People Group Mapping: Religious Centers in Chicagoland

Here at TIBM we are partnering with the International Mission Board, Send Chicago, and others to engage in a major research project seeking to identify all the people groups of Chicagoland.  Our hope is to ultimately provide the Church information about all the diaspora peoples in the metro area through an online database called Peoplegroups.info (scheduled to be re-launched).  I think that a bunch of mission thinkers are becoming increasingly convicted by the fact that the North American church is still suffering from severe "people blindness".

Currently, we are in the beginning phase of our research.  During this time we are collecting what we refer to as "people group indicators".  These essentially are signs which point to the presence of people groups.  One piece of this is to aim at discovering all religious centers in the Chicago area which have a high probability of being associated with diasporas.

We've published the results of our work in a simple, interactive map that you can view on the main TIBM website.

If you are interested in becoming a part of the larger project to map the top 100 MSAs in the United States, please visit USAPeoplegroups.com to find out more.