Gospel Desert Index: where evangelical Gospel presence is thinnest
A 0–100 score for every U.S. census tract. Higher means less structural access to evangelical witness.
Use it to find the neighborhoods where a church is hardest to reach, before you commit people, money and years to a place.
What is the Gospel Desert Index?
The Gospel Desert Index (GDI) is a 0–100 score of the structural Gospel-access gap in a U.S. census tract: the higher the score, the less access residents have to evangelical Gospel presence. It sums four equally weighted domains (church access, structural absence, social fragility and population reach) and sorts every tract into five tiers: Watered, Sparse, Dry, Arid and Desert. Of 84,414 U.S. tracts, 83,344 carry a GDI score and 1,070 do not.
The idea is borrowed from the food desert. A food desert is a place where residents lack reasonable access to nutritious food because of structural factors, not personal failure. A Gospel desert is a tract where the observable conditions that usually make sustained evangelical witness possible are missing or badly worn down: an accessible church, institutional anchors, a neighborhood with daytime life in it.
That is a structural claim, not a spiritual one. A high GDI does not mean God is absent; a Desert-tier tract may hold faithful believers and house churches no dataset can see. It tells you where to look closely before you assume a place is already served.
What do the GDI tiers mean?
Tier edges are fixed cut points on the 0–100 composite, not quantiles, so the tiers are not evenly filled. Over four fifths of scored tracts land in Sparse or Dry, and fewer than one in a hundred reaches Desert. The counts below are from the index the site currently serves, as published on the full GDI methodology.
A GDI of 60 or higher takes in both the Arid and Desert tiers, where the index finds the least access. The comparison of GDI with need pressure on the methodology page splits at that same line.
- Watered, 0 to under 25: 1,277 tracts, 1.5% of scored. Multiple accessible churches, active community presence, low structural barriers.
- Sparse, 25 to under 45: 26,104 tracts, 31.3%. Some church access, with meaningful gaps in coverage or accessibility.
- Dry, 45 to under 60: 39,324 tracts, 47.2%. Structural barriers are present; church access is thin or declining.
- Arid, 60 to under 75: 15,846 tracts, 19.0%. Significant absence of Gospel presence and of the structures that support it.
- Desert, 75 to 100: 793 tracts, 1.0%. Critical priority for incarnational church planting.
- Unscored: 1,070 tracts. The pipeline declined to score them. They are shown in their own color on the map and never rendered as a zero.
How is the Gospel Desert Index calculated?
Each domain is scored 0–25 by percentile rank against the full national tract set, and the four are added together. No domain outweighs another. Because the domains are ranks, the GDI measures relative severity: in the words of the methodology, a tract scoring 75 is more structurally desert-like than 75% of U.S. tracts, not past some absolute line.
Church access weighs distance from the tract centroid to the nearest church (40%), churches per square mile of land (40%) and the number of distinct denominations present (20%). Structural absence combines daytime isolation, institutional thinness and low-wage dominance from Census LODES employment data (40%, 35% and 25%). Social fragility reads poverty (50%), housing vacancy (30%) and unemployment (20%). Population reach is an urgency term: a Desert-tier tract holding 8,000 residents carries more aggregate need than one holding 400.
One thing surprises most readers. Distance to the nearest church is the strongest single input (r = +0.44 against log miles), while the count of congregations inside the tract is very nearly uncorrelated with the score (r = +0.02) and is not an input at all. A tract can sit 800 feet from a church just over its boundary and hold none of its own. So do not read a GDI as "this tract has no church." The church count is its own field.
What data is the GDI built from?
Church locations come from four sources, deduplicated against each other before they are joined to tract geography: OpenStreetMap places of worship; the IRS 990 Business Master File, restricted to Christian and Protestant church filers; ChurchesUSA, a purchased congregation directory; and Overture Places, a web-derived places corpus added in September 2026. Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witness records are excluded from the church layer. Neighborhood context comes from American Community Survey 5-year estimates and Census LODES employment data. The data sources page explains each one.
Some tracts rest on thin ground: fewer than 200 residents, fewer than 50 housing units, more than 5,000 jobs against fewer than 100 residents, or more than four fifths water. 1,373 tracts carry such a flag, 308 of them scored with a tier (including 34 Arid and 4 Desert). Check the flag before you quote a number.
How should a church use the GDI?
The index was designed for a three-stage planting workflow: choose metros by their Desert-tier tracts and the people in them, narrow a metro to 8–12 candidate tracts, then assess each candidate on the ground with a field report. The GDI answers the first two stages, not the third. Church planting site selection walks through all three.
The most useful single read is to set the GDI beside need pressure, the weight a place is carrying right now. The methodology splits them at a GDI of 60 and a pressure of 50. High GDI with high need is the Desert cell: prioritize it for planting assessment, partnership and field validation. High GDI with low need is Empty: there is little to draw on when pressure rises, so build reach before it is urgent. Low GDI with high need is Healthy, where reach is not what is missing and the work is to answer the weight of the place. Low GDI with low need is Quiet: build in the quiet season. The two numbers are compared, never blended.
What the Gospel Desert Index cannot tell you
The GDI can miss house churches, multilingual ministries, informal networks and congregations with a weak public data footprint; small, storefront and immigrant churches are under-registered in every source. It can also count organizations that have closed. And failed plants are absent from every church dataset, so prior failure in a tract is invisible.
Formal employment data misses informal neighborhood life, and five-year survey estimates lag fast change. Field-check a score before you use it in a public claim.
For what the map has shown so far, read The desert moved to the growth edge, which finds the steepest access gaps in new subdivisions and exurbs rather than urban cores; The desert is thin, four neighborhoods with the same score and almost nothing else in common; and State of the Field, the national survey across 83,344 tracts.
Common questions
What are the Gospel Desert Index tiers?
How is the Gospel Desert Index calculated?
Does a high GDI mean a neighborhood has no church?
Does the GDI measure whether God is at work in a neighborhood?
See the GDI for your own neighborhood
Type any U.S. address into a free field report to see its tract’s tier, or open the map to compare the tracts around it.