Week 26: Another week with good progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	46,248
Words typed this week:	3116
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	3116
Days I managed to write this week:	4

As you can see progress has been good this week with another 3,000 words added. I expect to find that I have another 2000 next week. The next topic is not so wordy as this one which is the real reason for the three thousand plus words this week not that I wrote them during the week. Indeed some I wrote the week before but then the week before I actually had two weeks of writing to deal with. Having put the location chapter to one side this week that leaves me clear to get on with the community chapter. I am sitting here and realising that there are things I will not talk about which if you had asked me at the start I would have said were part of the URC identity. Things like Peace and Justice and how the congregation relates to that. Now I am aware of those as topics within the life of both congregations but they were not ones that either were stressed over or doing work over. They are just an accepted part of congregational life. Indeed I suspect if you did not know what to look for you might not think there was even anything special on the go. Often the responsibility for keeping the topics on the agenda is left to one or two people.

The other thing is I am beginning to get my head around the reading. It is taking time to work out what. In some ways the easy thing has been to look for theories on group anxiety and it looks as if I can use the British Kleinian Psychotherapy rather than American Bowen Systems to do much the same thing. This is good news, as I know Klein psychotherapy quite well. Here is one of the real odd things about my thesis. One of the key writers for me if I take this line is Isabel Menzies Lyth. Now I thought nothing of a London Psychiatrist when I came across the name apart from the fact she was a woman. Then she died, and I found out not only is she a fellow child of the manse but she also is a St Andrew's graduate which is where I did my first degree. Now if I remember correctly from her obit in Alumnus (graduate magazine from St Andrew's ) I think she is largely overlooked. We can overlook the fact she worked for the Tavistock Clinic and URC headquarters are a Tavistock House (I suspect they are near neighbours). The world sometimes feels very small indeed.

Anyway having dealt with the relationship with children I need to move onto what is meant by a welcoming congregation. The problem with this is that it is actually a very hot topic in the URC at present with the collapse of ZI Campaign.  There really needs to be some sort of debate about what it means to be welcoming.