New International Coordinator

Jonny Thiessen is CMF’s new interna-tional coordinator. This new role will involve coordinating CMF’s ICMDA-linked activites – namely CMF summer teams, the international students’ precon-ference and participation in ICMDA - as well as providing administrative support to ICMDA Eurasia in its rapidly growing ministry involving over 60 countries from Iceland to Vladivostok and from Scandinavia to North Africa and the Middle East. The post is jointly funded by CMF and ICMDA Eurasia. Jonny is Canadian and has just finished a two-year diploma in missiology at All Nations Christian College in Hertfordshire. He is fluent in Russian and has worked previously in short term mission with Operation Mobilisation in the former Soviet Union. This summer he ‘hit the ground running’as part of the CMF summer team to Ukraine. Jonny worships with the Good Shepherd Mission in Bethnal Green, London. Please remember Jonny in prayer

Upcoming Office move

CMF’s base Partnership House at 157 Waterloo Road in London is in the process of being sold by the owners and will be demolished some time between January 2007 and January 2008. This means that we need to move to new headquarters between December 2006 and December 2007. The CMF Executive has decided, in order to maximise staff retention, partnerships and accessibility, that we should:

• buy rather than rent
• stay in the South-East either in London or on the outskirts of London
• seek at least 5,000 square feet of space preferably in a stand alone building

An executive subcommittee will come back to the Executive in December with a more specific proposal.

Scottish staff

CMF’s part-time Scottish administrator Calum Mackellar has taken on an expanded role with the Scottish Council of Human Bioethics, which will become full time from January 2006. We are therefore looking for a new Scottish administrator to work two sessions a week based in CMF’s Scottish Office in Edinburgh. We are hugely grateful to Calum who in the last six months laid a framework for CMF’s developing ministry in Scotland and we wish him well in his exciting new post. In addition we are still keen to appoint a new part-time Scottish student staffworker (4 sessions) to follow on from Lorna Nunn who is now back in full time general practice. Further details available on request.

Finance matters

When you are reading this edition of CMF News, (and looking at my smiling face again!), I fully expect to be reviewing the Fellowship’s 9 months accounts, which will have been achieved by a great deal of hard work by Charles Otim and others.

I am also very grateful for the wonderful response of members who have received subscription reminders in the last month, and who have replied very positively and generously to my request to consider paying their current and past year’s subscriptions. Many have also given on top of their subscription to the various ministry funds of the Fellowship (General, Students, Mission and Overseas, Publications).

If your blue or yellow subscription reminder form is still peeping out at you from a vast pile of personal admin papers, may I encourage you to pick it up immediately and respond in whatever way you are able - even with the responses so far, there are many who have not yet replied, and I fully expect a six figure deficit at the year end unless we receive the vast bulk of these current subscriptions, and a signif-icant proportion of past subscriptions from those who are able to respond more generously. If you are in a position to make a further donation in the lead up to Christmas that would also be wonderful, particularly as you will have read elsewhere in both Triple Helix and CMF News of the increasingly dark days in which we are living, and all of the work CMF is spearheading to stem the tide.

If you have read through the Introducing CMF booklet in the last mailing, you may have come across the membership joining form included within it. Might you now consider handing this on to a colleague interested in CMF’s work in the Medical Profession? 1,000 new members all working full time and contributing a full subscription would make a big contribution to CMF’s accounts breaking even in 2005!