In this series of articles on Church Consultant I will walk you through a step-by-step process to gather information to create your own Community Insight Report. The information provided should be helpful to anyone involved in church consulting or to pastors and churches who are trying to learn more about their community.
The Arda (Association of Religious Data Archives) contains a wealth of demographic and psychographic information that is useful for churches in gathering relevant information about their communities. It is also free which makes it an extremely useful tool.
Click on the following link (which will open in a new window) to go the Arda website. You should end up on a page that looks similar to the screen shot below.
The first thing you want to do is navigate to the Congregational Resource Center.
Go ahead and click on the What does my community look like?
You should get a drop down set of questions and you want to click on What types of people live near my congregation?
For demonstration purposes I will be using my own church and zip code which is 33043. Enter in your Zip Code or City and then click on the red GO button. You should end up with a screen that looks similar to the screen shot below.
You should see a map of your local area. If your church doesn’t show up on the map, don’t worry about it. You want to click on the map to the closest thing to your church.
I will click on Vineyard Community Church. You also need to enter a radius in miles. If you are in an urban setting you probably want to stick to 5 miles or less. Since I am in a rural area I am going to use a 15 mile radius. It is fairly common to drive 15 miles for people who live in my area. Once you have clicked on the map and entered a radius, click the Profile button.
If everything has gone according to plan you should be looking at a map like the one above. In our next article we are going to be clicking on the color-coded maps of your community and start building our community profile.
Steve Lawes is a Certified Church Consultant and a Church Encourager.
