GIS + Ministry: A match made in…
The rainy, grey weather this morning [Seattle's version of summer], didn’t bother me as I left my 8am meeting. Part of my responsibility as Director of Outreach at First United Methodist Church in Seattle is to head up the community groups. I met with the head of our adult council and ministry intern to vision our community group ministry for the year. As the three of us gathered over coffee at the local direct-trade coffee shop, an architect; seminary student-barista; and I [seminary student-communications/outreach director] began to cast a vision for what small group ministry could look like in a congregation situated in an affluent-urban-predominantly single-professional-type of neighborhood with members who commute anywhere from .5-30 miles away.
The New York Times 2010 Census Map of 98109, the zip where First Church is located.
As our conversation turned from the make-up of a small group [conversations, participation, discipleship, attendance] to metrics, we all kind of lit up when we started talking about infographics and surveys as tools for ministry. So, we ran with it. What if we developed a congregational survey that could help us understand where our congregation spends their time outside of Sunday worship? Where do they work? Drop their kids off at school? Go out to eat or have coffee? How many church activities do they participate in? Then what if we took this info and imposed it on a map of the city so we could see where clusters formed? What the relationships are among all of these factors? I know it seems like a ridiculously meticulous survey and probably a pain in the ass to fill out, but if we did it right, imagine the information we could have to inform ministry decisions.
Between the information we have from outfits like MissionInsite or from our conference’s District Planning and Strategy team and conversations in the community, we have a number of tools we can access to create something great. With a combination of vibrant worship and authentic community that is partly informed by this data, I am hopeful that the ministry at church will reflect the spiritual and social needs of our local community.
I enjoy data gathering and crunching as much as the next person [I really do] but I haven’t lost sight of the need to also gather the stories that give life to this data. If anyone has any good systems in place that can do this well, I’m all ears.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be starting with a draft of the congregational survey while also beginning to map out a strategic plan for our community group ministry and some sort of manual/resource for our lay pastors and group leaders. Once we finalize the survey, we’ll use google forms or surveymonkey to send it out, then run the data with a friend who has agreed to help using ArcGIS.
Watch for updates. Would love to hear what’s working where you do ministry.
If a Google Form was used, I bet you have the data dynamically overlaid on Google Maps instead of having someone do a one-time merge into ArcGIS. You could then also make the parts freely available to other churches that want to adapt it to their needs.
I imagine you’d want to collect the earliest/latest time that people are normally at a particular location in order to identify potential times of overlap. It’d be great if you could augment the form with a check-in tool (at least for those who have smart phones) so that people wouldn’t need to manually enter their data in the form.
Hi Rod!
Thanks for the additional questions/suggestions. I would love to incorporate some social/foursquare like element to this. This could clearly be a bigger project.
We’re partly doing the ArcGIS because it’s software available to our volunteers…But I would love to see this as something shared by our entire conference. What an amazing tool that would be for other churches to see where folks congregate. That might even cause some folks to see that there are vital congregations much closer to where they live. I know one of the issues families have is scheduling and trekking across town in between soccer practice, school, work and other activities.
I’ll keep chewing on this. Perhaps even talk to our DS about it.
Thank you!
Yes, Sophia, spot on. I’d actually written an article about this on the GBOD Worship Website in 2008, and republished this year when gas prices moved up near $4.00/gallon again.
Here’s the link: http://is.gd/1ZE07R
And yes, this is exactly the kind of mapping we should be thinking about in most of our places, anyway. Look for the intersections of our “daily beats” as places for meetings, and look at our most regular travel routes as places of mission. The church is wherever its people are– not simply or even all that often wherever its worship or other physical facilities are.
Keep pushing this forward, Sophia. And if you can develop an easier tool for your congregation to develop this sort of analysis (i.e., get it beyond the “grind” stage), by all means let me know and I’ll use the GBOD website and other GBOD social media to propagate it as widely as I can.
Peace in Christ,
Taylor Burton-Edwards
Director of Worship Resources, GBOD
Convener, emergingumc consultation
Hi Taylor!
Your article is prophetic. I especially appreciated the following points:
2. Consider how frequently people are asked to travel outside of their most “regular beats” to participate in church-related activities (including worship, meetings, programs, etc.). While it is reasonable to expect that committed Christians will do their best to participate in the life of the church at your current facilities when they can, the time may well have come to find ways to reduce the demand for “extra-beat” travel wherever you legitimately can, encourage carpooling, and encourage the use of public transit or carpooling to enable more efficient use of money and fuel for travel. Don’t just tell folks to do it. Show them how they can.
3. Look for shared travel routes and most common intersection points of these regular beats throughout the week. Use this information to facilitate carpooling and also to suggest possible meeting places during the week that do not diverge far from existing regular beats.
I feel that we kind of have to be enablers in this regard. It’s one thing to encourage people be at meetings, worship and other programming, but it’s another thing to help find ways to make this happen. Perhaps a ride share board [or online] or links to bus schedules on our website. We need to remove barriers to entry. It’s hard to ignore these solutions if we put it in their hands to try. And maybe that means the next meeting isn’t held at church if everyone who’s attending lives in the same geographic area. It’s definitely a shift in thinking.
One of the tools we’re using now is called The Table. We’re hoping that this closed social networking space can be another tool that builds community and allows the congregation to share anything from prayer requests to ride shares. And…it’s free!
4. Consider whether you have the possibility for turning some of these existing “natural meeting places” of your congregation into regular meeting places for smaller group activities, including meetings, small groups for discipleship, accountability, or mission, and even, potentially, worship.
This one gets me really jazzed. It helps folks to understand that our activities/worship during the week don’t only have to happen in the church building. We can be a witness wherever we gather AND it doesn’t have to be stressful. So many folks say that they can’t come to gatherings because it’s too far or they have transportation issues. By turning these neighborhood meeting places into regular meeting places for church-stuff, we’re taking church to a whole new level.
Thanks again, Taylor for the link to this and for the continuing conversation. I think the next step will be to have a conversation with our DS/Director of Connectional Ministries/strategic planning folks in our conference…