Cultural Catalog

  It is my personal conviction that demographics will never replace personal relationship. I also have a very strong personal conviction that the Gospel of Christ is the same for every culture and nation and we dare not, should not, better not change it. However, whereas the Gospel doesn’t change, the delivery method must so that every group can have an opportunity to understand it and respond to it. For more information on contextualization, see the list of recommended books in my reading list.

    I could reach all of my neighbors and have started several churches without any help from a demographic report. However, as I map out the worldviews of my neighborhood so my family can reach each one for Christ, demographics have been a useful aid in giving me a major headstart in constructing worldview studies of each of my neighbors so that I don’t make careless cultural mistakes when I try to reach someone different from myself. 

    The following documents are based on several years of research as outlined in this document
The Culturescaping Process.  Looking as an outsider into many of these groups and trying to form intelligent unbiased missiological conclusions based on brief interactions and census data is a difficult task and one that was undertaken with great care and cautiousness. I am amazingly grateful to God for His insight and wisdom. These conclusions are continously edited and re-examined, but by God’s graciousness, we have found them to be fairly good representations of the groups and reliable information for guiding a church to understand certain cultural perceptions and trends so that these particular population segments can be more effectively reached with the Gospel of Christ.  

    These documents should be accompanied by a good demographic report. The one we provide at SBTC has cultural data attached to it that is usually not found in other reports.  These profiles are not exhaustive in their content but might provide a launch pad to help outsiders to the segment think in culturally relevant ways. The profiles were written with the utmost of respect for each population segment and nothing said should ever be construed as derrogatory toward that particular culture. I am personally 4th generation Cherokee Indian raised as an anglo minority amidst southern Mexican mestizos and high income european background Mexicans. So I realize that trying to categorize anyone is futile at best. Therefore, I make no judgment statements but simple missiological insights and personal conclusions based on much research and personal interviews with the population segments. These documents are not perfect, and although they were developed with southern American populations in mind, they have been proven to be fairly accurate and have been effectively used by various regions across America to help churches understand their communities a little better. I trust that they will be helpful to you.

Please use them freely in accordance with the creative commons copyright that they hold. In other words, download them, distribute them, copy them freely, but neither any portion nor the whole document may ever be sold.

English Population Segments

  • Bohemian Mix - a look at the emerging culture
  • Southern Jazz - a look at the multi-faceted African-American community
  • Ethnic Mosaic- a generic look at later-gen ethnic segments of America
  • Prime Americana - a profile of American suburbia middle to upper income segments
  • Southern Country  - a generic profile of the rural anglo builder generation

Language People Groups - also look at www.peoplegroups.org