The other day, I took a trip through the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket and stopped dead in my tracks. Sitting there in front of me on the middle shelf, on special offer, were several boxes of a new flavour of Jaffa Cakes – cherry! I stood there in astonishment – cherry… What a flavour! In my mind, cherry is equivalent to bacon, chorizo and beer. It tends to make anything it’s mixed with better. After a short interval for consideration (roughly 3 seconds), I relocated a couple of boxes from the shelf to my shopping basket and continued on my way towards the checkout.

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.

UCAN Director Penny Clarke spoke on thechurchoffice.co.uk podcast with Gavin Smith on the challenges we face with volunteer levels in churches.

To help keep you focused in your work, John Truscott has just a published a new article on the concept of a ‘To Do Diary’.

Never before have the UCAN Board found themselves as ‘at peace’ with a decision whilst simultaneously being absolutely gutted. The only explanation is that this must be from God. With our great thanks, enthusiastic support but also genuine sadness, we have to announce that Julian will be moving on from UCAN at the end of this year.

As a planner, I like to be in control and have thinking time to react and bring the strands of running the different processes of the church together in harmony at the same rate – a bit like bringing the horses in front of a coach together in harness to run at the same time and in the same direction. I liken the phrase “Hold your horses!” to the instruction given to the charioteer or coachman to bring the horses that you need working together, to the same canter and rhythm and to ensure that they are working together.

That’s a terrifying thought isn’t it? Just over 90 days to Christmas with very little visibility about what the season may look like or where on the country’s ‘roadmap’ we’ll have reached. Are there ‘U’ turns or ‘T’ junctions ahead or will be going via Spaghetti Junction? We don’t know. However, time is linear and the clock is ticking so Christmas does need some thought.

Registration for our new HR support service will launch later this term and we’ll be emailing out further details as to how you can register your interest in due course… find out more here!

Nearly 60 UCAN+ members gathered on Thursday of this week at our virtual roundtable to support each other in a discussion about volunteer management and care. You can download two of the resources from this roundtable here

Find out all about our roundtable event that took place on the 23rd of September and discover some exciting news of an event we are holding on the 30th September.

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…