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.