Every congregation in the roster, read against all fourteen GospelGraph layers
The reference for the smallest roster in the series. Every Associate Reformed Presbyterian congregation was placed on the census tract its building stands in and that tract read against every national layer GospelGraph holds. What follows is the whole of it, layer by layer, with the national figure beside every number.
Two hundred and forty-three tracts is a small base. Shares here move by four tenths of a point per tract, and any figure from the two half-coverage layers rests on about a hundred tracts. The report states those bases where they matter and does not draw conclusions the sample cannot carry.
The rules are the same as the Assemblies of God report. Measures are taken on distinct tracts, not on congregations. Every share is taken against its own layer's scored base. The national column is the 84,414 tracts of the church-fit index unless a layer says otherwise.
The roster arrived already geocoded to 2020 tracts. Of 257 rows, 256 landed on a scored tract; one carried no geoid. That is the cleanest join in the series.
The 256 occupy 243 distinct tracts. Eleven tracts hold two congregations and one holds three. The roster carries no presbytery or classification column, so this report has no structural cut of the kind the Assemblies of God and OPC reports carry.
| Layer | ARP tracts scored | Share | National base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Church-fit index | 243 | 100% | 84,414 |
| Shalom v2 | 243 | 100% | 95,837 |
| Both trajectory clocks, MVI, segmentation, patterns | 243 | 100% | 84,414 |
| Situation tags | 235 | 96.7% | 95,837 |
| Field signals | 137 | 56.4% | 57,412 |
| Field instruments | 112 | 46.1% | 43,044 |
| Nearest churchless high-need tract | 243 | 100% | 547 targets |
Twenty-three states hold a congregation. Two of them, the Carolinas, hold 126 of the 256, which is 49 percent of the denomination.
| County | Congregations |
|---|---|
| Mecklenburg County, NC | 14 |
| York County, SC | 13 |
| Iredell County, NC | 11 |
| Gaston County, NC | 10 |
| Queens County, NY | 9 |
| Guilford County, NC | 7 |
| Richland County, SC | 7 |
| Los Angeles County, CA | 4 |
Four of the top five counties sit within an hour of Charlotte. Queens is the one that does not fit the pattern: nine congregations, the largest concentration outside the Southeast, and the reason the roster's gateway figures in section 8 are not zero.
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| GDI (access), mean | 48.1 | 50.0 |
| Churches in tract, mean | 16.5 | 6.8 |
| Miles to nearest other church, mean | 0.60 | 0.96 |
| Tracts with no church at all | 0.4% | 11.6% |
| Tracts in the two worst tiers (GDI 60+) | 20.2% | 20.3% |
| Tracts in the Desert tier (GDI 75+) | 0.0% | 1.0% |
| Tier | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Watered, 0 to 25 | 2.1% | 1.6% |
| Sparse, 25 to 45 | 36.6% | 30.9% |
| Dry, 45 to 60 | 41.6% | 46.3% |
| Arid, 60 to 75 | 19.8% | 18.9% |
| Desert, 75 to 100 | 0.0% | 1.0% |
The tier distribution is close to the country's and the Arid share is at the national rate, which sets the ARP apart from the PCA and OPC. What is not close to the country is density. The average ARP tract holds 16.5 other churches, two and a half times the national figure and the highest of any roster in the series. One tract in 243 holds no other church.
| Archetype | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Suburban | 57.6% | 42.8% |
| Exurban | 19.8% | 12.6% |
| Urban, sparse | 17.7% | 32.1% |
| Rural | 2.9% | 4.6% |
| Urban, dense | 2.1% | 7.9% |
Fifteen points more suburban and seven points more exurban than the country, and less than a third as present in dense urban tracts. The exurban figure is the highest in the series and is what the Charlotte-region footprint looks like from the census.
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| MVI composite | 50.5 | 51.2 |
| Street intersection density | 49.5 | 50.0 |
| Third place density | 45.6 | 44.2 |
| Public room density | 48.4 | 47.8 |
| Encounter: thin or fragmented fabric | 48.1% | 45.1% |
| Encounter: neighborhood tissue | 36.6% | 42.2% |
| Encounter: civic anchor node | 13.6% | 11.4% |
| Encounter: commercial node | 1.6% | 1.3% |
| Domain | ARP | Nation | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environment | 53.2 | 50.0 | +3.2 |
| Reconciliation | 52.4 | 50.0 | +2.4 |
| Health | 51.0 | 50.1 | +0.9 |
| Economic opportunity | 49.1 | 49.9 | −0.8 |
| Family stability | 48.8 | 50.0 | −1.2 |
| Education | 47.7 | 50.0 | −2.3 |
| Safety and justice | 46.6 | 50.0 | −3.4 |
| Housing stability | 45.5 | 50.0 | −4.5 |
The domains split evenly, three above the nation and five below, and none by more than four and a half points. This is the flattest alignment profile in the series: the ARP's ground asks for roughly what the country's ground asks for.
| Measure | ARP | Nation | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 composite | 49.3 | 49.6 | −0.3 |
| 2024 living pillar | 49.3 | 49.5 | −0.2 |
| 2024 health pillar | 48.6 | 48.2 | +0.4 |
| 2024 hope pillar | 51.4 | 50.3 | +1.1 |
| 2020 composite | 50.2 | 50.4 | −0.2 |
| Change, 2020 to 2024 | −0.89 | −0.76 | −0.13 |
| Tracts that fell since 2020 | 57.6% | 54.6% | +3.0 |
On level the ARP is the country, to within a point on every pillar. On direction it is slightly worse: the ground fell by 0.89 against 0.76, and 57.6 percent of tracts fell against 54.6. Three points on a base of 243 tracts is seven tracts, so treat the direction as a lean rather than a finding.
| Domain | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Life and health | 33.3% | 28.7% |
| Justice and protection | 23.4% | 29.3% |
| Provision and work | 21.6% | 19.9% |
| Household and generations | 20.7% | 19.0% |
| Social fabric | 0.9% | 3.1% |
This is the layer where the ARP departs from the country most, and it departs in the encouraging direction on two of the three clocks.
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Change per four years, mean | 1.85 | 1.39 |
| Opening | 55.3% | 54.3% |
| Opening fast | 19.4% | 13.6% |
| Hardening | 21.2% | 25.7% |
| Hardening fast | 4.1% | 6.4% |
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Slope per year, mean | −0.053 | 0.005 |
| Total change across vintages, mean | −0.19 | 0.03 |
| Stable | 64.6% | 64.4% |
| Easing, accelerating | 9.1% | 10.6% |
| Intensifying, accelerating | 10.3% | 10.4% |
| Intensifying, decelerating | 4.1% | 3.7% |
| Easing, decelerating | 5.8% | 3.5% |
| Easing | 3.3% | 3.3% |
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Direction: hardening | 83.7% | 80.0% |
| Direction: hardening fast | 16.3% | 20.0% |
| Rising pressure: domain only | 61.6% | 56.3% |
| Rising pressure: confirmed | 37.5% | 39.8% |
| Long exposure | 30.4% | 18.6% |
| Vacancy delta, latest | −0.0104 | −0.0078 |
| Cost burden delta, latest | +0.0085 | +0.0079 |
| Poverty delta, latest | −0.0024 | −0.0048 |
The activation delta is omitted for the reason given in the Assemblies of God report: its national mean is a tail artifact.
Access is improving under ARP tracts on both clocks that measure it. GIM v3 puts the change at 1.85 per four years against 1.39, with the fast-opening share at 19.4 percent against 13.6. The four-vintage trajectory shows the access score falling at 0.053 a year where the country's rises at 0.005, a total of about a fifth of a point over the four vintages. The ground is getting more churched, faster than the country, which on a roster already at 16.5 churches per tract reads as more of the same rather than as new reach.
The field instruments add one figure that runs the other way. Long exposure, the share of resolved tracts that have carried rising pressure across several vintages, is 30.4 percent against 18.6 nationally. On a base of 112 tracts that is thirty-four congregations sitting in places where the pressure has been rising for a long time.
Weighted by full composition and by household count. Lift is the ARP share divided by the national share.
| Segment | LifeMode | Nation | ARP | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Affluent Owner Family Suburbs | L1 | 13.7% | 15.7% | 1.15x |
| Exurban Working Homeowners | L1 | 13.6% | 17.7% | 1.30x |
| Dense Professional and Solo Households | L1 | 10.3% | 7.4% | 0.72x |
| Cost-Pressed Family Suburbs | L1 | 9.3% | 6.1% | 0.65x |
| Highway Corridor Commuters | L9 | 6.6% | 9.4% | 1.43x |
| High-Achievement Homeowners | L1 | 3.7% | 4.0% | 1.06x |
| Established Blue-Collar Homeowners | L2 | 2.9% | 6.0% | 2.05x |
| Affluent Mature Owner Couples | L5 | 2.7% | 3.3% | 1.25x |
| Middle-Income Established Homeowners | L5 | 2.5% | 2.2% | 0.87x |
| Urban Residential Block Holdouts | L8 | 2.5% | 2.8% | 1.14x |
| Affluent New-Build Families | L7 | 2.3% | 3.0% | 1.33x |
| Young Multifamily Workers | L2 | 2.2% | 1.6% | 0.70x |
| Car-Oriented Creative Renters | L4 | 2.2% | 1.3% | 0.58x |
| Low-Income Solo Holdouts | L10 | 2.1% | 2.9% | 1.35x |
| Car-Oriented Working Gateway Families | L6 | 2.1% | 0.6% | 0.27x |
| Professional Multifamily Households | L5 | 2.0% | 1.2% | 0.60x |
| Working New-Subdivision Families | L7 | 2.0% | 1.9% | 0.97x |
| Multifamily First-Timers | L7 | 1.9% | 3.2% | 1.68x |
| Crowded Commuter Families | L2 | 1.8% | 2.0% | 1.07x |
| Industrial-Fringe Homeowners | L10 | 1.7% | 3.3% | 1.89x |
| Young Urban Working Renters | L10 | 1.6% | 0.6% | 0.37x |
| Affluent Transit-City Creatives | L4 | 1.5% | 0.0% | 0.00x |
| Dense Gateway Families | L6 | 1.5% | 0.5% | 0.30x |
| Crowded Extended-Family Homeowners | L5 | 1.4% | 1.0% | 0.69x |
| Logistics-Corridor Homeowners | L6 | 1.3% | 0.5% | 0.41x |
| Transit-Dependent Gateway Households | L6 | 1.3% | 0.7% | 0.55x |
| Established Urban Gateway Homeowners | L6 | 1.2% | 0.2% | 0.18x |
| Dense Solo Gateway Renters | L6 | 0.8% | 0.5% | 0.58x |
| Garden Apartment Young Adults | L3 | 0.7% | 0.5% | 0.71x |
| Bus-Dependent Renters | L8 | 0.5% | 0.2% | 0.29x |
The shape is blue-collar and exurban. Established Blue-Collar Homeowners at 2.05x is the strongest single lift on any roster in the series, followed by Industrial-Fringe Homeowners at 1.89x and Multifamily First-Timers at 1.68x. Every one of the six gateway segments runs under half the national share, four of them under a third. Affluent Transit-City Creatives is absent altogether.
| LifeMode | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| L1 Family suburbs and exurbs | 49.0% | 52.1% |
| L9 Corridor commuters | 11.5% | 6.8% |
| L5 Established and mature | 8.2% | 8.3% |
| L7 New-build | 8.2% | 5.2% |
| L2 Working established | 7.4% | 6.0% |
| L10 Holdouts and fringe | 6.2% | 4.6% |
| L6 Gateway | 4.1% | 9.4% |
| L8 Urban residential | 3.3% | 3.4% |
| L3 Young adult apartment | 1.2% | 0.9% |
| L4 Creative renters | 0.8% | 3.3% |
| Modifier | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Long-commute rhythm | 16.5% | 14.1% |
| Public housing community | 15.2% | 15.4% |
| Displacement pressure | 14.4% | 11.7% |
| Elevated chronic-health burden | 8.2% | 12.8% |
| Household crowding pressure | 7.0% | 11.4% |
| Military-adjacent | 7.0% | 11.2% |
| HBCU-adjacent | 4.1% | 2.2% |
| Limited-English concentration | 3.7% | 5.4% |
| University-town context | 3.7% | 2.3% |
| Renter cost pressure | 3.3% | 2.9% |
| Retirement-community profile | 0.8% | 1.9% |
| Farmworker concentration | 0.8% | 1.9% |
The ARP is the one roster in the series over-indexed on HBCU-adjacent tracts, at nearly twice the national rate, which follows from where its 126 Carolina congregations sit. It runs under the country on chronic-health burden, crowding and military adjacency by about a third each.
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Child share of population | 21.4% | 21.4% |
| Elderly share | 18.4% | 17.6% |
| Working-age share | 60.2% | 60.9% |
| Family household share | 66.5% | 64.7% |
| Racial diversity index | 0.528 | 0.528 |
| Age diversity index | 0.838 | 0.817 |
Scored on 137 of the 243 tracts, 56.4 percent. Every share below is of those 137.
| Measure | ARP | Nation |
|---|---|---|
| Signal score, mean | 46.2 | 49.8 |
| Tier: watch | 63.5% | 70.6% |
| Tier: hot | 27.0% | 22.7% |
| Tier: positive | 9.5% | 6.7% |
| Flag: thin presence | 69.3% | 74.2% |
| Flag: daytime isolation | 59.9% | 65.2% |
| Flag: housing pressure | 46.7% | 53.7% |
| Flag: accessible desert | 10.9% | 14.8% |
| Flag: new activity | 16.8% | 7.7% |
| Flag: easing | 5.8% | 4.9% |
| Flag: intensifying | 5.1% | 4.8% |
| Flag: school-age pressure | 2.2% | 3.7% |
| Flag: displacement risk | 0.7% | 1.4% |
The new-activity flag runs at more than twice the national rate, 16.8 percent against 7.7, which agrees with the GIM v3 fast-opening share in section 7. The hot tier also runs above the nation. On a base of 137 tracts the new-activity figure is 23 congregations.
Share of tracts where the pattern is unhealthy. Ten risk-named patterns are swapped before counting and marked.
| Pattern | ARP | Nation | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Household mix | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.0 |
| Children in the city | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.0 |
| Old people everywhere | 100.0% | 99.3% | +0.7 |
| Life cycle | 98.8% | 99.3% | −0.5 |
| Neighborhood tissue | 81.1% | 85.6% | −4.5 |
| Stable family anchor | 86.8% | 84.5% | +2.3 |
| Social belonging | 71.2% | 78.1% | −6.9 |
| Caregiver pressure * | 79.4% | 72.5% | +6.9 |
| Community fragmentation * | 67.9% | 71.5% | −3.6 |
| Family pressure * | 72.0% | 65.9% | +6.1 |
| Civic anchor node | 63.0% | 64.9% | −1.9 |
| Activity nodes | 62.1% | 63.6% | −1.5 |
| Small public squares | 63.0% | 62.8% | +0.2 |
| Mosaic of subcultures | 65.0% | 61.5% | +3.5 |
| Network of paths | 58.4% | 57.7% | +0.7 |
| Burnout belt * | 60.1% | 57.0% | +3.1 |
| School-age pressure * | 53.9% | 50.8% | +3.1 |
| Under-resourced * | 48.6% | 50.1% | −1.5 |
| Third-space deficit * | 43.2% | 49.7% | −6.5 |
| Car-dependent exurb * | 48.6% | 49.5% | −0.9 |
| Identifiable neighborhood | 1.2% | 4.8% | −3.6 |
| Elder isolation * | 0.0% | 0.4% | −0.4 |
| Transient renters * | 0.0% | 0.1% | −0.1 |
* risk-named, polarity swapped before counting.
Four patterns depart from the nation by six points or more, two in each direction. Social belonging and third-space deficit are healthier than the country by about seven points each; caregiver pressure and family pressure are worse by about the same. Places with intact public life and strained households, which is a fair one-line description of an established Southern suburb.
Resolved on 235 of 243 tracts, 96.7 percent.
| Tag | ARP | Nation | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thin church ecology | 51.4% | 62.9% | 0.82 |
| Housing fragility | 27.2% | 36.9% | 0.74 |
| Rising need | 23.0% | 13.6% | 1.69 |
| Daytime isolation | 13.6% | 24.1% | 0.56 |
| Majority-minority | 9.9% | 9.8% | 1.01 |
| Gospel absence | 9.5% | 6.8% | 1.40 |
| Compound stress | 9.1% | 5.6% | 1.63 |
| Chronic disinvestment | 8.6% | 3.9% | 2.21 |
| Accessible desert | 8.6% | 11.1% | 0.77 |
| Pressure rising | 8.2% | 11.9% | 0.69 |
| Conditions improving | 6.2% | 8.9% | 0.70 |
| Health crisis | 5.8% | 4.8% | 1.21 |
| Mercy entry indicated | 4.9% | 4.2% | 1.17 |
| New church activity | 4.5% | 4.6% | 0.98 |
Chronic disinvestment is raised on ARP tracts at 2.21 times the national rate, rising need at 1.69, compound stress at 1.63. Those are the three tags for long-running hardship rather than acute hardship, and they agree with the long-exposure figure from the field instruments. On a base of 235 tracts, chronic disinvestment is twenty tracts.
| Place | Congregations |
|---|---|
| Mecklenburg County, NC (two tracts) | 33 and 21 |
| Durham County, NC | 18 |
| Anderson County, SC | 15 |
| Richland County, SC | 11 |
Two churchless high-need tracts in Mecklenburg County are the nearest for 54 ARP congregations between them, a fifth of the denomination. That is the Charlotte footprint again: the roster's centre of mass is close to two of the 547 and far from the rest.
Six congregations is too few to describe, so the section stops here. Two facts carry: the ARP's rate of frontier presence, 2.3 percent, is the highest of the four rosters, and its mirror ratio of 1.7 to 1 is the lowest. On both it is the least behind. It is also 256 churches.
The roster carries no presbytery, classification or planting column, so the structural cuts the Assemblies of God and OPC reports run are not available. The only division the data supports is geographic, and it is a stark one: the Carolinas against everywhere else.
A presbytery column would turn this into a real comparison. The ARP has nine presbyteries and the difference between, say, Catawba and Northeast on any of the measures above would be worth knowing. It is the first thing to ask for.
All four columns are tract means on distinct tracts, computed the same way.
| Measure | ARP | PCA | OPC | AG | Nation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Congregations placed | 256 | 1,734 | 334 | 11,008 | — |
| Distinct tracts | 243 | 1,674 | 331 | 9,650 | 84,414 |
| States with a church | 23 | 50 | 44 | 50 | — |
| Access (GDI) | 48.1 | 46.1 | 46.1 | 50.3 | 50.0 |
| Need pressure | 50.7 | 48.5 | 45.1 | 52.7 | 50.2 |
| Poverty | 12.2% | 12.1% | 9.9% | 14.7% | 13.2% |
| Churches in tract | 16.5 | 10.8 | 8.5 | 9.7 | 6.8 |
| Miles to nearest church | 0.60 | 0.57 | 0.77 | 1.08 | 0.96 |
| MVI | 50.5 | 55.6 | 54.8 | 51.2 | 51.2 |
| Suburban | 57.6% | 52.8% | 56.5% | 54.2% | 42.8% |
| Exurban | 19.8% | 8.8% | 8.5% | 11.8% | 12.6% |
| Rural | 2.9% | 1.5% | 1.2% | 2.8% | 4.6% |
| Urban dense | 2.1% | 6.8% | 3.0% | 5.3% | 7.9% |
| Access tier: Arid | 19.8% | 10.9% | 7.9% | 18.0% | 18.9% |
| Shalom 2024 | 49.3 | 51.5 | 54.9 | 47.3 | 49.6 |
| GIM v3 change per 4 yr | 1.85 | — | 1.39 | 1.37 | 1.39 |
| Share in an opening desert | 2.3% | 1.6% | 0.6% | 2.1% | — |
| Frontier presence against chance | 0.95 | 0.58 | 0.23 | 0.85 | — |
| Mirror to frontier ratio | 1.7 | 2.0 | 3.5 | 2.0 | — |
The ARP is the most exurban roster by a wide margin, the most church-dense by a wider one, and the only reformed roster with an Arid share at the national rate. It is also the closest to chance on the frontier and the lowest on the mirror ratio. The PCA's GIM v3 figure is not in its audit run and is left blank rather than estimated.
Sections 1 through 12 are denom:audit on arp-gospelgraph-dump.csv, saved as arp-full-layer-audit.txt. Section 8's thirty-segment table is arp-segments-all-30.csv. Section 13 is denom:frontier. All in design/denominations/, with the scripts and column dictionary in README.md and RUNBOOK.md.
Published alongside this at gospelgraph.com
Every GospelGraph resource · the glossary, the methodology and the rest of the field reports.