By Mary C. Frances, Senior Associate Consultant

Recently I had the opportunity to share a Neighborhood Insight Report with a congregation from a small town in the heartland of our country. Like many congregations, they were wondering what direction God was leading them in these days; what would be their next steps? So, we spent a little time looking at the demographic report that we call the Neighborhood Insight Report.

The Neighborhood Insight Report is an interactive, dynamic report that contains over 40 different data points for multiple drive-times, walking times or radii capturing the details of different aspects of the population.

One of the points that I always look at but hadn’t really thought all that remarkable is the number of households. When you click on that data point, it opens to show what compromises a household. That is, how many single person households, two person households, etc. and within the multiple person households how many people are family and how many are non-family. Seems straightforward and, I had thought, just one data point among many.

In this case, for the five-minute drive-time from the church there were 750 households. As I said, this is a small town. Total population for the same area was around 1,600 people. But here is what grabbed all of us: 405 of the households were single person households! That meant that 25% of the population was living alone; a population that was 20 years older than the national average of 38 years old. Over 50% of the households were single person households. It only took a heartbeat before everyone on the zoom call thought about the recent report from the surgeon general about the loneliness epidemic. Anecdotally that just didn’t seem possible. No one in the Zoom room knew that many people lived alone. And yet here was data that filled out details they couldn’t know just from their own contacts and contexts: the potential for the loneliness epidemic to be present in their own community was high.

Of course, this piece of information was just one data point. There is still much to be done to investigate the situation to see if our hunch plays out. Perhaps God is leading them to a ministry of making connections, deepening relationships, and addressing loneliness in their own town. Time will tell. When you consider that there were still 39 other data points to look at, needless to say, the Neighborhood Insight Report can help any ministry know their neighbors better.

For more information or to order your Neighborhood Insight Report, contact us at info@faithx.net