Community Mapping in Research for City Transformation

How Can You Use these Maps and Charts?

Our application was primarily in working with Church leaders in major cities to help with strategic evangelism. Although your purpose may be different, the basic principles are the same. What are your trying to accomplish, and how can charts and maps help you with that?

• Maps show spatial relationships.
  
  
• Charts show relationships of data. Charts enable you to see relationships that would not be visible by just looking at raw data or tables.

For our work:

1. People Group Mapping. We used maps to define people groups for which no church existed near them that was culturally and spiritually relevant to their needs.
   
   
2. Spiritual Mapping. Another type of mapping is what is referred to as spiritual mapping. One way to define spiritual mapping is "The sum of divine revelation, plus research, plus proven facts, whose objective is to provide complete and accurate information about the identity of spiritual powers that rule over a region, their size of operation, and the forms and methods they use to influence the people and church of that region." (Victor Lorenzo ). For this type of research maps are useful for identifying sites where spiritual activity has and is taking place over time and what this means in the context of the larger community.

These two goals are really related, as God does his work through th hearts of men and women and maps and charts give us and understanding of how he is working in a specific area.

Reaching Unreached People Groups

Here is a map showing where the Hispanics are located in the Portland, OR area. As an overlay, it also shows the location of existing Hispanic churches. Notice several unreached Hispanic groups on the map. If you look closely, you will see a large population of Hispanics in the north/northeast inner city that has no Hispanic church near them. We then took a vision walk in this area with some Hispanic pastors and verified what the map showed us, talking with the people there and listening to their needs.

In another situation out in the western part of the city we did some research for a church that wanted to plant a Hispanic church there. Note the dense Hispanics in this area. When we checked back later with the church, they had planted six Hispanic churches. There are several different types of Hispanic cultures He told me, and a church for one would not work for another.

In the Portland area, one of the largest unreached people groups are the Native Americans. Our maps show the highest density in the North area of Portland. We have prepared a research paper on this people group, and the research with this group is very important because the long history of this group in the area and the spiritual issues surrounding this history. Our thanks to Richard Twiss and Dave Hopkins who helped us with this research. We need similar papers on the history of the African-Americans in the area, the Hispanics, and other people groups. Some mapping on other ethnic groups has already been done, but little strategic research.

Another type of ethnic map shows the density of the population (or ethnic group) relative to the number of churches or church attendance of the ethnic group in the area. Here is a general map showing this.

Using Maps for Spiritual Mapping

In spiritual mapping, you are trying to define where bindings are in the city and the relationship of these and where God is working in relationship to these. This map shows the density of non-violent crime in the city with an overlay that shows where some of the pornographic stores and strip joints are located. Portland has a very high ratio of these relative to the population - one of the highest in the country. This map is only a starting point, but does show some relationships.

Another map we did showed the location of murders during a particular year in the north/northeast area (where most occur) with an overlay showing where the churches were located. Our theory was that most of the murders took place very near a church. Not only was our assumption true, but in fact there were churches all over the area - every few blocks. It didn't matter where the murder took place, it would be near a church. The problem was the lack of much ability of these inner city churches to affect transformation. There are specific reasons for this, and to transform the area you would need to know what these reasons are. To get these answers, you would need extensive history of the African-American people group in the area. Notice from the church density map mentioned earlier that this part of town has the most churches for the population; i.e., high church/population ratio.

Maps can also be used to show the relationship of events through time. Again you are spatial mapping, but one of the mapped dimensions is time. Here is a map showing the settlement of Portland over time.

Conclusion

This is the first generation in the history of the world with low-cost mapping tools available for strategic evangelism. Some of the maps we've done are so strategic we can't show them here. We do have a CD available with over 100 of our most popular maps with tutorial material - see our store for that. Or if you need help with strategic mapping or charting for your city or church, why not contact us. We also do secular mapping, charting, and research.