It is an exciting day for me! My first Monday (aka AngelWings day) since a massive release of 2023 Census data!!

As well as being generally interested in a whole host of data (and I’ll be back to make some comments on that), I’m excited because it means that I can start to prepare the 2023 Community Profiles: I have been providing such profiles to churches for the past 30(!) years…

I came up with the idea of producing Community Demographic profiles when I was doing my honours in human geography in 1992 – I took a course/paper on geographic information systems (they were new and exciting then!) and SuperMap 2 had just been released, containing the 1991 Census data. It was amazing! I could see the potential for churches to understand their communities, and wrote an assignment on it, later pitching the idea of providing community profiles, to (the newly established) Vision New Zealand.

They said yes, to fresh-out-of-uni me! Alan Withy was a key supporter, and Bruce Patrick as well. I remember Keith Hay Homes helped fund the purchase of the software and some generous denominations also pitched in advance payments, which enabled it to go ahead. (The software and hardware was Quite Expensive, as you might imagine.)

I developed the original profile, and have streamlined and amended over the years. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of them… certainly over 1000.

I’ve provided profiles to churches of all denominations, but especially for Baptist churches, having produced them FREE as part of my role there since 1997. Most Baptist churches ask for them as part of the process of finding a new minister. They were also part of the church review documents (when external consultants did reviews). I also reviewed each BU Tindall Application based on the demographics (which Tindall loved and wanted me to do for more groups, but this idea fizzled with the delay to the 2011/2013 census).

In 2008, I took a roadshow (well, I flew) to Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland where I walked through what the 150 participants might learn from their profiles. When I was asked to speak at Arrow leadership training, I’d provide the profiles (free!) and we’d work through them together.

Having moved to Adelaide, and with the delay to the 2011 Census, I was seriously considering stopping providing profiles before the 2013 data came out. I was doing my PhD by then, and wondered if it was time to stop. BUT! I attended a course taught by John and Olive Drane, at which John randomly handed out cards from the Jesus Deck. The card I was given is pictured and it seemed very much like a God-prompt to continue😊And here I still am.

What’s involved in preparing profiles? A three-stage process…

• I take the data from Stats NZ and get it into a format that I can work with. (That small sentence requires Quite A Bit Of Work)
• I prepare a profile template into which I can copy and paste data from the spreadsheets
• Once all that is done, it is pretty speedy to produce a profile (provided the church provides good information on which areas to include)

Today’s task is to see what will be involved in getting the 2023 data into a usable format. Each time has been different and a new tool has been released this time around. I’m hoping it will be as intuitive as the demo seemed to be and that the path forward will be quickly obvious…

People find the profiles helpful, saying:

• “Thanks for this work – very, very interesting.”
• “Many thanks for this, it makes interesting reading”
• “Your resource looks really good and is something that would be helpful for local congregations to get to know their local context.”
• “Thanks Lynne this is super helpful”

Watch this space for more!