Hey Church types! I have an idea for you that I think would be cool to try out.

Go out and buy the largest and best map of your local area, one that can feasibly include the location of your most distant congregant or visitor.

Glue or otherwise secure said map to a 1/2 inch thick styrofoam back; mount said map on a highly visible, accessible wall; Buy a big container(s) of coloured push pins of varying colours and assign themes to the colours with a legend explaining those colours next to the map.

Ask your visitors, guests and congregants to take a pin and push it into their street address. Decide on meaningful definitions for colours such as – Red for Parents with Kid(s); Orange for Married without Kids; Green for singles; Yellow for single parent household; Black for emptynesters…you get the idea.

Now leave it up and constantly encourage people to take a moment at some point in the future to pin themselves to the map.

Stand back and watch the power of demographics. What will you do with this? Who knows? It is information and all sorts of things could come from it like – “Hey I didn’t know that 82 percent of all our people come from this five block radius”, or “Wow 76 percent of our people are rural”, or “Why doesn’t anybody from neighborhood Y come and visit us?” etc.

It can help with better small group planning, it can help with connecting newcomers with members of the community who live near them, it can help in determining what part of the community you should perform volunteerism in, it can help you better understand the nature and makeup of your congregation and this is ALWAYS a good thing.

You can also do this via your website if you are Techie enough although I would suggest a real map in a real location that can be virtually recreated later.

Do it.