Bringing God's grace and healing love
to people with life-disrupting problems

CCM Strategy, August 2006

Introduction

I met Mike Pears, the minister at Cairn’s Road Baptist Church, on Thursday 8 June. He has been very supportive of our work for some time. He had a number of very helpful suggestions, based on his experience in helping set up Pecan (see http://www.pecan.org.uk/ if you are not familiar with them).

Please take this as a proposal for the CCM Trustees to consider. You will find below a summary of the proposal - a slightly expanded version of the message sent to Staff and Trustees in June - followed by some thoughts on how to make this happen if the Trustees decide to go ahead.

Summary

Mike believes, with us, that we work we do is right, necessary and important. But he suggests that there are some fundamental problems with how we position ourselves in the market, and how we communicate about what we do. I won’t give you all the details here and now, but some edited highlights:

Our Dual Focus

Our position as both Christian and social action is difficult to maintain, but not impossible. However, if it is to succeed, we must be successful in both areas, while at present we cannot demonstrate (provide documentary evidence of) our success in either.

As a social action project, we perform an essential role within Bristol. But to demonstrate this (which is what we need to do in order to attract funding), we MUST improve our record keeping. We must be able to report effectively on what we are doing, even if we can’t demonstrate the outcomes as clearly as we would like.

As a Christian organisation, we need either to succeed as a church, or to gain the support and ownership of churches in Bristol. I don’t see how we achieve the former, but he thinks the latter is possible if we are prepared to redefine ourselves.

Changing our Constitution

If we say ‘we are a charity involved in promoting the Christian faith and in social action’, nobody knows what to make of us: we are not a normal charity, and we are certainly not a church. We are a bunch of people that has come together to do two things, and two aims is much more difficult to achieve and much more difficult to sell to others than one aim. And most people - most Christians, even - will see those two aims as being quite different. Some people see those two aims as being directly opposed to each other.

If we are owned by a bunch of churches from different denominations across Bristol, then the message is quite different. We can say that these churches have got together in order to do something good in our community. People know who we are (‘we’ are a bunch of churches) and they are glad that we are prepared to do something useful. We don’t have to justify or explain our Christian ‘ethos’, and we naturally belong within the community of Christian churches in Bristol.

This should help us from the Christian perspective: we are no longer something odd, different and outside - we are a part of the Church in Bristol; we belong.

And from the secular perspective, it should also help. We are no longer a bunch of people who want to waste their time and energy in promoting the Christian faith as well as doing something useful: we are now a bunch of Christians who would otherwise be wasting their time praying and singing hymns, who have chosen instead to do something useful with their time.

Putting it into Practice

Next Moves

This plan can only work if:

The Trustees decide this is the right direction to move in.
The Charity Commissioners and the current membership agree to the necessary constitutional changes.
We can find a group of churches in Bristol willing to take on the joint ownership of CCM.

I believe the Charity Commissioners and our current membership will accept these changes if the Trustees are agreed and we can find partner churches.

Mike Pears knows the chap who set up Pecan and thinks he would be willing to come down and help us reshape CCM if the Trustees decide this is what we want to do.

Constitutional Changes

We have been working on updating our constitution for some time, so adding in the necessary changes for this plan would not be a large amount of additional work. As I see it at present, the key points are something like this, but please note that this is a discussion paper and these points are not fixed in stone!

We remain a charity and a company limited by guarantee.
Our present members are converted into ‘associate members’ or ‘friends of CCM’ who will be invited to our AGM but will no longer have voting rights.
Our Board of Reference is formally disbanded.
Membership is open to Christian churches and organisations (based in the Bristol area?) supporting the aims and objectives of CCM. Each member group has one vote at the AGM.
As at present, the members elect the Board of Directors, who are the Trustees of the charity, but the people being elected will no longer be members.
The number of Trustees will be between 6 and 12 (at present it is fixed at 8, which makes the selection and appointment of Trustees very difficult).