Today I collected, packaged and posted two copies of my hard bound MPhil thesis.  A third lies casually on my desk in the vestry at church, its gold lettering glinting against the black covers.  It looks very smart!  It will reach Manchester tomorrow and then I just wait for a graduation date (December sometime).

I am disproprotionately pleased with the look of the hardbound version, so I hope the visiting preachers in the next couple of weeks appreciate just what they are looking at!

Yesterday I was doing some work on the notes for a session I'm leading in September.  I don't want to give away all that's planned, but this little quotation (the seeming missing word is as per the original) seemed worth sharing more widely and earlier.  It is about the corporate nature of TR (or why we shouldn't leave The Minister to do all the thinking) and seems to fit well with Baptist ecclesiology and Church Meetings at their best...

… theological reflection is characteristically a corporate activity.  It is the meeting of minds in common dependence on the tradition and enlivened by the Spirit in searching truth, which yields the insights.  A larger group provides the checks and challenges, the insights and lateral thinking, the unexpected questions and the realism necessary to resist the temptations of fantasy.  With this important safeguard it can be said with confidence that theological reflection on practice is one of the indispensable tools of ministry.  With it we will learn from experience and grow in ministerial maturity. Without it we run the risk either of pastoral ineffectiveness or of great error.

Paul Ballard and John Prichard, Practical Theology in Action, London , SPCK, 2006 (second edition) p. 144