Mid-sized Clusters

Mike Breen has some interesting stuff about mid-sized clusters. I must admit that I am uneasy about mid-sized clusters, if they morph into mid-sized meetings. I do not want to go there, because that was what we had before the mega churches came along, and it was not great.

Nevertheless, I think the number fifty is important. In Being Church Where We Live, I described five Christian leaders with strong relationships with each other. If each of the five is discipling three or four others, and some have families and a couple are discipling someone else, that is ten people connected with each one (the number Jesus discipled). If each of the five leaders are doing the same, that would be fifty people making up this relationship set, to borrow a neutral term from mathematics.

Each of these fifty people are connected to the rest of the set by relationships. They would not all know each other well, but they would each know a few of the others really well. This is not a group in the usual sense of the word, but they are each connected together through their leaders to every other person in the set (by two degrees of separation, to use the jargon).

If the five leaders are balanced in their giftings, all spiritual resources needed should be available to any person within the set wherever they need it. The leaders will influence all of the fifty people in the set sufficiently to develop a common culture, (or way of doing things).

This set of Christians can function effectively, without the entire set ever meeting together. Meeting together for worship might be encouraging, but meeting to receive teaching would be pointless, because everyone would be at a different stage in their Christian walk. The Holy Spirit would be speaking to the leaders and to everyone in the set, so they would not need to get together for a common teaching.