967
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2967
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Right I seem to be making progress though if I am honest despite the impressive word count I still feel I am wading through mud. One of the things is that sometimes the vocabulary does not seem to exist. For instance what is the generic term for regular services that are not the main worship service or what is the term for those that happen maybe once a year. I do not mean the precise services, those usually have at least emic terms for them such as "evening worship" or "Maundy Thursday communion" or "youth service", I mean the big over-arching terms, I don't really have a clue. So I have been busy with a thesaurus and called the first Auxiliary services and the second Occasional and yes I am aware that the second is used for marriages and such as well. The thing is there seems to me to also be two sorts of auxiliary services. One sort is aimed at the people who I call the keenies when I am not doing thesis (before someone thinks its an abusive term, I acknowledge that I myself fall into that category) and the committed when doing the thesis. The sort of people who on a wet November day with a dreadful cold will still be there to open up the church and turn on the lights. They are the backbone of most congregations and they often appreciate extra time to think and develop their faith. The other sort is a service that is designed to appeal to people at the margins of the congregation. The aim being to draw them into a safe environment where they can get to know people and explore the faith before having to brave the main worship service. Guess what I haven't got names for them yet and this is before I ever get near the theory.

I am beginning to sort out the theory, beginning being the operative word and as next week I am supposed to be writing it, I am wondering if I am going to have to sort my way through Althusser and Lacan in order to create some sort of an understanding of what is happening in worship rather than go to the theorists on worship, well I suppose it is a good idea to quote your supervisor at some point in the service, I think I have a couple of relevant papers from the tradition and maybe I can blend in with it some of the ethnography of ritual. Hmm it really sounds bitty and disjointed and what I am beginning to focus on is the difference between "I-identity" and "We-identity", then there is the division between passive identity and active identity which works very tangentially to this. Whereas I suspect a lot of surface passivity in identity in main worship services, most of the congregation at least during worship seem quite happy to fulfil the slot provided for them. When it comes to these other services there seems to be a far closer active creation of the slot particularly in the Occassional services.