Just over fifteen years ago I stood in the snow outside St. Andrew’s United Reformed Church, Upper Hanover St, Sheffield, wondering what sort of people worshipped there and whether, if I got the job I was going for, I would be one of them. On the notice board outside it still said Peter Chave was minister and it was not until I got home in the evening that I learnt from my father that the congregation was in vacancy.

I was at the time a member of a very different United Reformed Church congregation, one which from my perspective now, seems quite extraordinary, but at the time I felt it was totally normal. It was a full year before I was to begin attending St. Andrew’s thus fulfilling my secret dream of living, working and worshipping locally. What I was totally oblivious to at the time was I was starting a journey that would lead me in fifteen years' time to be studying for a PhD.

St Andrew’s had me puzzled from the start. My initial question was: “Why is a congregation with two hundred members, decent funds, a youth group, just having called a minister and a seemingly vibrant social life talking of being dead in a few years time?” From the perspective of someone who had come from a church with no funds, around a hundred members and a shared minister retiring shortly, it made no sense. However I was soon too busy with life in general including having a new boyfriend.

Really the next step came with the break up of the relationship, which was traumatic to put it mildly. It led directly to two things, firstly a major reassessment of what I meant by reality and secondly the realisation that I had an opportunity to study further for the church as I wanted space to think. With that being the case I started on Training for Learning and Serving. It was during that that I began to find ways of asking questions that led to new and different channels of thinking. I started to develop an interest in social psychology and faith and came across the idea of “vision” which I think I would call a congregation’s vocation. So it was not something as simple as a vision statement.

Training for Learning and Service forced me to reflect on the nature of St. Andrew’s vision, both formally and informally. I also started to explore the vision process, but disquiet grew within me at the same time. All the stuff I read told me about how a minister could get a congregation to have vision and seemed very top down. It simply did not make sense to me that vision was created by the ministry alone. As there are nonconformist congregations that have sustained themselves for over four hundred years, it seemed to me just illogical that this was solely the province of the ministers. I have met few churches who have had charismatic leadership, like that of Ernest Marvin, for more than a couple of decades per century. For the vast majority of the time congregations seem to have survived without such leadership. Well if it wasn’t the minister it must be the congregation, so how and what were they doing?

This sent me back to study, not immediately to a PhD but to get a master’s degree in Social Science with the Open University. This was really a crash course in Social Thinking and I began to pick topics up that gave hints that they might be useful. I did some training in more qualitative social research as well. It was only with this that I then started looking around for somewhere to supervise a PhD. Every time I brought it up, people said try Birmingham, so I did.

I found that in the department of Theology and Religion at Birmingham there was a Social Anthropologist who specialised in Congregational Studies, which is the study of individual congregations, and that he was willing to supervise me. My parents offered to pay for me to do it, although I considered funding it myself but would have to have worked full time if I did. So last September I started studying for my PhD part-time having dropped to working four days a week.

The plan for the PhD has been for the first year to be mainly reading and sorting out my first placement, the second and third to do a placement with one congregation and in my fourth and fifth a placement with another congregation. The final sixth year will be for writing up and finishing off. At least that is the plan.

This means that from October I will be doing participant observation at another congregation, so be rarely at St. Andrew’s for the next four years although I will still be living where I do now, as I am still working for four days a week at the University of Sheffield.

At the end I do not hope to have solved the quandary that I set out with, I think that will take me the rest of my life, but I hope to have made some progress towards it and be able to share my knowledge with others for the benefit of the Church as a whole. Finally in the words of Mary Leakey: “basically I have been compelled by curiosity”.

Jean Russell