Introducing the new Shared Resources Hub

Life could be getting easier for churches: the first of the Church Life Fund’s shared services, the URC’s Shared Resources Hub and Helpdesk launched on 30 June. The Hub is an easily accessible website bringing together in one place a wide range of documents and policies useful to local churches, from job advert templates to GDPR guidance. The Helpdesk offers personal support by email and phone.

This is an outcome of the Church Life Review, which investigated how to relieve the burden on local churches. It found that some synods offered such resources, and some did not; and those who did, offered different versions.

‘It’s an immense relief to see it launched,’ says Myles Dunnett, the URC’s Director of Strategy and Programmes. ‘The first Church Life Fund shared service is up and running. It feels like we’ve taken a big first step on the journey to implementing the review.

‘It makes provision better for local churches, but it also offers economies of scale, because we have been duplicating and triplicating activities and costs that we could be doing once. Now we will have a single version of each document hosted in one place, and there will be someone on the Helpdesk to support local churches when they need more contextualised help or have more specific questions.’

Ross Furley-Smith, the Helpdesk and Hub Coordinator, says, “In my Synod experience, it was clear that local churches didn’t necessarily know where to go to find the documentation they needed. It was felt that it would be really helpful to have a place where everything is stored, and where they could ask for things. The Hub and Helpdesk are a sort of bridge between the local church and the synod and the denomination. It will help churches see what resources are available for them.’

The Resources Hub is in its early days, and will grow and develop. The main focus so far is on resources for GDPR and health and safety. There is human resources documentation too, such as shortlisting forms for interviews. Ministries documents are being uploaded, such as forms those training for ministry.

Coming soon are resources for local churches in the areas of property, governance, law and finance. ‘And then further down the line,’ says Myles, ‘we hope to integrate shared services. So say someone had an HR inquiry, they could call the Helpdesk, Ross could direct to someone in the team who could triage the query and escalate it, but there would also be supporting documents for general HR guidance. So it will be a really holistic easy-touse Offering for local churches.’

Content is grouped under seven headings. There is also an A-Z directory, and you can favourite resources that you need to return to. ‘We will always be responding to what the local churches are asking for,’ Ross says, ‘because we want this to be a place where they can find exactly what they need. We don’t know everything that people require, so we are listening, and we will constantly be expanding. And resources will need to be updated as policies change and new legislation comes in.’

Myles agrees. ‘There’s a line in 1 Corinthians, ‘Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.’ The Lord’s work is never done, basically! So this is a continual project which is going to evolve over time, to best serve churches as their needs change. So for example, if there is a demand for it, we could add a feature where people can log in and have an account. We didn’t do that for the launch because it introduced additional complexity, which we thought would be a barrier, but in the future we could move towards that.’

Ross has already had a lot of feedback from people using the hub. ‘It has been really, really positive,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s all been positive. That’s a huge relief, I can tell you, because people have been saying they find the hub very user-friendly, they like the layout of it, they find it easy to locate what they’re looking for. Which is exactly what it needs to be and what we want it to be.’

Now that the Resources Hub and Helpdesk are live, it is important that everyone in local churches who would find it useful know that it is there for them. Please spread the word.

The Resources Hub is here, and contains links to the Helpdesk