Found this great 12 step programme for doctoral students here.  It is nice to reassured by others who once felt as hopeless and helpless as I do now.

After last night's unjolly meeting, a not very good night's sleep, and a bit of space to reflect, I am feeling cheated!

Cheated because one of our decisions was not to have any services of our own over Easter but instead to join in with other people.  Not that I mind joining with other people, I just enjoy preparing worship for Easter and this year won't get to at all.

On Maundy Thursday we will join with D+1 and D+2 at D+1 - I don't mind this at all but a have great longing to do a 'Christian Passover Seder' which never gets any nearer to happening.  To be honest watery soup and trite poems, with no mention of an upper room or foot washing is, to me, a travesty, but there I go.

On Good Friday we will join in our traditional ecumencial thingy, which is great, except it leaps to Sunday before we end the service, and denies us the real entry into Good Friday feelings.  Let's all be jolly and munch half a hot cross bun while Jesus (symbolically) is still in agony at Calvary.  Maybe I'll need to sneak into an Anglican or Catholic vigil service.

On Easter Sunday we will join with the Methodists for their early communion and breakfast and then, in the words of one of my deacons, for goodness sake, 'have a day off.'  It means I can get to the GB Easter parade service, but I am deeply saddened that my folk don't want to celebrate the resurrection together, and with the colour and exuberance I'd long for.  This greatest festival, at the heart of our faith, the event that drew us out of Judaism and we want the day off?!  For this our forebears died?  I despair!

So I'm feeling cheated, and saddened, that this central Christian festival is being sidelined just because it is more convenient so to do.

Sorry Jesus, I did try...

Thank you to all those who responded to my prayer request regarding tonight's meeting - without your support it would have been so much worse than it was!  After a good half hour going round in circles and stressing that if the meeting approved the budget people were committing themselves to increasing their giving by 10%, and several saying that they couldn't afford to, they approved it with only one against.  Someone suggested that the shortfall could be made good by holding coffee mornings and socials - at which point LMB lost control of her professionalism spoke regrettably harshly to the person making the suggestion about not wanting her wages paid from jumble sales, shocked herself, apologised (too late!) and almost burst into tears - but not quite, she never does that!

Not a good end to the meeting - though I received far more affirmation in the ten minutes after the meeting than in the last three years.  One kind person dragged me of to the local(-ish) Travel Lodge for a drink and a change of scene.

So now we have a budget approved that we will struggle to meet and I will just have to deal with the mega-apology I need to make to the person who pushed me over the edge (why her and not someone who had broader shoulders?!).

So there you have it, I do lose it once in a while.  I am, as I told my folk, a human being, and maybe it's not such a bad thing to demonstrate it now and then.

God bless Frances Ward!  I have just read her chapter in Congregtional Studies in the UK and have found in it a voice of encouragemnet for all first time researchers.  She talks about her project (which, assuming it is part of her PhD work, ended up with a very grand sounding title) with great honesty and openness, and a humility that is at once endearing and helpful.

Her original plan was to look to at corporate identity within three congregations of different denominations somewhere in northern England.  She soon discovered that the Anglican rector was about to leave, so changed to focussing only on that congregation.  Then as the interregnum began, her emphasis shifted from identity to power, and then again to questions of racism.

In her reflection on the work (she used ethnographic methods) she shares the struggles and frustrations, the negatives and inconsistencies as well as the bits that worked (noting that Hopewell and others present a rather rosy image of the process and outcome).  The gender thing (that sometimes irrritates me, I have to confess) led her to think about who was refusing to participate and why - the importance of silences is a helpful corrective to the loud voices of others.

When she talks about writing up, she is keenly aware of partiality (both senses) and particularity.  She even shares something of the negative responses people gave to her protrayal of them!

At the end of the process she had a nice title for the research project she could/should have set out to complete, given where she ended up - and notes the benefits of hindsight.

For those of us blundering around in the dark or wading through treacle trying to establish 'square 1' (how's that for mixed metaphors?!) and finding our questions shifting, changing and devleoping as we go, this short essay is a real blessing.  Thank you Frances for sharing.

There is no Roger Hargreaves female equivalent of Mr Worry, so I'll have to settle for Wibbley of Dibley!

Tomorrow night is our church AGM and I dread with a passion reaching the approval of budget and request for Home Mission Funding for 2008 - the budget for this year needs a 10% rise in freewill offering if we are to meet our commitments and with no contingency.  I don't think this will happen - it hasn't happened in the last three years, so why would it now?  Granted, if we sell our building and if we are allowed to realise the interest we will be solvent and off Home Mission for good, but that isn't going to increase freewill offering, it is likely to breed complacency.  The stark truth is that this church can't afford a minister and that leaves me feeling rather vulnerable.  This is not helped by the fact that most people here are 'Members of the Noble Order of the Ostrich,' to use a family-Gorton expression.

I want to tell people not to approve the budget unless they are able and willing to meet the 10% increase in giving - but fear that they will vote for it because that is the easy way out of a tricky discussion.  I do believe God has work for me to do here, but today am feeling decidedly stressed - stressed enough to tell the world rather than just the Almighty.

I know I am not alone, and that compared to people in Iraq, Africa or Asia I am truly blessed, but if you could spare a prayer for us vulnerable HMF supported ministers of small churches, I'd be everso grateful!