Alex Bunn has settled in well as assistant student secretary. He will be overseeing summer teams and the national students' conference, amongst other things. This increase in capacity is already bearing fruit, for which we praise God.
The national students' committee met on 8 April and it was an exciting time of sharing and looking forward. Early projects include improving our freshers' strategy, recruitment and retention of student members and more structured BMA involvement. It has been great working with John Greenall but we now face the need to find a successor for him in the next several months – prayer and wisdom would be much appreciated.
Another transition has taken place on the Nucleus team, with Gavin Ling being succeeded by Hugh Ip, former president of the Imperial College CMF group. Hugh is already bringing his enthusiasm to bear on the current issue of Nucleus and we also have a number of new committee members.
The team of staffworkers has sadly said goodbye to Richard Knox (West Midlands) and Tim Hinks (South UK), but said hello to Roxana Whelan (East Midlands), Kerrie Bavidge (Scotland) and Helen Lane (West Midlands) – Helen was our Birmingham Relay worker last year. With Alex's arrival we are now in the process of moving over staffworker supervision and support from Peter Saunders' desk onto ours. Along with this we have begun developing a formal staffworker training and appraisal package. We continue to give thanks for a great team and want to continue improving the support we offer them.
As the summer rolls on, CMF summer teams will again go out across Europe and Eurasia. We are sending a large team to Tver and Samara in Russia. Also during July a number of CMF student staff and students will be in Sydney, Australia, for the ICMDA world congress. We are expecting that this landmark event will catalyse the growth of student movements in many countries and would value your prayers, especially for the students' and juniors' preconference on 7-11 July.
As we look to the year ahead, as well as the usual round of freshers' events, we plan to hold several evangelism training roadshows in the autumn using our excellent resources
Confident Christianity and Answering Other Faiths. We are also delighted to announce the main speakers for the national students' conference on 9-11 February 2007. Hugh Thomson will speak from Daniel and Rhona Knight will give the conference address; the overall conference theme will be 'The God we Serve is Able'.
As a family Rachael and I have reconsidered our future and decided not to move north after all. Although this has been in our minds for a while and was close to being realised, with current and future developments at CMF we agreed that I could be of more long term use to CMF by staying within easy reach of the office. This has been a difficult decision but one which we both feel has had the Lord's hand on it.
