Structural access, not spiritual fruit.
Mapping gospel deserts across America.
We measure Gospel access and church presence at the Census tract level, so it is possible to see where the church is present, where it is thin, and where the need is heaviest.
Observable things, on purpose.
Gospel presence is described here through three dimensions that can be observed and counted. None of them measures spiritual fruit or the health of a congregation, and none of them is meant to.
Distance to the nearest local church, and the number of congregations within walking or driving range of each tract.
Aggregate budget of nearby churches weighted by distance, as a proxy for ministry capacity and congregational maturity.
A composite of poverty, housing cost burden, single-parent households, and other socioeconomic stressors.
They are easy to mix up. Two are levels; one is movement.
How structurally absent evangelical Gospel presence is in a tract, combining the church-access indicators with the neighborhood-need ones. A high score means Gospel access is thin, not that a neighborhood is bad.
Public tools use “gospel deserts” broadly for 60 and above, which covers both of the last two tiers.
Thresholds come from the index pipeline, not from interpretation.
Where a tract stands right now. It is the Shalom composite turned around, so a high number means greater standing need today, and it says nothing about which direction things are moving.
Higher need pressure means more need, not more Gospel fruit.
need pressure = 100 − Shalom
Whether conditions are opening or hardening. It is a change between two eras rather than a score out of a hundred: positive means Shalom rose, negative means it fell, and a value between about −2 and +2 means the place is holding roughly where it was.
On the map this same measurement is labelled Gospel Shift. It is one metric under two names, and a rising score does not prove that any ministry caused it.
GIM = Shalom (latest era) − Shalom (previous era)
are needed
A tract can carry heavy need and still be improving. A hard place is not a closed one.
This is why the level and the movement are kept apart. Read only the level and you write off neighborhoods that are already turning. Read only the movement and you miss the ones holding steady under real weight.
Salvation is the Spirit's work. Presence is not invisible.
Gospel impact is both spiritual and observable. Salvation is the work of the Spirit, but the church's physical presence, its financial investment, and its proximity to those in need can all be measured, and have to be if we are serious about where the church puts itself.
The framework draws on Jonathan Edwards on observable fruit, Jane Jacobs on neighborhood vitality, and Nassim Taleb on antifragility, applied to the church's capacity to absorb pressure and stay somewhere for a long time.
See what this looks like for one street.
The tract-level surface lives on GospelGraph. The field guide for a single block, written out of the same model, is here.