Thinking on Church Websites while on strike

This week has been odd. I am hoping that one of these weeks I will get a week in which I am able to be in work for four days, however the reason this week was strikes. Now I am not a great fan of strike action, but the UCU rarely uses it (I think this means I have withdrawn my labour for one working week in the nineteen odd years I have been in HE). In this case, I suspect the jobs issue is a no win one but perhaps an idea of feelings, Pensions is a bit more about fairness, when the stockmarket was doing well the Universities as employers took a holiday from contributing, now it is doing badly they don’t seem to understand the quid pro quo for having taken that. However my main reason for striking is I belong to the Union, I appreciate the work the Union does on my behalf (having been regraded un-unionised and regraded unionised I can tell you which one was the better outcome), and I also believe that if ever things came to a dispute between me and the University I would want the backing of the Union. Given that I don’t believe in being a fair weather trades unionist and only belonging when I want to, so  I was on strike. So although I was in work on Monday, which was quite quiet and Wednesday but I was off Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (Friday being my day off).

I am afraid striking and research do not mix. Tuesday was the sort of day where if I would have been in two minds about whether I could work or not. I was feeling off colour but nothing very specific but as I was on strike I went back to bed and slept it off. I then spent quite some time reviewing Herringthorpe URC website ( but it has been updated since and is updating) for the church.  I am surprised myself in doing this. Firstly there are some things that have not changed. Much of what I thought was appropriate for the front page, is still what I think is appropriate for the front page. However my focus for the site has changed. As far as I can see for communication within the congregation there are better ways such as email or Facebook (if the congregation has enough young members)  and the older ways bulletin sheet, newsletter, notices and the good old phone call all still work. So it is a noticeboard or a shop front. So what are we selling, well the services yes. But rather than just the name time and place, how about something telling them what a service maybe like?

I have this little script going through my head for Herringthorpe:

(IA is a member, VB is a visitor)

IA: People tend to be slightly early for church, this is often so they can have a natter and so with their friends, you are given a notice sheet when you come in and there are notices up on the projector screen

VB: So how do you know when worship is about to begin?

IA: Well at about the time the Bible is brought in!

VB: is that the start of the service.

IA: No, its a mark of respect for the bible and  a sign to shut up, because then further notices are given from the front

VB: You do seem to put an awful lot of effort into notices,

IA: Well there are always last minute alterations and the in case of fire notice, but when they are finished they ask for silence

VB: So that is the start of the service?

IA: Well no, the real start is when the minister stands up afterwards and says the opening sentences

VB: the what?

We need to stop assuming people know what happens in church and start trying to inform them.

Christianity and if so what form and style? Why us and not the next church down the street? Try and give something that has a personal touch, something that says “ours” rather than try to compete with the highly skilled apologetical sites. What they can’t do is give the view from the point of view of a person people might know a normal person. Alright so it might be a normal person like the individuals granny but still not a celebrity or a theologian. The thing is the issues talked about are likely to differ as well. You do really need a very skilled apologist to explain the Trinity, but why someone enjoys singing in the choir on a Sunday, is surely not within their brief.

Other are perhaps more mundane. Do we have good child safety polices, disability awareness? Where do we stand on inclusion?  but there are other things that people might be looking for, they maybe looking for a venue for a wedding or somewhere to have a child baptised (yes I know the problems but it might be as well to give them something to think about before they approach rather than leave it all to the minister). Then there is room hire and other activities. Do you perhaps want to recruit people for social outreach project or raise awareness of certain issues?

It took longer than I planned but my brain has obviously been thinking. I also had to get onto thinking about what I was going to tell Pauline on Thursday. On a sadder note I discovered that a member of my writing group had died on Sunday night. She had been suffering from Breast Cancer for the last nine months but was suddenly in great pain last Sunday evening and died that night. If you have spare prayers could you pray for J and her son T and daughter A. The funeral is on Friday, I am still deciding whether to go.

Wednesday was very ordinary, although coming back from prayer meeting at St Andrews I think I saw a buzzard soaring on the thermals above the buildings on Glossop Road. Now I am not sure. The soaring behaviour was clearly there but at first I thought rook or crow, but rooks and crows don’t usually do that. Then a couple of gulls came past and they were clearly smaller.

Thursday was a big thesis day. I went to see Pauline for lunch and then to talk about reporting back.They have a young golden Labrador called Emma and she was very suspicious of me at first but once she had established that I was not a threat to her directly and none of the humans regarded me a threat she went and slept in her cage while we ate lunch. Then spent an hour or so talking with Pauline. Pauline definitely deliberate over her choice of space. That is not a problem so am I. This time we were in the music room, which has a couch that just seats two people. This says something quite clearly about equality and closeness. 

Then it was on to interview Henry. This was really one of the most important interviews of my time. In the end for very different reasons to the interview with the equivalent person at St Andrews Chesterfield. Henry is 99 and has been with the congregation for close on ninety years. He became church secretary a very short time after he joined and served for 17 years. During those years the congregation would have gone from being Congregational to URC. Henry came from another Rotherham Congregational church. All this is true but Henry does not really live in the past, he seems to live in a continuous present. His relationship to Herringthorpe is rather like a man who has been married for fifty years and can’t see the changes in his wife. It is not that they haven’t happened it is that the changes have happened as much to him as to the congregation. That at least is my tentative understanding.  Oh and what would he like to have happen, more people worshipping particularly more young children in the Junior Church. He did lend me a history of the church, interestingly over ten years old.

Friday was the sort of day when I got things done simply because I was at home. Time of the month came and it was uncomfortable most of the day.  However as I was largely in I could sleep when I wanted to and work when I felt able. Saturday was also quiet although I got some PhD reading and Stuart came around in the evening and we shared a bottle of Ame and hot cross buns. I got reheating them right this time and they were warm without being too dry. By the way I think my favourite Hot Cross Buns are Marks and Spencers Cranberry and Orange. If I am in Waitrose I get their saffron buns instead.

Today morning church with another Baptism, Herringthorpe does seem to get a good number of baptism. This family clearly had church contact, were singing along to the hymns and as they were mainly fairly new ones out of Songs of Fellowship, this suggests recent as well. They indeed did know one or two members but did not really seem to be part of the Herringthorpe wider community.  Other than that resting and generally not doing much.

Supervision in the midst of a cold

Right this has been a mixed week. I really have little recall about Monday, I went to writers group and took a poem which I wrote when I was playing. This was a one off and when I say playing I mean playing, I was building a tent in my main room made of blankets and clothing horses. Something I used to do a lot of as a kid, and this one evening decided to do so again. What was interesting was how other writers picked up both the child and the adult in the situation.


Tuesday I was struck down with another cold lurgy, I decided to take the day off and as I was going to Birmingham for a supervision the next day I felt staying in was sensible. Actually on the Wednesday the lurgy was kept under control quite well with cold supressants and caffeine. If only the previous one had been so amenable! I have covered a lot of ground this last month, I am still stumbling for a language, metaphor or analogy to use to explain what I am covering. I am thinking that I will probably end up talking of technologies within the Reformed Tradition, meaning technology in the Foucauldian sense (must read Discipline and Punish the birth of the Prison because I suspect we are adopting “softer” technologies of that sort). Actually I suspect society is moving towards softer technologies so it is not surprising that the church is. However what is it a technology of, I alternated between being a technology of self (see Weber) and a technology of faith. Other options considered are culture, (I would say many of the current technologies are cultural but to call them culture seems wrong, something to do with the relationship between culture and the individual), spirituality (in the sense the way to be a Reformed Christian, what sort of behaviour is expected), tradition (how is the Reformed nature of the congregation created in this setting and why is it Reformed and lets say not Anglican), ecology ( how do things work in this setting). However by the time I got home on Wednesday (I actually spent quite a time after the supervision working through papers, some interesting but when will I get around to reading them) I was caffeined out (i.e. taken in as much caffeine as I could) and still not feeling if I had the energy for getting home. So I decided that treating the next day as still cold was probably essential.



 
Friday I was at the Broomhall Breakfast, I picked up an email on the morning from Sarah saying would I do a computer consultation at breakfast. It actually turned out to be a misunderstanding. The reports were Excel spreadsheets but because they had been called reports Janet’s supervisor had thought that they would automatically given him the figures. This had never been as far as I know in the work flow. The workflow was for the data to come to me and then that to be turned into figures, the advantage being that I can turn around data in about 24 hours if I don’t have to enter it. If I enter then at least a week is needed. Ah well. I also went into work. Not sure I did much more than catch up but anyway.

Saturday I had a quiet day, shopped, mainly food. I also realised that I have spent around £250 on books with Amazon this last month. I know that is a lot, not all those are for reading, some are background reference but when someone in one book refers to another I need to be able to trace. Often it is only sections of books. A lot of what I am buying are scans of out of print books. However it was good to have a lazy day.

Today worship in the morning was all age and very noisy parade service. At one stage they had us singing along to a CD that was so loud I had to cover my ears as it was painful, alright I was directly beside a speaker but a bit lower volume would have been a good idea. Had an equal opportunities moment, there was a dramatised session on Ruth and I think they had not managed to find anyone to be Orpah’s husband. So they asked who was willing to hold someones hand look blissfully happy and then die a horrible death on stage. The only volunteer was a girl scout who is regular member of Sunday School. So we had the story of Ruth with a civil partnership!  Then back again this evening for a session on being guided by the Holy Spirit. Now was the Holy Spirit guiding this morning if so why did  the Holy Spirit let people forget to have a technical rehearsal? Oh the imponderables of life.

Busy time, with many different paces

Right the week after I wrote was quite exhausting, not only was I only semi-fit, no cold symptoms but I tired easily, but there was a Data Curation Roadshow I was attending for two days with work. Having two full days when I was dealing with people (largely strangers) continually for four to five hours was exhausting. The topic was interesting and I am fully aware of the gap between what does happen and what ideally should happen. At the moment if you are fortunate then if you want the data behind a paper, the researcher has it on a disk which they can unearth. If you are unlucky then they have long ago chucked out the scrap of paper which the original data was on after all they had gained the publication. This is true except for a few high profile disciplines and some very large studies where the data is fully documented and stored on secure maintained fileservers.  What we need to do is move to a method of automatic archiving of data with regular reviews but that will cost a huge amount and nobody has yet found a funding model by which it raises money. Also once the research is complete a researcher often looses interest in the data set, also many researchers don’t feel they have data, they just have video recording and pictures and such.

In the middle of attending this course I also had an interview for my PhD. It was with a couple about my age and their son aged about my nephews age. This is the second time a child of that age has been interviewed but both times parents were present. Often when I am dealing with people who are younger members they are less what my supervisor calls insiders than older members, now this couple were as much insiders as me. The boy Luke lasted all of twenty minutes and then went back to playing with his Xbox. At the end of the time they asked whether I had anything to input about the mission of the church. This was because they had an elders retreat day this weekend that was looking at the mission of the congregation particularly with respect to the children’s work. The problem is not shortage of children, they have around 100 children on the books at present, but shortage of leaders. Well I stalled, not because I had nothing but I have a huge amount and it is still at a fairly unprocessed state. Anyway of the following two nights I wrote up both the interview and but a short paper together and emailed it to both them and the minister. It was pretty much thrown together, however it had the core of what I wanted to say to the church. I suspected that the minister would want to get back, but although I made it clear I was ready to talk, she didn’t.  We will see how it develops.

Over the weekend I was writing, it was interesting to do, the time I had and the word space meant that I could not do justice to my sources. The piece therefore I feel is sketchy, I have more to do and this is only my first real attempt to write something about Reformed tradition as central to my PhD rather than as something that runs alongside it. It is surprisingly different how I can think when addressing this issue. It is as if the sociologist becomes dominant rather than the person who does organisational studies, I suspect that actually by looking at it, I distance myself from some of the Reformed character in me, who actually feels rather at home in organisational studies, this is the stuff we handle rather well. Sometimes I suspect we are too good at organisation and could do with a bit more chaos. I also conducted a second interview on the Sunday this time with someone who was very new to church (yes all church) having only been attending Herringthorpe for three years and before that churches were places for hatching, matching and dispatching but she had married into a Christian family and when her husband had wanted to return to church she had ended up going with him to Herringthorpe. I am however rather relieved to find Philip Benedict has written “Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social history of Calvinism”  which covers upto about 1700, it means a different perspective at least on the early stuff and the last section is titled “New Calvinist Men and Women” and I suspect it will be useful.

This week was quieter in work which in someways was good. I managed to get the papers off to my supervisor although I am now seeing him on Wednesday next week instead of Thursday. I suspect that he did not realise Thursday was St Patricks day as his excuse is that he had to be in Liverpool on it. That would fit with his current research topic, he did Chinese New Year in London last year, I did a quick google for a related paper but can’t find any. It may be a totally different situation. I also found the week slightly confusing as I took Tuesday as my day off to finish my essay as I had so much on, on Monday.

On Friday evening I went to James and Jean Dickson for the evening. They seem to be keeping up pretty well given that James is 80. I had spotted that the building that has my office in has a map of the area before St Andrews was built with lots and lots of wells marked, as these wells do not seem to be attached to particular property I suspect they mark the site of springs coming to the surface. I mentioned this to James and he wants to take a photograph of this map. We shall see if this is possible on Tuesday.

This weekend I have been over to my parents, on Saturday we had lunch with Ruth she seemed to be in good form. She cooked a meal that suited us all very well  including fruit salad. Although some restraint was practised over the delicious first course none was practised with the fruit salad. The only snag was my parents had decided that as I was over it was chance to eat lots of nice food, so they had salmon for supper as well. I spent quite a bit of time making sure Dad’s computer was virus free, except I suspect it was never infected but his mechanices account had been compromised and someone was spoofing emails using my fathers email  address which they had got from his account. Today I ended up entertaining my parents by reading postings Crappy Choruses and Horrible Hymns thread on Ship of Fools which had them giggling. Some of the pieces really demonstrate what can go wrong while composing pleasant dittys to the Lord. I went back