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!

The literature review exercise I am currently undertaking gives me a mixutre of great joy - I love the reading - and immense dread - am I reading enough, am I reading the right things, am I engaging with it at the right level and, ultimately, am I missing something blatantly obvious?

Today I finally found a little essay that, to some degree, reassured me!  A study of a Quaker congregation using narrative approaches offered concerns over Hopewell's work similar to those I had felt, added some new dimensions and connected more directly to some of the things I've read on historical method.  It also teased around the edge of questions of authority, with its ideas of individual, local and canoncial narrative.  It recognised the complexity of what it was trying to do, but seemed to offer a metaphor of braiding - which I took to mean plaiting - threads together.  Immediately my mind went to the tapestry metpahor I've posted about before, and also to good old Eeyore, sorry the writer of Ecclesiates, whose three-stranded cord is noted for its strength.

I am still waiting in anticipation that someone has already looked at all this stuff before and living with the dread that six years down the line someone will say 'so and so has already done this' (not lack of trust in supervisors, just an intuitive doubt that I can be onto something new), but in the meantime I am at least able to do a little bit of 'Brianing' (making connections) with what I have read.

I have, at very short notice (that's down to the undertakers round here) been asked to conduct a funeral for someone who died suddenly, overseas and became an organ donor, enabling two other people to live.  This fact gives some comfort to the family and they (rightly) want it mentioned in the service.  I am trying to think of a non-naff way to link this to a Bible reading, which is quite tricky.  John 11 (I am the resurrection...) gets used in the opening bit anyway and I guess at a push there is John 10:10 (life in all its fullness) or 'unless an ear of wheat...' but I don't really like either very much.  The internet is no help either!

A funeral is hardly the place to be talking about the Film Jesus of Montreal where organ donation was the way that the good news went to people of all nations (if you haven't seen the film, this will make no sense, but it was for me a very powerful ending) but there is in some sense a kind of resurrection, new life element to it. 

Anyone got any ideas?  (The funeral is Thursday a.m.).  One day, when I've finished playing with Baptist historiography, I'll contribute something useful to pastoral/liturgical life by collecting and ordering precisely this type of resources.