The person behind it
I built the tool I needed when I was on the street.
I am an evangelist, a software engineer, and a pastor-in-process in Anne Arundel County. I founded The Hood Shepherd and built GospelGraph out of three years of incarnational ministry in public housing, before I had a framework for any of it.
Founder and Executive Director,
The Hood Shepherd
Why this exists
I am an evangelist. That means standing in the middle.
I see the evangelist's role as a mediatorial one, and it runs in both directions at once. Neither side arrives already knowing the other.
Speaking for the lost
I advocate for what they actually need, and for the way the church speaks to them.
Speaking for the church
And I advocate for the church back to them, because they do not necessarily know what is on offer in the works of Christ and the words of Christ.
That is the centerpiece of why I built GospelGraph. What it does is introduce the two to one another.
The whole point is to make the Gospel good news to a person.
Trained
U.S. Naval Academy
MJ, University of Maryland
M.Div., Westminster Theological Seminary
Sent by
Missionary, Faith Community Church
In the ordination process,
Reformed denomination
Based
Annapolis, Maryland
Military retiree
The Hood Shepherd is a 501(c)(3)
Where this started
Harbor House came before any of this.
I spent three years doing mercy ministry in public housing and among the unhoused in Anne Arundel County through Harbor House. Before I wrote a single methodology document, before I ran a single Census query, before GospelGraph existed as anything other than a frustration.
The frustration was specific: I kept watching pastors and church planters walk into neighborhoods they had not read. Not bad people. Not lazy people. People who genuinely wanted to be useful and did not have anything to orient them. They were deciding where to plant, and where to invest three years of their lives, on instinct and a drive-by read.
I built the tool because I had seen what it cost to not have one.
Formation
An odd résumé for this kind of work.
None of it was planned as a sequence. It is just what happened.
U.S. Naval Academy
Taught me to operate under pressure and to take institutional work seriously.
Northrop Grumman
Production software engineering. Taught me to build things rather than just describe them.
University of Maryland
Master of Journalism. The newsroom trained me not to publish until I actually understood what I was looking at.
Harbor House
Three years
Mercy ministry in public housing and among the unhoused, three years before I had a framework for any of it.
Westminster Theological Seminary
M.Div. Harvie Conn's biblical urban theology finally gave me a framework for what I had been doing on the street.
GospelGraph
I did not hire anyone to build it. Nights and weekends, while the rest of my life was happening. The tool reflects that: not a product designed by a team optimizing for a market.
Sent and accountable
I am not operating independently.
A lot of ministry tech floats free of any real ecclesial accountability. It runs on vision statements, advisory boards, and the founder's personal credibility. The Hood Shepherd has elders. It has a sending church. It has people who know me and can ask hard questions about whether the work is actually serving the mission it claims to serve.
Sending church
Faith Community Church, Anne Arundel County
Ordination
In process, Reformed denomination
The data serves the pastor. The pastor serves the block. If the tool ever starts reversing that order, someone should say so. There are people in my life whose job it is to do exactly that.
The theology underneath
Presence precedes program.
The church's most common failure in hard neighborhoods is not lack of resources or lack of desire. It is lack of knowledge. You cannot love your neighbor well if you have not yet figured out who your neighbor is and what their actual life looks like.
Harvie Conn spent his career making this argument from Scripture: shalom is not only a spiritual category. Its absence is visible. Shortened lifespans, fractured households, streets people do not feel safe on. These are diagnostic. The Gospel is meant to touch all of it, and where it has, you can see it over time.
The tool is a servant of that conviction, not the conviction itself. You still have to go.
Get in touch
I read my email.
If you are a denominational leader thinking about licensing, a church planter trying to make sense of a specific neighborhood, or a journalist working on something in this space, reach out. I respond to everything eventually, and faster when the question is specific.
Support the mission
The harvest is plentiful. The laborers are few.
The Hood Shepherd is entirely donor-funded. A tax-deductible gift sustains the neighborhood intelligence infrastructure that equips church planters and mercy workers to go where the Gospel is needed most.