A while ago (in 1996/1997) I adopted a project to figure out where church were need in the Chicago area. I started collecting church databases from people that were willing to share them for research purposes and then started adding to it myself. Over the past 9-10 years I have sporatically updated the database. It is pretty good and most of it has been confirmed/added within the last two years. There are currently around 6000 churches with at least a name and address. Many more have phone, email, website, pastor's name, primarily language, denomination, size and church worship times. In mid 1997 I spent several weeks putting together a church population ratio for the Chicago area. This was a zip code by zip code project and it was a lot of sorting and editing until it got to a place that worked. Then I shared it with a few people and I think it mostly sat on a shelf (or as an unused email attachment) since then. Over the past two weeks I have had several people talk to me about church planting and I dusted off my file, opened up my church database and looked on the US Census webpage to see if I could find a good zip code population file. The short story is that in less than two hours I have a complete update of my data (without any write up other than the original 1997 write up). The increased use of the internet and the increase availability of data mean that I could do original research and have an average church to population ratio for every zip code in the Chicago area in a matter of hours. It still may not be used by anyone. But at least it is available. If anyone is interested in it or how I did it let me know. I am trying to find some free/cheap GIS software to turn the data into maps to make it more useful. I quit paying $1400 a year for GIS software a while ago.
