After Sarah's Leaving Do

First of all I went to a conference on “Opening the Gates to Heaven” which was held in Northampton at a Youth Conference centre on a business park. Northampton is an odd place to get to by train. My checking of tickets suggested that it would cost me over £120 to pay for a six hour journey. They insisted on either sending me by a whole host of local services or going into Birmingham and out. I do realise now that it might have been possible to book advance fare to London and then get another train out. However given that it is 3 hour drive at my speed (I know other people could have done it in just over two) and that car hire was around £40 there really was no competition even with petrol on top (another £30) the hire was quicker and cheaper. There should be a map of Britain where the towns are spaced according to the rail fares charged between them. It would be very interesting to see. The actual conference was a fairly URC affair. It was organised by an interested group based at one church in London with some support from the Faith and Order group. It was open to all, although I think I was the only person who was not either formally trained or in training to be a leader of worship (thus a mix of ministers and authorised lay preachers).

The conference had two main speaker and about five people giving short talks. Actually Yorkshire was one of the better represented Synods but we did seem to be mainly lay preachers. Really as most of our lay preachers are elders we should change the name.  The problem I have is that worship leaders seem to be worrying about what they are saying, and not by what people are hearing. The fact is that what worship leaders “say” and what people “hear” are not identical because while a worship leader may be clear in their own minds of their intentions, the hearer starts out with a different set of experiences which means they may understand what you are saying in a different way. There is a cartoon I recall of a short cleric who had gone into the a high pulpit with a sermon on a long piece of paper. All the congregation could see therefore was the top of his head and the scroll of his notes flopping down the outside of the pulpit. His opening words were “Today I would like to talk to you about communication...”. If you add to that the Reformed bias that says “Get your theology right and your worship will follow”, then I am not sure you will go anywhere. The trouble is my thesis is persuading me there is quite a bit of truth in "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi"or that as we pray, so we believe and so live (which is a rough translation). However if that is the case then you need to find how people experience prayer.

Thesis is on the whole going well although maybe not as quick as I would like. I have two chapters in second draft and therefore they have gone to my proof readers. I have another chapter which I hope is in second draft after my supervisor asked me to revise it and another that I have just started redrafting but I think I know where I am going with it. The big problem is getting the time slots required to do redrafting. I need at least a day to get any work done and better still if I can get most of two or three consecutive days to work on it. Whereas when I was doing first draft I could spend short spell because I was writing small pieces. Second draft is far more about rearranging the pieces so as to create something that is more structured and makes an interesting argument rather than pure description. I write detailed description first and while I am doing so the theory is forming in my mind, so I then need to go back and do some pretty major restructuring. Once accepted into second draft however there is little point in major restructuring. I have to do some on one of the chapters but the other I would prefer to leave alone.

At work I seem to have taken on quite a bit of teaching. I have done two sessions on NVivo for Linguists. These are mainly masters and I suspect doctoral students who are doing their research training year.  I am having problems in keeping up with the training needs of the University on this topic. Then I am also teaching with MASH  a course for Linguistics (yes same department but a different area) on using statistics. The basic idea is to give them enough skills to not feel daunted by the statistics in papers. Linguistics as a subject is rather peopled by individuals who were glad to get rid of maths at GCSE. The fact that they find themselves now in a subject that is increasingly using statistics and complex statistics at that is frightening for them. The big thing from my perspective is that I am having to learn R as that is what most linguists use. This is not the easiest of statistical packages to use. However unlike medics the Linguists seem to think that using a package that is capable is more essential than having one that is easy.

The weekend before last I went over to see my parents. This was simply an over one evening and back the next but if I did not do that I realised I would not be getting until I submitted my thesis. Therefore it was a matter of taking the time out. Hopefully my parents will be over next month. We went for a walk in Lyme Park, hoping to see hares but the weather was so bitterly cold that after all of a hundred yards we returned to the car and went in search of a cafe for a warm drink. Dad is beginning to work through the stuff that needs doing as if anything happened to him, then Mum would struggle by herself. Together however they work very much as a team, with Dad remembering what needs doing and quite often Mum doing it. However Dad has never been the most proactive at contacting people and sometimes being almost as slow as reluctant as his father who would rather do things for himself than ask help off anyone. Needless to say my father and grandfather would do their best to help anyone who came to them if they could.

Last weekend it was the annual church meeting. In that I am due to finish my thesis in less than six months, I felt that it was probably the right time for me to stand again as an active elder. I have also agreed to be table elder 1 and that is difficult if you are not an active elder. As you do an apprenticeship as table elder 2 for the year before being table elder 1, this was agreed over a year ago. However I did have to specify that I needed re-election. I was last elected I think in 2000 (it may have been 1999). It must have been a late Easter that year as I was ordained on Easter day. David Hill asked afterwards if I had ever been non-serving. He had presumed that I needed to resign, but as I had served for over six years (on a five year term of office) I did not really see how I could resign. Sarah asked me whether I would leave for the vote and I said “Yes, I’d prefer to” which must of surprised her but being out of the room while the whole thing was going on seemed much preferable to being in even though I was pretty confident that there would not be any problems. Needless to say I was voted on.

Writers group is going well at present, indeed we have twelve members and next term we are probably going to be playing hot chairs to get a seat as there are at least thirteen people who want to come. Actually I suspect we could run with fourteen and with people who are willing to miss a turn or who do not turn up we would manage just fine. From my poetry perspective, I need to find a way to tell which of my poems are good and which are not up to scratch. I can tell when a poem is unfinished but the qualities that differentiate a good from an adequate poem feel totally beyond me. I am realising however that I am developing a second style of poem, my usual poem tries to capture one moment, one incident succinctly. There is thus a sparseness about them. I have written some which are just four lines long. The fresh style is a narrative, that is there is more story to it and the feeling as if something happens or we move somewhere. They are thus longer pieces. I suspect it was the development of these that made one of the group comment on the lyricism of my recent work in the autumn. The other thing is my poems have been darker and bleaker this term. It is as if  that with Margaret (another member who is very good a writing Gothic pieces) being off, I have felt the space to explore some of the darker atmosphere.

Slowly slowly the wheels are turning to having me back on the Chaplaincy at the University as a religious advisor. The biggest problem I am having as always with this role is getting synod to think actually what it is doing. Synod has now appointed me and written to me to say so and to the chaplaincy. That is good but as far as I can tell they have appointed me to act as contact person without working out how I am to keep them in the loop or they me in the loop. I might be happier with the situation if district had not been so ready to treat me as irrelevant last time.

Finally I come to today. I have not talked about the weather but we have had our share of cold and snow. In particular we had snow on Friday and Saturday here. On Friday it fell in the morning but had largely melted by the evening but at night it started snowing again. That snow continued for the better part of the day and though cleared in late afternoon it was well below freezing so not melting. The result was even down here we had two to four inches of snow. Jean and James were reporting 6 feet in their back garden. The result was that yesterday they were making the decision on whether to continue with today’s service and celebration. Actually I think the service would have happened regardless but maybe not the celebration. The numbers that turned up were good. I think in the region of a hundred, especially if you include the clerics who turned up after the service. To my knowledge there were three or maybe four and yes they were all clerics. The result was that the hall was packed for the meal. People seemed to be making a real effort to come including at least one couple from Chesterfield. James ended up doing a lot of running around due to the snow. Jean was at one time worried because he had dropped her then gone out to collect Derek and Sarah. It became apparent only when he got back that he had also realised that John might need a lift and David did not feel that he could cross the carpark to his flat. The snow may have been a bit of a blessing as the hall was full, as was the garden room and we were close on filling the committee room. Any more and we really should have been taking the meal through to the church. Sarah used her ability in writing to give more of the story of  Sarai a women around the time of Jesus who connects with him at various times in his life.On the whole it worked as well as any Palm/Passion service does. A bit of a pity the time in the church while the meal was prepared was taken up with an organ recital. Douglas was good but I suspect quite a few people would have appreciated the extra time to talk to Sarah and with other people.

On a winters evening

I got to Edinburgh on time and headed Northwards along the Dundass Road, towards the B&B. It is not far, it was cold and the lights in Central Edinburgh  were bright. These days like many city centres they have fairgrounds running in the centre of town. Princess Street was shut due to work on the trams but this just meant the fair had spilt out onto the road. The B&B was comfy, I had opted for a room without a bathroom but was slightly put out to discover that the bathroom was on another floor. The room however met my standards of comfortable. That is they had a table/desk in the room. So many rooms have nowhere you can really write a letter or read in comfort.


On the evening I met friends off Ship of Fools.We met up at Ma Bells, as I was walking up there I noticed that there seemed to be snow on the ground. This was confirmed by ship of fools friends I met at The Bow Bar  which was a small bar serving a huge range of whisky, although most of the time we drank ginger beer. We then went on to look for food, unfortunately at this point we got fooled by a restaurant that still had out its early evening menu and when we got in the price were about double what we were expecting. So we ordered starters and sides and I really don’t know how I could have eaten more than what I got.Talk was varied, including one or two St Andrews University acquaintances and how they were doing, talk of J.K Rowlings prior to Harry Potter, that Anglican hegemony on Ship of Fools and so on. One of the people there was something like a Doctor of Epidemiology only because she could not be a Doctor of what she wanted to be, Doctor of Pain, her speciality is pain management. Of the five of us three were involved in the conference the next day. Another was a househusband waiting to be a full time carer, his wife’s career in Mechanical Engineering had took off in a way that his in English literature/philosophy hadn’t.


My father was right in part about New College being cold. That was the heat was very unevenly spread. On the Tuesday I thought the whole college was cold but from Wednesday lunch time on I ended up in too warm rooms. The previous evening it had been mentioned that it was part of J.K Rowlings inspiration for Hogwarts. Having been inside it I could say that it was not just the impressive front. It does have a splendid dining area and ancient halls as well, but the big thing was just how complex the internal layout was. It was clearly a building that had been built and rebuilt over the years. Some of the seminar rooms had windows for the lower half of the room! Flights of stairs seemed to go off at random and I am not at all sure how New College would have got on with standard University room numbering. For those unused to it the numbering usually consists of two numbers, the first being the floor and the second the room with either 0 or G being used for ground. So my office at work is something like 2.17 (second floor, room 17) and my supervisors at Birmingham is something like 8.21, eighth floor, room 21.

Well there were enough URCs to have URC seminar as that is what seemed to be where I did my paper. I suspect that ironically, my cafe paper, which is on ethnography of worship would have had a higher attendance. I also suspect that being put in a seminar labelled Reformed theology put people off. I later sat through a paper of Schleiermacher and his eucharistic theology. The thing is that I was reminded just how easy it is for me to inhabit his thinking without having done major reading, I know the corrolaries and the ramification before the speaker stated them. It is something I nearly always can do when dealing with Reformed thinkers but not when dealing with theologians in other traditions. That does not mean I have to agree with the Reformed thinkers, it just means I know where they are coming from. I have written a more indepth blog about my assessment of the conference on my thesis blog


Travelling back was interesting. I got down to pick up my case from left luggage (the choice of hiking it up the hill to New College and then through the stair filled corridors, or paying £7 for left luggage at Waverley, meant leaving it at Waverley won) just in time to get the last direct train to Sheffield (it leaves just after 6pm). Unfortunately the weather had caused a train ahead of it from Glasgow to fail and it was running about an hour late. The thing is when a train is that late it tends to get later and later, so instead of getting in around 9 p.m., it was after 11 p.m. Fortunately I had booked the next day off work as recovery time. However I did get a really good taxi driver who not only knew where my flat was (a rarity) but got my bag out of the cab.


Thursday and I was back into work, actually not much happening but I managed to get up a short video on how to produce evidence for working, but by the evening my head was aching and I decided that there was possibly a migraine on the way and I better go home and see if an early night would fix it. Unfortunately the next day the dregs stayed with me.  The only thing I actually did was to put a plastic layer over a window that does not shut properly, as this is right by my thesis computer I wanted to stop the draft that came in through the crack and made that place uncomfortable. 

However I managed to go to the Dicksons for evening meal. It was a good time although I was not really hungry. The previous weekend they had been celebrating their golden wedding. This included a couple of meals out and cake and champagne at the church. Unfortunately I then went and forgot to take my medicine so yesterday although I managed to write and get to the station to try and sort tickets I was sort of off colour, and today I have felt fragile but made it to church. The congregation is interesting, there is probably a better spread of ages than when I joined almost twenty years ago, but that is largely due to the loss of people at the older end. The recruitment at the younger end remains much the same. The problem is that it is not high enough to sustain the congregation. However the way I was feeling I just drank coffee and then came home to sleep for a couple of hours and am now feeling much better.

including a Liturgical conference

Panorama of mirfield
Originally uploaded by jengie@btinternet.com

Checking back over my twitter feed I see that the parentii were watching “Last of the Summer Wine” last week. I suspect it is on this week as well so they will not be ringing me until 8p.m. so this may well be written before they ring despite my late start.

Last Monday I heard that I did indeed get the concession, so I only have to pay half fees this year again. Yes! The day actually filled pretty quickly, partly as it was my only day in work this week and partly because my brain clicked into write mode with the Butyrate project and I wrote up most of what I needed to do. Also that evening my mind also sorted out what slides I needed to have for the conference. So a good day. I did not shop as I was away the rest of the week so the evening was free to think on the paper.

Leaving at 11:00 a.m. is civilised as it gives you plenty of time to pack. Unfortunately Kirkgate Station Wakefield is not civilised. The standard method of finding what platform your train leaves from is to ask the guard on the next train to come in. Seriously for those who have the choice of changing trains at Kirkgate or Westgate in Wakefield go to Westgate. Kirkgate was not the best of stations in 1977 and it has gone down hill from there. Fortunately the only smartly dressed people at kirkgate station were heading for Mirfield.

At the conference I was put into the retreat house. This was a good idea as the retreat house keeps silence from about 9pm to 9am as it is part of the abbey. It also meant more walking, and a continual job of educating the organisers that those in the retreat house needed extra time to get places. Turning up late was common place.

The conference itself was the sort confusing. The people were predominantly from the churches with set liturgies. This of course meant that the main interest in liturgy was critical and historical. I of course came from the sociological perspective but probably more importantly from a free liturgical tradition. That means that what I am used to is talk of what makes for good liturgy over a far wider range of topics. I think the thing that high lighted this for me, was a talk by an Anglican on the Anabaptist daily prayer book  where he mentioned that they had poets, musicians and Biblical Scholars right in from the start as well as liturgists and my response was “Of course you do!” I have written two  entries on my musings blog. However I have a third concern and that is the taking of Reformed thinkers out of context. A statement by a Congregationalist that for some people the main concern in worship is faithfulness to tradition and for others it is relevance, is not a statement about whether people have a written liturgy or not. You need go no further that Scotland to find excellent counter examples. The Wee Frees are totally about tradition but have no set liturgy, while Iona Community is strong on relevance and is producing liturgy all the time. Actually it gave me a weird sense that I as a lay Reformed person was about twenty years ahead of the conference. The things they were talking about were often part of the assumed structure within the URC. It was not helped by the fact that the one comment on my paper showed that I also outpaced one of the leading members in divinity, and I did not have time there to take her through all the problems I could see with her perspective. She was making logical leaps that were not possible to make from my paper. The assumption the Jesus learnt basically does not necessarily imply an adoptionist Christology. My own stance is that Jesus knew as a human according to his human nature and knew as God according to his Godly nature. (if someone recognises that quote and can tell me where from I would be grateful) Therefore as a human he learnt, because learning can not be easily separated from human development. I suspect that the God-nature was present but as an extreme form of what some introverts experience, where they seem to pick up what is going on for others around them very easily.

The net effect for me of these things was that my brain went into ethnographer mode and that takes me into a state where I overload fairly easily. By the time I came to talk to the conference I had a second paper that was a direct response to the conference germinating. I am still not sure what to do about it. However that made me highly nervous as there seemed to be so much ground that needed covering before my paper could even be read. In the end I just gave it. I tried telling the story but it did not work my brain was too full of the facts of what really happened that these undermined the telling. Anyway the paper is distributed and I will need to re-write to try and interact with the audience. This means taking things back a couple of stages and arguing that everybody does work around worship not just those who right the text. To understand a liturgy therefore you need not only look at what is written but what happens and what people understand to have happened.

Friday I was exhausted, but I also know that a couple of books had come to work, and that I needed to shop. I had ordered the books to arrive before I went to Mirfield so that I could take time out from the conference theme. One was the Non-designers design Book by Robin Williams which is very readable and I think worth reading. I got it as I was doing layout of the next collection of work for my writers group. Anyway I got into work and there were not two parcels waiting for me but four. One I left in work as it is almost certainly a book I ordered for work through Abebooks and got from Bristol Oxfam! Well it was a fairly obscure Statistical Text.

The actual text for the collection arrived Friday evening. I forget how addictive layout is and it was after midnight before I got to bed. I had just sussed how to get the stuff from Word to Publisher effectively. Although I Office 2007 was a major redesign for Word and Excel, Publisher is still very definitely Office 2003 style, which made it interesting to use. Some fairly obvious shortcuts were simply not implemented and it did not handle overflow well. Neil the teacher for the group had claimed that layout would take a long time. I am pretty sure it does if you approach it the way many people do, which is to take the different texts with all the formatting and try and create a uniform version. I did the opposite. I got rid of 90% of the formatting that was already there, then put in a fresh lot. There are still some fiddles but these are minor compared with working the other way.

Today went to Herringthorpe. It was a double baptism, the last as part of the main morning service. Pauline took the baptisms and then returned to the manse as Alex, her husband, had only come out of hospital on Friday after major surgery and was still far from well. So she wanted to be there to make sure he was alright. Roy Roddison took the rest of the service, and I was doing the reading. I got a couple of compliments on how I did it, which I expected. That is not vanity, I don’t feel that I read exceptionally well, just that I know if I prepare a passage, I will read it so that it is audible and with expression. I know about sound systems, I have been reading in church since I was ten, I have had numerous trainings and I actually focus on communicating what is going on in the passage while reading it rather than “me reading”. I am not sure why this stands out but it does because I regularly get the feed back that it does.