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.

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.

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…

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

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.

This month we’re talking about our staff. In Exodus 17:11 we read:

11 As long as Moses held up the staff in his hand, the Israelites had the advantage. But whenever he dropped his hand, the Amalekites gained the advantage.

Here we have a picture of Moses being instructed by God to uphold his staff as he surveyed the battle before him. It was a physical sign of Moses being visible, watching, and prayerfully upholding the Israelite army before God. Moses’ role was not to be fighting, but to be looking out for the men who rallied to his call. It was a spiritual relationship between a team and its captain; between crew and pilot; between a community and its leader who was following God.