If your church is like mine, conversations are taking place about how quickly full services can resume. This includes live worship, singing in the congregation, new roles for people, and putting back in place some of the structures and teams that have been fallow for over a year.

There will be pressure amongst church leaders to want to demonstrate just how quickly their train “the congregation” can get back up to speed – “it only took us 2 weeks to get 4 services a week restarted, plus all the new digital streaming, launch a new building project and giving soared.” I don’t think so…

We’re still carefully considering what pace to ‘exit’ the pandemic restrictions with so no face-to-face UCAN dates are ready for the autumn yet. However, here are two virtual events for your diary...

One of our greatest joys over the past 18 months has been the privilege of journeying with our first cohort on the ILM accredited Managing Church Well course. This group, with the support of their churches, have invested time and money to develop their management skills for greater kingdom impact. Cohort 1 completed earlier this month as many from the group shared a special time together at High Leigh conference centre, for an ‘end-of-course' residential.

Join with many other church operations personnel and administrators as they unpack Sharon Clark’s new book on the topic of church administration.

At UCAN, we’ve been wanting to provide a primer for church administrators to help learn the basic dynamics and landscape of exercising the spiritual gift of administration. Then along came Sharon Clark who followed a spiritual nudge to provide exactly that. The whole UCAN team devoured her work and this month we launched UCAN’s first book live at the Cutting Edge conference. We were rather taken aback at the orders streaming in during broadcast. The books have now arrived and will be available for dispatch shortly.

This month, UCAN’s flagship “Cutting Edge” conference was streamed live from St. Saviour’s Church in Guildford. Over 80 delegates joined us from the comfort of their own homes and offices, watching live sessions and accessing on-demand content.

Wisdom, support, practical know-how… and this last month, laughs galore were all are to be found on the UCAN Forum (hosted on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/UCANForum/ ).

These notes list ten points that fair, perceptive, generous church members tell me they long to see in their Minister. The list might well be pondered by all Christians and is designed to shed light and provide practical ideas, not to induce guilt.

Note: interest in this specialist article may be limited to Church of England churches. It has been written for Patrons but also for PCCs, Administrators guiding their church through a vacancy, and clergy needing to brush up on the system.

It describes the patronage process from the Patron’s perspective and presents it as a drama in two acts with five scenes each. There is also a cast list and a number of scenery backdrops. The idea is to make the patronage process interesting!

Everything in the right order……God, people, task – a reminder we may need from time to time!

In less than one 24hr period, two friends and a bible daily reading App had all independently sent me the same verses of Scripture:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths”.

Proverbs 3:5-6, NIV

That was such an encouragement because there were significant and challenging work decisions looming that I needed a reminder to trust God in, and with. But I almost went ‘thanks that’s encouraging’ and moved on. Then a third friend sent me the same verse the next day saying, “I think the Lord wants to highlight this for your Jules”. That made me take time out to sit, read the verses, think about their context, and ask God what he was trying to get my attention on.

We’re really excited about the opportunity to see each other, in person again. This month we’re aware that some of our local groups have been gathering to meet and our two ’Managing Church Well’ cohorts are busy planning their next in person meet-ups for July.