Resources and methodology
Two field reports on what the national data says, one county read neighborhood by neighborhood, and the methodology behind every number in them. Written for pastors and planters, and citable by anyone who wants to check our work.
Census tracts mapped · 83,344 scored
Gospel impact domains
Nationwide coverage
The field reports
Field Notes No. 1
We went looking for where the gospel is thinnest in America. We did not expect the answer to be the new subdivision.
Where the ground is opening fastest, who is hardening beside a church that is already there, and the household types that only look reached.
White Paper No. 1
What 83,344 census tracts say about where the church is, where it is not, and which direction the ground is moving.
The full national picture, layer by layer, with the limits of each measure stated on the same page as its findings.
Field Notes No. 2
Four neighborhoods with the same gospel-access score and almost nothing else in common. What they share is that there is nowhere in them to run into anybody, and that the one thing each has stopped expecting is a room it can walk into without paying something at the door.
Twenty-seven churches and still a desert, a subdivision with no middle, and a college town with good bones and no congregation — what each already knows about itself, and the walk that tells you which one you are in.
Field Notes No. 3
Three kinds of neighborhood hold half of everyone living in America's deepest gospel deserts. Each one already knows something about itself that nobody says out loud, and each has stopped letting itself want one particular thing. Preach a true gospel to the wrong one of them and it arrives as law.
Why the four-minute gospel presentation labours what these three neighborhoods already know and hurries the one thing they never dared ask for, and what actually counts as good news in each.
Field Study No. 1
A county that looks fine on paper and isn’t, in fifteen places.
One county read neighborhood by neighborhood: where no congregation meets, where need hides behind comfort, and one move for whoever is best placed to make it.
Field Study No. 2
What the map of a denomination does to its preaching.
Every congregation in one denomination placed on the tract it stands in: the neighborhoods it is missing, the fastest-opening ground in the country it is almost absent from, and the one word that predicts whether it planted there.
Field Study No. 3
What a denomination's own polity classes say about the ground it holds.
Assemblies of God polity sorts every congregation by how far it stands on its own. The hardest ground the denomination holds is held by the churches a district is carrying, and in 657 census tracts a self-governing congregation and a dependent one share the same neighborhood.
Data report
Every congregation in the 2024 roster, read against all fourteen GospelGraph layers.
The reference behind Field Study No. 3. Access and three trajectory clocks, Shalom and its pillars, viability and built form, need and the eight alignment domains, all thirty household segments, field signals and instruments, the twenty-four neighborhood patterns, situation tags, and the nearest churchless high-need tract. Every figure, with its base.
Data report
Every congregation in the roster, read against all fourteen GospelGraph layers.
The smallest roster in the series on the same fourteen layers. The most church-dense ground of any denomination measured, the most exurban, and the one reformed roster with an Arid-tier share at the national rate. Every figure, with its base.
Data report
Every congregation in the directory, read against all fourteen GospelGraph layers.
The best-served, lowest-need ground of any roster measured, six household segments with no OPC presence at all, and seventeen presbyteries read side by side, two of which stand on national-average ground while the rest do not. Every figure, with its base.
Essays
Essay No. 1
Complexities of AI Morality
Models trained on the outputs of fallen image-bearers mirror that corruption back. Read through Reformed categories, alignment is law applied to an unregenerate nature: it restrains and exposes, and cannot produce what it commands.
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