Slowly getting my focus back

This will be short but I have spent most of the weekend sorting out what needed to be done next and beginning to do it. I had been slowly loosing the focus over the weeks before as other demands encroached on my time. I am not clear next, this week has an elders and there is a communion next Sunday.

I have also been very tired this weekend, more than I have been recently. This may be good news as I had not been sleeping too well for the last couple of weeks due to the stress I felt under. This may mean that I have started to sense an easing in it. However I need more time on my thesis and I am finding it hard to find it. Every one is very ready for me to take time in theory but in practice the reality is different. I can take study days at work but I have to be able to complete my work and there is no let up in that.

So this weekend I was basically getting my head around the edits that needed doing to my introduction. They are interesting, not on the whole huge things but quite often requiring some reading and thinking about. I must admit I cut out one comment as it was just not worth the effort I would need to do to justify it. I thought when I put it in that it was accepted knowledge. After all most congregations I have ever been in a lot of the lay leadership has been in their sixties and seventies. It is a rare congregation where it is spread more widely although thinking on it Christ Church Parrswood did have quite a few who were younger though church secretary was Bernard and he was in his sixties. The church treasurer was two people in my time, one in his eighties  and one in his forties. I also know I am not alone in this knowledge, Rev Mike Jackson of Park URC Reading also commented on it when I was there. However there is no literature out there that says this is the case.

Anyway I have got the introduction to the introduction written, in the end I took the very straight forward approach of telling my examiners what this thesis was about. I have also done quite a bit on the vision process. Some tidying of the last section. So this week I really need to read enough of a couple more Congregational Studies books to make a complete literature review. I am trying to trace any thesis (masters or doctoral) that has been done within British Reformed or Non-Conformist Churches that is a study of congregation(s) and uses ethnographic method. So far I have found a geographer at Edinburgh University who has done some research on Free Church of Scotland that is Ethnographic (actually I may need to reference that work in a later chapter as well). I also have found a Presbyterian Lecturer in New Zealand who puts his interest as Congregational Studies and knows enough as to list the URC. The major problem is finding a forgotten thesis.