Find out more about our newly launched HR Support Service

How do you speak to yourself in January? Have you ever thought about it? Following the excitement, busyness and disruption of Christmas, and then the post-festive lull it can take time and effort to once again motivate ourselves for the next season. I’m writing this opener in the first week of January. By this date, are you already raring to go for the spring term or still wanting to crawl back under the duvet for further hibernation? To be honest, I’m somewhere in between, but probably close to the latter.

Looking ahead towards the end of the year, there is one inevitable feature of the festive season that I’d rather avoid, but it is coming my way like a unstoppable freight train. It’s the Christmas cracker. Now you may choose to cause me Ebenezer Scrooge but out of all the seasonal traditions, I’ve never understood the cracker. Pulling them isn’t ‘fun’, there’s nothing worthwhile inside and the paper crowns are just annoying.

You may have heard the exciting news that we now have a new board member, Mark Parsons from Christ Church in Bristol. We are very happy that he is joining the team and we wanted to make sure that we were able to introduce him to you all properly so, we interviewed him. Take a look at the interview here.

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.