By Tom Bandy MissionInsite (and its parent company ACS Technologies) introduced a revised system in February that includes a number of new and useful features. Congregational, District, and Conference users will need to update their passwords and log in anew, but you will find your saved shapes and plots still in place. One goal for …
By Tom Bandy Many churches hold leadership retreats in January or February. Aside from prayer and fellowship, these retreats are often about assimilating newly elected council and board members and strategic thinking for the coming year. Updated ComparativeInsite reports are an essential resource for both elements in the agenda. ComparativeInsite date compares current church …
By Tom Bandy Lifestyle diversity and cultural change have created new challenges and opportunities for worship designers. The challenge is that the basic question people ask themselves on Sunday morning is no longer when to worship or preferred style of worship, but why should we bother to worship at all? Prior to the millennium change, …
Read more “Why Bother? Changing Lifestyle Expectations of Worship”
By Tom Bandy Baby Boomers (present age 60 – 78) represent a large portion of the population in Maryland and Delaware, and an even larger portion of UMC participants. However, Baby Boomer church expectations are not all alike. Consider just some of the top boomer lifestyle segments: Baltimore-Washington Peninsula-Delaware Region UMC Region …
Read more “Lifestyle Sensitivity and Preaching to Baby Boomers”
By Tom Bandy We know how to retrieve lifestyle data about our community context or church participation. Run a ComparativeInsite Report. Identify the top 50-60% representation. Read the Experian E-Handbook summaries and MissionImpact Guide commentaries for each lifestyle segment, starting with those significantly over- or under-represented in our church. This gives us a pretty good …
By Tom Bandy MissionInsite does a nationwide survey called “The American Beliefs Study” of religious preferences and practices. This tends to be richer than other national surveys because it uses a larger sampling. A new summary is now available as of January 2023 and there are recent videos available to explain them. Customized data for …
By Tom Bandy Many of you may have read the Easter opinion column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times: “It’s Easter 2050. Here’s What American Religion Looks Like”. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opinion/easter-religion-america.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare. It’s a good article, and I have been reflecting on it from the point of view of demographic and lifestyle change. The writer predicts …
By Tom Bandy The internet has been valuable in so many ways. But the combination of digitalization and miniaturisation has raised ethical concerns especially for lifestyle research. Many churches and denominations also use lifestyle research (as we do), but there is always a risk that institutional priorities and hidden biases might unconsciously lead us to …
Read more “How to Use MissionInsite: Ethical Principles for Lifestyle Research”
By Tom Bandy Strategic thinkers often want to explore a specific demographic detail for which there is no one single category in the Build a Report process. Recently I was asked to research locations with a high population density for children aged 5-13 in families below poverty. MissionInsite only allows you to do separate OpportunityScans …
Read more “MissionInsite: Going Deeper beyond Basic Categories”
By Tom Bandy You can use MissionInsite to make this Christmas especially meaningful for distinct lifestyle mosaics that live in your reach. This is particularly useful for urban churches experiencing growing lifestyle diversity that is transforming their surrounding neighborhoods. Centralization is what happens as urbanization moves along major transportation corridors, isolating rural areas, and forcing …