Annual meeting cancelled

It is with regret that, due to the industrial action by the train drivers on 30 September 2023 and the impact this will have on the committee and members being able to get to London, we have to announce the cancellation of the 2023 Annual Meeting.

In lieu of the Annual Meeting, please find below the report from ACE Chair Sally Churchus.

We also ask that all member’s vote on:

  1. ACE 2022 AGM minutes (see ACE 2022 AGM minutes attached below and on the voting page and on the voting page)
  2. Accept the Accounts for year ending 31/12/22  (see Balance sheet 2023 signed attached below)
  3. Appoint the Independent Examiner for the Accounts
  4. Vote the committe on for another year

Details of how to vote are available here (member logon required): 2023 Member Voting

Chairman’s Report 30/09/2023

We have had a successful year, maintaining our membership at around 200.

We would like to thank Nigel Smeeth for being on the committee for the last two years, as Secretary during the last year which has included managing the Awards entries and scoring figures; but he has decided he needs to step down. He has been a great help to the committee and been extremely efficient. We are therefore looking for a new Secretary and also someone else to come on to the committee without any specific responsibilities. If you think you might be able to help with either of these roles, please contact us on to see what is involved.

I would also like to thank all the committee members for giving their time and expertise to ACE, Bob Peters for his excellent Ideas Forum each month, Alan Rickards for continuing to manage our accounts and membership, Tim Cooke for maintaining our website and helping with IT; as well as Biddy Wigley. As an organisation we cannot operate without a committee, so please pray for us- we have a lot of other commitments to juggle with running ACE. Thank you.

We have managed to hold a successful regional workshop in South London in May, which was greatly appreciated and enjoyed by 11 editors and we are hoping to be able to run one in Cheshire next year. Members have also benefitted from the tips included in the monthly Ideas Forums and the interesting content for us to use in our magazines, kindly produced by Bob Peters. If you have any suitable articles not specific to your area, please send it to him for inclusion on as it would be helpful to have some more contributions, especially of shorter items.

This year’s awards competition has had far fewer number of entries compared to last year as presumably more churches are finding it affordable to use colour printing for their magazines – which is a good thing! We know that even those magazines that haven’t won a prize have been lovingly produced and are appreciated by their readers.

We have managed to gain some new members through advertising in the Church Times and the Methodist Recorder this year, although it is pretty expensive. The magazine for the URC, Reform, is on our ‘to do’ list. We would ask everyone to encourage new members by telling other editors and churches about the benefits of joining ACE- we want to help and inspire as many editors as possible! Thank you.

May God bless you and your work as church magazine editors.

Sally Churchus
ACE Chair

Balance Sheet 2023 Signed

ACE – 2022 AGM minutes v2