Finished reading Clusters: Creative Mid-Sized Missional Communities this morning. This book was co-authored by Bob Hopkins and Mike Breen and birthed out of the journey of a number of churches seeking to reach people in a post-Christendom UK.

I picked this up because I got a chance to meet Mike about a month ago and because Bridgeway, the church Andrea and I were a part of in Oklahoma, is one of the churches who have been adopting the principles of mid-sized community (MSC) that this book addresses.

The hardest part, for me, was that this book comes off very textbookish. Not sure if it is because of the writing style of Hopkins, who, I believe, writes most (discussing principles Breen developed), or because it is meant to be a manual of sorts for churches seeking to move toward MSC. In either case, it took some determination to push through some of the heavier text. If someone were to pick up the book outside of a true desire to understand and implement the principles within it, they would have difficulty, in my opinion, getting through it.

That being said, this book has done more for me in helping me understand how a church like Bridgeway is structured and operates - a church that I feel very much akin to.

I won't go into the full details (I did take a lot of notes in my Moleskine, which speaks well to the content), except to encourage anyone looking to find a new model of doing church to check it out. So much more in that our country is beginning to slip into the same post-Christendom challenges that have been found in the UK in the last couple of decades.

You can grab the book from the 3DM website, and even download a digital copy for around $10.