Church Partnerships Team - December 2004 

Being launched in March 2005, the new Church Partnerships Team will have responsibility for our work amongst churches in mainland Britain, expanding Crosslinks’ ministry of serving supporter churches and developing new church partnerships. 

This represents a major shift in thinking for Crosslinks and involves the discontinuation of the three regional offices, the centralising of the administrative function and the replacement of Regional Coordinators with new positions focussed on church partnership support and development – see UK Jobs for the job descriptions. The decision to do this was ratified by General Council on 30th November, following a lengthy period of planning and consultation. 

Your prayers are now asked for its implementation, for Alan Purser whose responsibility this is, for the care of those whose jobs are disappearing and for the recruitment process – but above all else that this initiative will result in a more efficient operation for Crosslinks and a more effective serving of the churches in the cause of mission in our day and generation.

Andy Lines writes:

... I had asked Alan Purser to give new direction to the Regional Team in Britain. After a process of consultation and careful prayer and planning Alan put a new plan with radical changes to the Standing Committee and this week to General Council. The result was a unanimous acceptance of the suggested plan for a different way of relating to churches, which ended up with the termination of the regional programme. As such without a programme there can now be no jobs connected with that programme. So the downside of all this is that the Regional Co-ordinators and their secretaries will be made redundant in the New Year, although they may apply for the new jobs. This is very hard for those concerned, some of whom went through this last time 2 years ago. In some ways the new plan is more what John Truscott had been envisaging but which we were not in a position to carry out. There are risks in making these changes, which focus on specialist function rather than geographical area but we believe that they are right. More detail will come to you later. Inevitably there will have to be changes for you too but we shall advise you of these. We are very keen to keep a strong emphasis on personal relationships under the new plan. Our concern at present is how to help the existing team members in the changes. 

Please can you specially remember the regional team, John Price and his secretary Gina Scotney, Jonathan Leeson and his secretary Sue Cowley, and Udobata Onunwa, together with their families, as they face great changes in the next three months.