Weeks 55 & 56: Filling a gap

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these fortnight:	1,681
Words lost these fortnight:	0
Total increase:	1,681
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	2

Apologies for the lack of Triskele in this blog, I have run out of time to add the bits and anyway I need to finish this section and then do it. What I have been doing is trying to put together a section on using the sociological theory that I am doing to understand worship. In this I am not looking at the standard theories of ritual but am picking up ideas of identity. The intriguing thing is that the Reformed Tradition actually is honest enough to suggest that this is precisely what is going on in worship. That is that worship is the fulfilment of what we were intended to be. Humans were designed by God to be worshipping animals, it is due to the fall that we fail to do this regularly and that society is not designed around worship.

It must be remembered that Reformed Worship is also centred on God, worship is done because God and God alone is worth worshipping. The iconoclasm is not centrally about destroying pictures, images or such that are there, it is about removing that which attract false worship. That can equally be success,  money, social norms  or a celebrity. That which attracts what rightly belongs to God is an idol and needs destruction. As such it is a very ascetic tradition and nowhere is this more seen as within the ritual of worship. It means building theory onto what the ritual is doing rather than developing a much broader analysis is a bit like trying to work out how a car works by reading the highway code instructions on maintenance.

However the tendency within the tradition is to turn the whole thing into a matter of theology and to concentrate on the sermon and what is preached. It is thought if you get your theology of worship right and have sound sermons then you have things sussed. Again this is reductivist and fails to take on the many and varied ways people interact within the worship. The sermon is the start of the process as far as the congregation is concerned and people are interacting internally with it.


Anyway the piece needs another few hours on it before it is ready to be sent to my supervisor. Then there is sorting out what I will do over Christmas. The task is to take something I can do without carrying a huge number of books around. The introductions sounds like a good idea.

So you have theoretically a twin poles pulling at worship. Worship is in some ways the apotheosis of what it is to be human and yet at the same time it stretches out towards the divine.

Week 35: Making good progress during the week

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	57,557
Words typed this week:	3,732
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	3,732
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Yes there has been a big increase this week and yes it feels good. That is not to say it is all good, part of that increase was doing the final changes to what I hope is a main draft of my community chapter. There was something missing and I needed to get it in but I ran out of time and did not manage to find what to remove from the chapter to get it down to its proper size so it is still a thousand plus words too big, the proof editing added about half of those words as it became clear I had to explain something.

However there was also 2641 words written on the worship chapter and the words were flowing on that. This is partly because this is my third time through this part of my thesis and partly because I am on familiar ground in that I am discussing some pretty detailed discourse work along with some statistics. Its a style of analysis that comes almost naturally to me, while the more fuzzy aspect of ethnographic analysis I struggle with writing up. Don't get me wrong I enjoy ethnography very much indeed, I could not have done this thesis if I had not but I am also a trained quantitative researcher (albeit one who believes all research is basically discursive) and I keep asking myself about my evidence, can I really build what I am building on the data I have collected.  Are my representations of others accurate, so much easier when the exact words are in the public domain. In other words I have been analysing hymns again and thoroughly enjoying it.

The final thing is I have realised there is a specific way to describe the Reformed tradition that I can use that allows both my congregations to in their own local tradition be emphasising different parts of it. These parts largely do not tie in with the Congregational/Presbyterian divide so many are fond of.

Week 34: Progress made while at a conference

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	53,825
Words typed this week:	2000
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2000
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Yes the word count this week is exactly 2000, no more, no less. This is complete and utter accident, a sentence that finished the section on normal URC worship quite neatly did it in exactly that many words and as it was 2000 I felt that I did not need to go any further and stopped.


I am well aware that no-one in the URC apart from me thinks there is any such thing as normal URC worship, yet having been involved with a variety of different congregations over the years, at least eleven I can think of, as well as visiting too many to count, on a one off basis, I find that when I am in worship I know what is going on when and why most of the time. It is a lot easier to follow than if I went into your average Anglican. I think part of this is we do not proclaim which faction of the denomination we belong to so clearly through worship. The hints rather are there but are more subtle than within Anglicanism, you actually have to read the hymns and listen to the sermon to get them.


I am debating where next. I think I might try and see what I can do about hymns. This is intriguing as I will need to rewrite one of the two papers I have presented. The big challenge is that while I can do stuff on hymns and sacraments, I have only a little on sermons which can probably be put into hymns, and nothing on prayers. I am go into a very different mode during prayers and it seems rude to me to be thinking about how to record them, maybe this week I need to really concentrate on liturgy of the Word and deal with sacraments separately. The fourth section would then be on other services.

Week 33: Slow week but I have started the next chapter

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	51,825
Words typed this week:	1539
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1539
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well the new chapter has started for real this week. I have been drafting the opening scene. This is one of those times when re-creating a scene is very useful theoretically. I am beginning to be able to reflect on the forces and constraints that shape a given enactment of a liturgical practice. Admittedly the one I have chosen to portray is chose because I thought it was interesting in its own rights. However even the act of portrayal has had to be handled carefully. It is not enough that I portray it realistically, I have to watch that I leave individual's theological stance honest and not try to co-opt them to my own views, I perhaps tend to be on the high side for URC, but what is really interesting is that being high or low sacramentally makes a difference in the liturgy used but differences in wider management do not seem to stem from that dimension.

This coming week I am at Reformed Spirituality meeting a Westminster College which should be good. Partly because there is chance to engage with a paper by David Cornick but also because I am spotting that I am flagging and am aware that I have been writing almost continuously since October and that makes for a endurance week as I need to find the time to do quite a bit around writing. I will not stop writing this week, I also will try and take some books on worship/ritual/liturgy maybe even some from a Reformed understanding. My task for writing for next week is to write about a normal church service within the URC. It is an interesting task as the role is to also explore on what looks at the surface a very similar act of worship regardless of where you go, how the two congregation I went to nuanced it and the ways that they sort to shape it to their own ideas of what was going on.

Week 28: Slower again but I am writing the theory now.

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	49,698
Words typed this week:	1268
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1268
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Right this weeks progress is poor, I am not going to pretend otherwise. However I am more pleased with it than it looks.  I have swapped from writing the descriptive, which I find relatively easy to write, to writing the theoretical. The problem with the theoretical is that I have to be precise. That means when I am writing it up I need to get the references right. I spent a good couple of hours today looking for various bits a pieces. I remembered that when I first started out I found a couple of papers on congregations as organisations. I wanted to have a look at them again. So I needed to find them. I am fairly organised and they were in the folder I thought they would be in but I had to find the folder first. Then I wanted to cite a Kindle edition. I have been checking the internet and been told to cite one I needed to find the doi or a url. Have you ever tried finding a doi for a Kindle book! Worse still it was one of those books that do not have page numbers. Most Kindle books now do but there are still some early ones that don't. So I had to cite chapter.

The other thing is that I have planned out my theory part for this chapter and am actually quite excited about writing it. That might be part of the problem with me writing anything of any length. The thing is that I am getting a grasp of where I am going, still have to work out the last major data chapter on worship, plenty of stuff there just got to work it out. I never really expected to have a chapter on Worship when I started, just as I never expected to have to report that despite appearances it looks as if church meeting is a functioning institution and perhaps we should not put so much effort into revitalising it as put effort into using it for what it is good at. I have also finished the section on welcoming and that was tricky. Not so much because the congregations weren't welcoming; they both were, but because for once I had talk about the individual. I have kept it short, but this person really was the focus of some major parts of the congregation's character and yet she'd absolutely hate having any limelight at all. Its not that she has done anything bad, she is on the whole a force for good.

Anyway this week I need to write the the rest of the theory, this is going to be read and write so pretty intense and then next weekend I need to write it up and pull together all the data parts of the chapter and get it off to my supervisor. It is not a finished chapter there is one major section missing but I suspect it will now be closer than my previous chapter was at this stage which will make writing the next chapter easier. So a pretty intense week and I am doing the sound next Sunday so can't miss church.