How clusters (multi-parish) work

A cluster lets one team serve several parishes from a single sign-in, while each parish keeps its own data separate and intact.

The cluster home

• After signing in, the pastor sees a cluster home that rolls up each parish's day — birthdays, care, approvals, Masses, and celebrants across all of them; these combined roll-up views are pastor-only.
• Other shared staff signing in at the cluster home go straight to the parish switcher — they work one parish at a time.
• A parish switcher sets which parish you are working in; everything you do then applies to that parish.
• The cluster home offers Sign in with Google, alongside email/password, for any active member of the cluster — the same Google account your parish already uses, no separate setup.

Shared staff

Cluster staff can be shared across the member parishes, so a secretary or priest serving the whole cluster signs in once and works in each parish without separate accounts.

What stays separate

Each parish's records live in that parish — the cluster home shows roll-ups and lets you drill in, but it never mixes one parish's data into another.

Pastorate mode and vocabulary

A grouping can be presented as a pastorate — with your diocese's own word instead of "cluster" — see *Naming a grouping*. Everything works the same; only the wording (and, once its web address is set up, the address) changes.

More across the grouping

• Announce once, everywhere — a pastorate-wide message that each parish delivers from its own email to its own people. See *Sending a pastorate-wide announcement*.
• Rotate celebrants — assign who says which Mass where across all the churches in one grid. See *The pastorate Mass-rotation grid*.

Tips

• Your cluster sign-in is distinct from a single-parish login; it authorizes you only for your cluster's parishes.
• Use the roll-ups to spot what needs attention across parishes, then switch in to act.
• If a parish is suspended, it drops out of the switcher and the roll-ups and can't be worked in until it is active again. The other parishes carry on exactly as before.
• A suspended parish also stops counting as part of the grouping when the home checks who may sign in. So a grouping needs at least one active parish to sign anyone in at all — if every parish in it were suspended, the home would stay reachable but no one could get past the sign-in screen until one is active again. That is deliberate, and never a fault at your end.