Additionally, the world is urbanizing at an accelerating pace as people move to the cities for job opportunities and to escape hardships in rural life. This urbanization often means a clash of cultures as people from all walks of life and holding a variety of competing religious beliefs now live side by side in the same neighborhood. Urban church planting and viewing US cities as a mission field is becoming normative, and rightly so. Representatives from hundreds of unreached people groups now reside in the United States.
The Foreign-Born Population in North America
States and cities across the United States and Canada are seeing increased immigration and urbanization. Payne notes that many migrants to Canada “are predominantly urbanites and are even more likely to live in a metropolitan area than Canadian-born citizens.”5 Major cities in Canada such as Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto have foreign-born populations comprising 25 to nearly 50 percent of the city’s population.6
The following chart shows the top ten US states with the largest foreign-born populations.7
| State | Foreign-Born Population | Percent Foreign-Born |
| 10 Connecticut | 503,209 | 14% |
| 9 Maryland | 874,332 | 14.7% |
| 8 Massachusetts | 1,061,461 | 15.7% |
| 7 Texas | 4,494,345 | 16.7% |
| 6 Hawaii | 253,551 | 17.9% |
| 5 Nevada | 547,696 | 19.3% |
| 4 Florida | 3,967,671 | 19.9% |
| 3 New Jersey | 1,943,338 | 21.8% |
| 2 New York | 4,442,247 | 22.6% |
| 1 California | 10,473,630 | 27% |
While this type of demographic research is motivating and helpful, it does have its limitations. The census can only determine the country of origin of immigrants and cannot list which people groups are represented in these states. That localized research is much more difficult to determine, is much more helpful, and is largely the focus of the rest of this book.
Payne, in his book Unreached Peoples, Least Reached Places,8 lists the following information compiled from a variety of sources on specific people groups scattered around US cities:
El Cajon, California is home to “Little Bagdad,” with 60,000 Iraqis.
Of the 30,000 Senegalese in New York, over half are Wolof Mourides.
The Bay Area of California is home to “Little Kabul,” and made up of tens of thousands of Afghans.
Minneapolis, Seattle, and Columbus, Ohio are home to well over 100,000 Somalis.
Irving, Texas is home to 5,000 Kurds with Nashville housing the largest number in the country.
Punjabi Sikhs number 80,000 in New York City.
St. Louis is home to the largest number of Bosnians, with estimates ranging between 35,000–60,000.
Detroit has the largest concentration of Arab Muslims (e.g., Yemeni, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinians) numbering in the tens of thousands.
Outside of Israel, New York City is home to the largest number of Jews in the world, numbering in the millions.
About 5,000 Soninke/Serecole Muslims live in New York.
Second to metro New York with 60,000, South Patterson, New Jersey is home to thousands of Egyptian Arab Muslims.
89,000 Tamils live in the United States, with the largest concentration in Central New Jersey.
Albanians (Tosk and Gheg) number 122,000, with the largest numbers living in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit.
A few hundred thousand Urdu may be found in the United States with large concentrations in Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and Atlanta.
Turks are estimated at 378,000 with the largest enclave found in the South Patterson area of New Jersey.
The Burmese have significant populations in New York, Los Angeles, Bay Area of California, Dubuque, Iowa, and Fort Wayne, Indiana.
God has presented us with wonderful opportunities to reach the nations, as the world truly is at our door. The multicultural complexity of modern communities presents a challenge for effective ministry, however. This book is an effort to equip the church with the skills necessary to step out of their door and into their neighborhood with eyes to see and ears to hear what God is doing. Community research is not something that can be left to professionals. Every believer can build relationships, learn about their own neighborhood, and lovingly meet the needs they discover as they share the life-giving gospel in a hurting world.
The Intent of this Book
Community research can be intimidating and many books on the subject are overly technical. Christians may feel that if they don’t have a degree in sociology or anthropology there is no way they can make sense of the technical jargon and research skills needed to learn about their community. Over the years I have been involved with community research projects in dozens of neighborhoods across America and on four continents. I have taught research methods to hundreds of students and trained many in the church. Over time, people have begun asking for this training in an easy to understand format that does not require several years of academic study. This book is the answer to those requests. I wanted to write something that was in-depth enough to be thorough but still readable for the regular person. In that light, I write mainly in the first person and take a nonacademic format, using few footnotes. I take an applied approach and attempt to show how good research can shed light on real world problems and equip the church to minister effectively, especially across cultures and in multi-cultural communities. Before moving into the main content of the book, it will be helpful to provide an overview of community research as a whole and explain some of the terminology you will encounter throughout the book.
What Is Community Research?
You will find various names for the kind of research I describe in this book. Some call it community research, others call it neighborhood mapping. The technical name is ethnographic research. This name comes from two Greek words simply meaning writing about or describing a community. That’s what we are after—to learn as much as we can about the dynamics of our neighborhood and then describe what we find to those interested in ministry. In our case, we use the research to develop an appropriate ministry strategy for the specifics of the community. We seek to answer questions such as who lives here, what languages do they speak, what spiritual beliefs do they have, what family structures are present, what needs do people have, what resources might already be present to meet these needs, what churches are at work, and what is the most appropriate strategy for ministry?
Community research is both a process and an outcome. It is a process in that it allows you to build relationships with people in the community as you gather your information. It takes time to get a good handle on all the dynamics. Yet, it is not wasted time because often, those people you get to know in the research phase become the very ones that are later integral in your ministry. In a sense, community research never ends because the neighborhood is always changing. However, after completing a basic survey, you have a tool that can be used for mobilization and training.
I was part of a team conducting research in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada a few years ago, just shy of the Arctic Circle. A major church-planting network was hoping to send new church-planting teams to the area but first wanted to learn what they could about the community, any present churches, and especially the relational dynamics between the indigenous Inuit people and the white population. I had posted the fruits of our research in a write-up on my website and was later contacted by a man who had a burden for the Inuit. He told me he had found the research and God has used it to confirm his calling to the Arctic, where he currently