If you’re a Harry Potter fan you’ll be familiar with the franchise’s instalment that involves the mythical phoenix – the bird whose fiery death results in sudden and unexpected re-birth. I’ll resist the parallel with resurrection, but in church administration there are many times when something has to die in order to be reborn.
I remember when I had built our church a church management system based on Microsoft Access shortly after I started (18 years ago!). I had quickly deployed my incoming skillset and put together a design, front-end and reporting tools that enabled us to manage our teams and mailouts. A few years later I become increasingly distraught at the number of requests for modifications and enhancements but without the ongoing expertise or time to be able to deliver them... let alone deal with the desire to use it on devices other than a desktop PC. I decided to kill it all off, and a year later after we smoothly migrated to ChurchSuite, I took a look at the detailed 80-page document I had painstakingly written that detailed all the structure, design, and growing wishlist, took a deep breath, hit “delete” and never looked back. Now, our church’s deployment of ChurchSuite manages our website content, sign-ups, giving, groups, GDPR and resource management. There’s never been a moment of regret.
I remember when I tried to launch our church welcome teams to use ConnectionPower to manage our tracking and follow-up of newcomers. After a year of building a team, training, putting practitioners in place in every cell group, it died a slow and horrible death as the numbers of visitors didn’t sustain the flow of reminders or involvement that it needed. One of our community groups decided to all serve together on a particular Sunday of the month, and work across all the different roles to “fish together” for newcomers and to look after everyone. It was spectacular in its fruitfulness, and a few months later I closed the ConnectionPower account.
Over the last few years, I have handed over running our facilities, then Sunday operations, communications, and then this year mused over the prospect of trying to work out how I was ever going to let go of overseeing all the finances of our church. I held line management for the day-to-day transactions through a colleague, but was stuck delivering management reporting, budgets, fund structures, company accounts and the submissions to Companies House and the Charity Commission. Last year, a member of the congregation asked us to help a work colleague with his financial problems. That referral to our money advice service, took my team to the High Court in London, saved a family losing their father to suicide, and turned a massive debt situation into a rebate from HMRC. This year, this congregant retired from his accountancy job and got in touch to offer his service full time to, in his words, “take on all the financial responsibility for the church, to learn the role, and then recruit the new person and train them up. We have to help you rescue more people, and if you touch another spreadsheet I will consider myself to have failed. I don’t need paying, but cake is always welcome.”
This wonderful Godly man has systematically and voluntarily restructured the whole way we look at our church’s finances and is painting on a financial canvas a masterpiece that I could never be capable of. It has left me in admiration at God’s ability to show us just what He can build when we get out of the way when He is building his church, and to trust Him to bring us the people we need when we ask.
So maybe I’ve just discovered what I’ll coin “the Phoenix Principle”. That in church administration, we need to embrace the time when it is right to allow something to die, to facilitate the birth of something else. If you talk to any gardener about pruning, you’ll soon hear the parallel in nature that you have to cut back very healthy growth in order to focus future energy of the plant to the direction that you want to grow in. For this reason, it is time to apply some pruning to combat the relentless jostling in my head space between being Operations Manager for Riverside Church, Centre Manager of Riverside Money Advice, and Executive Director for UCAN. The congestion has been increasing over the last couple of years.
Many times this year I have reminded myself that just because you can do lots of different things, does not mean that you should. Our job as church administrators is to facilitate the body of the church to get serving and build God’s kingdom, not end up trying to be the whole of God’s kingdom ourselves.
Applying the Phoenix Principle, I am therefore stepping away from Church administration and therefore my role within UCAN, because I recognise the time has come to allow my input and involvement to die off and make way for others to thrive with the space and permission to take the network onwards. Since our current team took over from the behemoth of church administration that was and is John Truscott, we’ve seen the birth of Virtual Roundtables, the first digital conference, the UCAN Facebook forum, the ILM course, a UCAN book, and plans for our teaching materials to launch across the NewWine digital platform.
Over the last few years, I have been moved to tears at what some of my clients in our money advice ministry have said, and I realise that we have actually saved lives, held families together, have kept a roof over heads, and put food on the table for children who were going without. It’s the thing that I want to spend the rest of my working life dedicated to and would be the one thing I would regret if I did not throw everything of myself at it. I’m also stepping out of my Operations role for Riverside Church but staying on the leadership team to embed the debt advice service and other missional teams right in the heart of our church’s focus. I face the nerve-wracking search for both a full-time successor, and staffing for a full-time Events and Facilities Manager, as well as a part-time Finance Officer. The entire operational staff of our church is going through a 100% turnover at the same time. If I wasn’t convinced by the appearance of my new finance volunteer, or the generous outpouring of donations to our money advice service, or feeling so alive when serving clients and hearing their testimonies and thanks, I would be hanging on and not letting go until all the replacement people were in place.
There’s no other place to be but on my knees before God in awe of just what on earth He is doing and wondering just why it is all coming at the same time. It feels like a nexus point of pressure all building up – an end to a wonderful season that I never wanted to stop, and yet massive expectation of what is to come. I suspect that when something big is about to birthed in the Kingdom of God, everything in heaven and on earth is involved, and it’s often true that when you’re making decisions in obedience to God’s calling, the forces of darkness let loose too. Right now, as I am writing this paragraph, my wife has been called to her mother’s death bed, and as I re-arrange our plans for the evening and tomorrow, and contemplate the consequences that will follow, I find my heart crying out in prayer, “Now??!!”
When God stirs you, take notice and action – and maybe right now is your invitation to either start or join a local UCAN group, join our Cutting Edge team ahead of the next roundtable or conference, or think about serving on our Exec team or even board. I am so looking forward to what is ahead for UCAN. The photo of our whole team at the closing of the conference this year is one that is a very special memory that swells me with pride at what an amazingly talented and wonderful bunch of people church administrators are. For me, this has been a four-year journey between identifying what God has called me into, negotiating and managing the work and life balance, and intentionally stepping forwards, having to trust God for pieces of the jigsaw to drop into place even if I can’t find them in the box yet.
Your church will have had a lot of things that came to an end over the last 18 months. Trust that God’s hand was in it all to bring ministries and churches to a close to make way for what is next – and that’s why you don’t want to just let all the old stuff re-appear. Don’t despair, He’s got this.
Julian Mander
Executive Director | UCAN