By Gary Meyers, NOBTS Communications
[img_assist|nid=7959|title=Dr. Bill Day|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=640|height=427]NEW ORLEANS – What pastor hasn’t asked these questions: “Who lives near my church, and how can I reach these neighbors with the Gospel?”
The Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health, located at and sponsored by New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), offers detailed, individualized demographic studies to help churches answer these questions. The studies offer church leaders detailed information about their community and help with the development of community-specific evangelism plans.
NOBTS launched the Center for Evangelism and Church Growth in 1992 with the goal of helping churches implement strategies that result in measurable church growth. In 1995, seminary trustees renamed the Center in honor of the seminary’s seventh president, Dr. Landrum P. Leavell II, an evangelism and church growth specialist. Later, the name changed again to place more emphasis on church health. Preston Nix, professor of evangelism and evangelistic preaching, serves as the Center’s director. Bill Day, professor of evangelism and church health, is the associate director.
The Center conducts a wide range of research in the areas of church growth, church health and evangelism. The Center’s conferences on church revitalization and evangelism seek to foster healthy church growth in Southern Baptist Convention churches.
It is the Center’s work with individualized demographics studies, however, that provides local churches with the valuable data needed to reach a specific community. The detailed information is helpful in developing strategies for targeted evangelism efforts, for church planting and even for efforts to relocate a church.
Bill Day, who produces the studies with the assistance of NOBTS students, notes that many state Baptist conventions offer free basic demographic studies. The free studies provide a basic snapshot of the community around the church, but are less specific than the studies produced by the Leavell Center.
“We are not trying to replace what other entities are doing,” Day said. “What we try to do is to complement that by giving more detailed individual studies for churches. Instead of getting a fairly general demographic study of a community, we talk with the church and seek to know specifically what it is they are dealing with.”
“Just learning that the average age in your community is 35 is interesting; that’s not as helpful as what we are able to do by showing where the different age groups are concentrated and their interests,” Day said.
The Center works with multiple strings of data to provide a better understand of the people in a specific community. The result is a clearer picture of the ages, ethnicity, interests and economic status of the people a church is trying to reach.
The detailed demographic studies present more than just current community data. The Leavell Center also is able to find data projections of where the community will be in five years – valuable information for strategic planning.
The Leavell Center can also provide an additional level of data to assist churches – geo-coding and profiling. The geo-coder plots the addresses of church members on a map to provide a more accurate assessment of the church’s area of reach than other methods.
“Instead of just drawing a big circle around their church and saying, ‘We’re going to give you the demographics of this church circle,’ we are able to take their membership and put it on a map and then trace where their membership is actually located,” Day said.
Geo-coding requires an accurate address list of church members and the more information the church can provide, the better the study results. If a church can provide age data on its members, the Leavell Center can plot where specific members of an age group live as well.
Demographers have identified close to 60 different lifestyles in the United States. By running address lists through a profiler, the Center can identify which of these lifestyles are represented in a church. The location of these lifestyle groups are shown on maps of the church’s community.
Geo-coding and profiling helps a church mobilize its members to reach out to their neighbors through common interests.
When the study is complete, the Center provides the church a PowerPoint presentation of the results. These detailed presentations, sometimes containing over 100 slides, are uploaded to a secure site and the church can access the data the day the study is complete. The report stays on the secure site for 14 days. The church has unlimited access to the report during that time and it can be download to multiple computers. The report can be downloaded by as many in the church as need it.
The Leavell Center charges Southern Baptist churches $100 for a detailed demographic study. The Center will geo-code and profile the study for an additional $100. Churches from other denominations can pay $200 for the detailed study and $200 for geo-coding and profiling. The studies are available for communities in all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico.
For more information about the Leavell Center, call (504) 816-8820, or visit the Center’s website,www.leavellcenter.com.