Lent Blog 4: catching up

In theory, Lent blog post 4 should have been done yesterday, but at least I'm catching up with myself. Saturday was spent catching up with messages, paper, email and myself to be in some way ready for Sunday (today). It's amazing what accumulates when you're not really looking or concentrating.

I really envy those people who can naturally bring order to a desk / room / space which makes perfect sense and seems relatively effort-free to achieve. Tidiness for me requires large amounts of time, energy and brain power. Result: a desk which grows piles of paper, and things which haven't got a home or place to be stored. Management books on administration that say things about everything in its place just make me frustrated/guilty and give me a deep desire to throw stuff. Somehow if you haven't got the ability built into your 'hardware', it can't be programmed in afterwards.

Having said all that, Saturday included a desk-purging session which now means some wood grain is now visible again. Maybe that's an aim for Lent. A clear desk...

Management Days

On Friday I was attending a day for departmental heads from St Martin's College. We were joined by colleagues from Cumbria Institute of the Arts and the Carlisle and Penrith campuses of the University of Central Lancs. I get invited as Senior Chaplain. One day I'll get that s-word replaced with 'Coordinating' or something similar. (Should that be hyphenated?)

Perhaps I should be a little careful how I comment, as a senior college manager reads this blog! Seriously, you shouldn't blog stuff you're not prepared to own up to in public or at work, so read on

Actually I have to say it was a really good day. Quite apart from it taking place in a conference suite in a very pleasant hotel just outside Kendal, it was very interesting. We weren't doing the management game thing that the phrase 'day away' usually conjures up in people's minds. Instead, we were engaged in planning and managing. The new University is a tricky entity to bring into being with the complexity of the merger, so it's really important to get that right. Some good work was done.

From my point of view, I also caught up with several pastoral contacts, built up some relationship with staff from our partner campuses, and thought of some useful ideas for our chaplaincy moving forward. At this rate, I may write a paper on delivering distributed chaplaincy - how do you care for people at many locations when you can't have a member of staff at each of them? I think there may be some interesting lessons for the Church at large to learn from the experience will have in forming a new team for ministry to the new University.

Fresh Expressions? Chaplains have been doing it for years!