Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of the new cluster model being introduced in my conference. On the surface it seems a positive move, but I believe in practice it will not be as beneficial as believed. Why? Geography. The idea is that United Methodist churches will ‘cluster’ together to do ministry in their community. While that may work with churches in a large city, it will not with those of us in smaller communities. The closest UMC to me is about 20 minutes away in a neighboring town. The communities are not the same. We are suppose to have four or more churches involved. If that is the case, that means we will have churches from four different communities. I could go on, but basically I feel it will be next to impossible for multiple rural area churches to come together and have a cooperative ministry to each individual community. With the price of gas, and the “time crunch” issues I believe there is a potential that individuals will choose either the cluster ministry or local church ministry, but not both.

I guess Google feels the same way. When I opened up this email from my DS about the cluster kickoff, I also noticed that Google had placed an advertisement to “End cluster headaches.” How did they know??? Perhaps I can bookmark this site for later use…