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…

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.