this weekend.....

.....I have mostly been writing my dissertation. Apologies for not blogging.

I've got a tutorial on Wednesday and thought it might be prudent to do some work in advance of my trip down to Birmingham. Amazingly I got the work done that I needed to get done in relatively good time. I'm not entirely sure how satisfied I am with what I've written. I think this bit may need looking at again, or at least some loose ends tying up when I write my conclusion. We shall have to see.

When I started thinking about writing this dissertation, I had in my mind the idea that it would be possible to accurately define where 'youth work' ends and 'youth ministry' begins. At the moment I'm not sure this is the case. Now some of you youth workerish/ministryish types reading this might be thinking "duh....obviously", and some of you might disagree, thinking things along the lines of "stop being so vague and wishy-washy". But as I've written about both 'youth work' and 'youth ministry', I have started to think that the two disciplines are actually pretty similar in many ways, and that while it may well be possible to distinguish between different practices, perhaps the dividing line does not fall neatly along the line where people start giving different names to the work/ministry we do. Maybe there are other factors such as our attitudes towards values, education and empowerment that are more helpful in categorising the different practices which exist.