THS Neighborhood Review - Brooklyn Park, MD

Brooklyn Park, MD | GospelGraph Breakdown + Neighborhood Walk

What does gospel need look like from the inside?

In this video, I pull up Brooklyn Park, MD in GospelGraph and walk through every data layer — census tract demographics, church coverage, people group density, and how it all fits together into a picture of real gospel reach. Then my buddy Cole and I hit the streets and walk it block by block.

Cole isn't a ministry guy. He's just someone who loves people and wants to see them reached. And watching him see the data come to life on the ground (the people types authenticated block by block)  is exactly why this tool exists.

This is what ministry intelligence looks like in practice. It's not just a theory or a map, it shows you a real neighborhood with real people and real gaps. And it equips real people with the tools to share the Gospel in a way that is truly good news.

🔗 Explore GospelGraph: gospelgraph.com
🔗 Learn about The Hood Shepherd: thehoodshepherd.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey everyone, it's Aaron Rosa, I'm the Hood Shepherd, and I want to take you today on a little tour of a place called Brooklyn Park. Now, Brooklyn Park is in the north part of Anna Rundel County. And um what really attracted me to this uh place was I read an article a couple years ago saying uh in the Baltimore Sun that was saying, why do or asking the question, why do people in Brooklyn Park live on average 15 years less than the rest of the people in the county? Now this is really intriguing to me because that's not an insignificant, you know, amount of time there. So it's always kind of been on my heart to try to check out Brooklyn Park and see, you know, what is going on there spiritually and then how the gospel could l possibly uh change or transform that into a place of hope for the rest of the county. So today we're gonna do a little something a little bit different. What we're gonna do is we're gonna look at this area through the gospel graph and thehoodshepherd.com, and we're gonna look at what kind of what the data actually tells us about this place, and then we're actually gonna go there. So I invited my buddy Cole to come along with me. Cole has been um walking alongside of me and learning and you know trying to figure out what it means to be an everyday missionary, and so I figured it would be a really great, you know, segue into this whole everyday missionary. How can the gospel graph help you become a missionary in your everyday context? So let's check it out. Alright, here we go. So the first thing I'm gonna do is we're gonna go to thegospegraph.com. So uh thegospegraph.com is a tool that I created to help you see the world, see the country through a different lens. So what you'll notice here, this is on the free homepage, by the way. What you'll see here is a uh kind of like a patchwork heat map of the country. Um right now, just randomly like zoomed into Knoxville, Tennessee. But if we look at this right here, what you can see is that um blue is not so great and orange is really great. And the idea is that this is a measurement of the shift of all of these 150 different indicators that we've identified with gospel movement over time. So this is uh from 2020 to 2024. So if you look here in Knoxville, it shows that this area right here shifted 1.5 uh in these in this overall areas of gospel impact uh since 2020. And you can see here that the major area that this moved was in the living category. Now we'll get into that in a second, you'll see what actually feeds that. But um, if you look over here towards West Knoxville, Mechanicsville area, it went down 1.6. This area up here went down 2.9. So you really start to get a sense of like what is going on uh in this area. Okay, so now we're gonna check out another tool here, which is the explorer. So if you sign up for an account with uh gospelcraft.com, you can access the explorer here, and the explorer will bring you to you can see the entire country, and you can see all the different maps that we have. So let's take a look. We got Annapolis defaulting here because home suite home. And we're gonna take a look up north and Brooklyn Park. Okay, so this area right here is known as Brooklyn Park. Uh this really dark area, uh, just if you're using the if you're using the platform, you might see some areas that are abnormally dark, um, whether good or bad. Uh that doesn't necessarily mean there's been massive gospel impact in that area. Sometimes it can the data can be a little bit skewed by the fact like this is just a port, right? There's not a whole lot of people that live here. So everything is kind of um magnified in that area. Uh there are other places I'll show you. If you go over here, if we look at our gospel desert, we'll pull up our gospel desert map, right? Um these are areas with that where you have high poverty and people without access to the churches. Well, this area right here really sticks out here in Jessup. Well, if you look at it, you find out that it's actually a it's a prison. This is the state prison in Jessup. So um you kind of have to, you know, fact-check a little bit of the work, but it's it's a very useful tool. Okay, so we're going to look at this area in Brooklyn Park. So I'm gonna bring up my gospel shift map again, right? And uh Cole and I went and decided to go grab lunch, and while we were grabbing lunch in Brooklyn Park, we got excellent chicken wings, highly recommend. Uh, we started pulling this up on our phones and looking at what we could possibly expect so that we could fact-check the data with what the platform was telling us. So we went to this particular uh neighborhood right here. Um this neighborhood right here uh backs up to Here we go. There's a doors out. We went to the doors of. So Cole and I we got lunch, we uh started to scope out what we were about to see, and we picked it, we picked a neighborhood that was very close to where we were eating. So we ate in this uh shopping center right over here. Um really good chicken wings, highly recommend. Drove up to um Doris Ave in this area, and parked over here right here on the corner, and took stock of what we could expect. So let's click on that and let's see what um Cole and I saw when we were in the car. I'm gonna take another look at a field report here for this area. So let's click on this. And this really is a down and dirty um uh field report that any missionary or lay person can use, and it'll tell you everything you need to know about this area. That's what it's designed for. So let's take a look at it. The population of this area is 1,578. That's a a pretty sizable number of people that live in that area. Um there are 13 churches in the area. And then look at this. This is uh these are the issues that are happening there. So if you are gonna be doing ministry of any sort, if you're gonna be leading like a small Bible study, if you're going to be planting a church, if you're going to be uh doing some sort of you know, neighborhood Bible study ministry or something like that, your ministry should keep in mind these issues because these are the real needs facing this particular area. The first one is reconciliation. So low cross-class social capital. What this means is that you don't have a whole lot of rich people hanging out with poor people in this area. You don't have a lot of black people hanging out with white people, you don't have a lot of Hispanics hanging out with black people. This is a low, like everybody kind of tends to stay in their sections here. So you have economic and residential segregation quietly entrenched, you will have a slow go at this. You need to do some sort of bridging ministry that will allow that mixing of those classes so that people understand that their common uh bond is in the gospel and not necessarily in these kind of external um class structures that have uh that they fit into. Um safety and justice is relatively stable here. You don't have a whole lot of uh crime in this area. Family stability. So family structure stress is above average. You have a lot of single parent household and related pressures. This is a big problem for church plants and uh churches in general, because uh the the typical pastor might look at single parents and think, oh, we just need to have more child care. Yes, you need to have more child care at your ministry, or you should have childcare integrated in your Bible studies and all that. But it goes much deeper than that. Because uh one, we tend to think in terms of everybody has the same schedule of during the week, nine to five, and then you have off on the weekends. But most single parents don't have that luxury. They um if you're a single parent, you have to worry about getting a babysitter. You have that that's a financial cost. Um generally most single parents end up working multiple jobs to be because they don't have a a two-person income to be able to supplement that. So and and kids are expensive. So you might end up working multiple shifts, so you probably can't work on a sun, you probably have to work on a Sunday and can't make it to church. So what happens is people end up getting falling through the cracks. Not to mention when they do show up to church, a lot of what gets touted as um the pinnacle or normal is that nuclear two-parent household, and so there's a lot of things like guilt and shame that get wrapped up into that. Economic stress is present and structural. People are cost burdened relative to income. Housing in Anna Rondal County is very expensive. And so, especially if you're working gig work or you're a single parent and all that, it just makes it that much more stressful for you to be able to meet those economic needs. Um, education is good in this area, health is health burden is relatively low in this area, so that's uh pretty good. Probably because most people here qualify for Medicaid, so they have um insurance that they can uh can uh take care of uh chronic issues. Housing stability is a problem here. You have lots of residential churn, whether that's people moving in, people moving out. Remember, I told you this was a transient community where people were going to uh move into this area and then eventually try to move out to later down in the county. This is what we're talking about here. So what this means is it's very difficult for you to get uh that kind of relational network that can absorb major changes like an unexpected pregnancy or a death in the family or some sort of like people aren't able to carpool because uh because gas prices have gone up so much. You know, these are the kind of things that are in this area. Alright. Um let's look at the type of people that live in this particular area. We have under-resourced, so uh these are people who are on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, these are on the the poorer end. So you have people thinking about survival math, they're dependent on public transportation, they are um in they're interdependent on other people in the community. Uh there's also a strong institutional distrust because they tend to fall through the cracks in churches, in uh in in normal society, nobody sees the poor. So instit you can see right here, institutional trust is fractured by repeated experience of programs that came and left. Too often in the Western church, our idea of outreach is going to do a a lunch or a dinner or some sort of uh you know game day or field day or something like that. And what they don't realize is that people who live in these neighborhoods r understand that everybody thinks in those terms. So you always have people that come through like, oh, we love you, we're praying for you, and then they leave. So whatever you're doing in this area is going to need to be it's going to initially start with very low trust. So you're gonna have to earn that trust through constant incarnational, you know, presence and loving people. You have immigrant communities that live in this area. Uh issues here are, you know, linguistic, right? They're they're um they're segmented off by language. Everybody speaks Spanish or everybody speaks some sort of dialect of Indian or something like that. But you do also have tight-knit networks, so the people in that community know who the trusted people are. So the the pastors have a uh a high relational capital. Um there are certain people, unofficial leaders in the community that know where to get you resources that you need. You have strong cultural identity, and generally a non-evangelical religious background. Uh, it tends to be more on the assemblies of God charismatic side of things, Pentecostal. Uh this is the largest growing church in immigrant areas. Uh, and then the last uh group of people you have here are service workers. So these are essential service workers who you know during COVID, most people thought, okay, we could work from home. There were a fair amount of people who were not able to work from home because they were busy, you know, buying the groceries and delivering them. They were busy doing the Ubers. They were busy uh, you know, they they were suffering because nobody was tipping, because nobody was eating out anymore. This is that group of people. So you have large families really getting the only time of their only type of downtime is listening to a podcast while they're driving. Um, their bodies are constantly breaking down because they're on rotating clocks, they're exhausted because they're doing a lot of manual labor. You might have a lot of these types of people working in like uh seasonal jobs like Amazon uh warehouses where it's very high pressure, always go, go, go, go, go, nobody ever gets to rest. Uh, and because they work weird hours and all the time, they're largely never end up in church because there is no church service or Bible study that can um cater to their time schedule. Alright. This is one of my favorite parts. Um situations. These are people who you will actually meet in this area. Uh you have housing in instability, it's fracturing the community formation, high housing stress, not a lot of people there. People don't spend a lot of time pouring into relationships there because why would you? The person's gonna move away in the next year. Um, you have high housing vacancy, so it signals to everybody else that there is disinvestment or displacement. So um people like if you go into a neighborhood and you see a lot of abandoned houses, you wonder what's wrong with this neighborhood that people are leaving or people aren't taking care of their homes. Uh this tends to hollow out the social fabric of the community and it concentrates the most vulnerable residents because nobody wants to invest in a neighborhood where everything is, and and if they are going to invest in that neighborhood, it's gentrification that's eventually going to push them out. So that's what you're gonna see in this area. Um people are wary of anything institutional, including church. Uh you have um languages creating a wall between different communities and most existing churches. So what you're gonna find when we go through there is there are actually some Spanish language churches in this block, which is very encouraging, and I'll uh show them to you when we uh when we get to that area. One tradition tends to hold the only evangelical presence in this area. You might only have a Methodist church, you might only have an Assembly of God church, you might only have uh a Church of the Nazarene. If you don't tend to fall into one of those denominations, you're not gonna have another option nearby, and so therefore you might just say, Well, I'm just not gonna go to church anymore. So any sort of ministry that's different than the existing denominations in this area is actually probably going to find a good following of people because they just haven't had an option for that there. And then obviously, we talked about the reconciliation gap, economic and residential segregation is quietly entrenched. You're gonna find we see this area that um there is a strong border there between Baltimore City and Annerundal County, and um on the Baltimore City side, this tends to be a public housing neighborhood. So you're gonna see a real divide there just institutionally. Um I think the overall thing that we're looking at here is that there's residential instability. You're gonna see a lot of people, transient communities, you're gonna see a lot of people with um kind of starter cars, starter homes, starter families, uh, and they're not gonna last for a long time. So there's not necessarily a tight-knit community. All that to say is this seems like a very interesting neighborhood to check out, and I really want you guys to see the result of our visit. So we're gonna cut to some b-roll, you're gonna see a little bit of stuff here, and then I'm going to interview Cole, and Cole is going to um talk about from his point of view, so you don't take my word for it, uh, how accurate the data was. So let's get to the neighborhood. Hey guys, I'm here with my buddy Cole. We just drove through a couple different neighborhoods in Brooklyn Park. We got lunch here, we talked to some people, and we crucially we connected uh the intelligence from like the gospel graph and the Hood Shepherd assets to what we're seeing on the ground here. And now Cole had a lot of really interesting observations when we were driving through the neighborhood. Cole, what did I tell you we were gonna run into when we saw when we looked at the information on the website?

SPEAKER_01 16:53

It was a lot of diversity. Uh you could go from one street to another and it could be a completely different uh either socioeconomic status or just completely different lifestyle, and but how close and proximity they all were together. And so uh, and I was just blown away by the accuracy of all the stuff that was on the packet. Okay, so let's talk about the accuracy because that's good for business. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

What do you mean by accuracy? So, what did I tell you we were gonna expect when we walked in before before we drove through that neighborhood um from the from the website?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Well, we looked at it on the Hood Shepherd, and it said it was gonna be uh uh a two or three big categories of people, and we found a lot of those things to be true as we're actually driving through the neighborhoods based on using some detective skills. Like, for example, like what were you expecting to see um when we're in that last interface? Uh there was uh heavy presence of immigrant families, a heavy presence of um blue-collar workers, um, the the corridor caravans, right? A lot of people that that commute, they've got um nine to five jobs, or they might be working hard to keep the mortgage going or rent or whatever it may be. Um but then there were also like these little tracks that were very different that looked a little bit more those legacy uh families where they have more toys like boats and RVs. And it was exactly as it was depicted on Hood Shepherd, like street to street, line to line, like everything was it was phenomenal. It was really, really cool.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Alright, guys, we'll see you back at the studio. Hey guys, I really hope you enjoyed that trip to Brooklyn Park with me and Cole. Uh, to me, it's great to learn the data, it's great to learn what people are like in a particular area, and these are hugely useful things for church planters and pastors and people of that ilk. But to me, it doesn't necessarily matter if you know a lot about these people, if you're not actually sharing the good news with them, if you're not actually, you know, engaging them as people who are loved by Christ. And so I want to show you one last tool to help you. It doesn't matter if you're a pastor, it doesn't matter if you're a lay person, it doesn't matter if you're just a neighbor who wants to love your neighbor a little bit more, or you felt kind of like coal move towards your neighbors by being more exposed to the reality of the neighborhood around you. This is a tool that will help you actually do that. So we're gonna go real quick to thehoodshepherd.com. And this is a tool that I've created to help you not only see your neighbor, but also know how to love your neighbor and eventually share the gospel with your neighbor. So we're gonna click over here on Discover My Neighborhood Type. And if you live in Anarondo County, any one of these addresses is free for you. So I'm gonna just type in an Ana Rondo County address. Shout out to Bay Area Community Church, this is their address. And here at 884 Chesterfield Road, and you're gonna see that Ana Rondo County is detected. It's an Aaron Rondo County address, so your checkout at the end will be free when you buy it and you can get the full packet for free. But check this out. And then about 32% transit link need, which is people who commute into like DC or Fort Mead or Baltimore. Uh they spend a lot of time with in the car, listening to podcasts, that kind of thing, going to work outside of the area. So let's take a look. It automatically defaults to the highest percentage uh population around you. So this is going to be gateway renters. You can unlock them again, all for free if you live in Anne Rundel County or if it's an Anne Rundel County address. I'd highly encourage you to do so. You can find this at thehoodshepherd.com. So, right away, we're going to see for immigrants, this gives you basic demographics, dense apartment corridors, older mid-rises, subdivided units, crowded complexes, near bus routes. Basically, what we just saw in kind of the B-roll and in while we were going through Brooklyn Park. Here's an idea of like age, median household income, 55k. That's notably lower than the county average of like 68k in Annerundal County. And then it's pieced together through shift work and rideshare. So uh a lot of different gigs. You've got might have like a husband doing um construction work, you might have the wife doing childcare or cleaning, you might have the kids doing like Instacart or Uber and things like that, and everybody's pulling their money. Like that's what life is like here. Here we see a day in the life of your gateway renter. So this is you know, from wake up to going to bed, this is what the day looks like. And the idea here is really to try to see you, see your neighbor as a human, see your neighbor as someone who goes through life and is exhausted or going through life and uh has frustrations just like you do and concerns just like you do. Over here we have a couple, again, in the full packet, you unlock all of this stuff. There's a lot more, but here, these are the areas where you might find major pressure for for immigrants. Um documentation barriers, there's confusing systems. You think the DMV is bad and you live here, imagine coming from another country. Uh fear of mistakes, vulnerability to scams, uh, stress around mail, form, deadlines. Uh, the language gap makes everything harder. You've got to depend on an 11-year-old to translate from you many times. How to show up with relief. Again, in the full packet, there's like 25 of these practical care tips for each one of these types of people. But here is a quick preview. Best first move. Here's where you can open with. If you're new here, what's been the hardest part of adjusting to this culture? And then just listen, man. What about the practical care tips? Lead with hospitality first evangelism, things like meals, uh, welcome baskets, rides, especially if you have lots of kids, you have lots of you know, units trying to get out to make to make an income during the day, you know, rides are at a premium. So being able to just give a ride to a kid to school or be able to help someone with a ride to the grocery store is probably extremely helpful and will really start to lay the foundation for an eventual gospel conversation. And then, like I said before, remember forms, that's a big deal. You speak English, you understand the system. Being able to sit down with someone and just help them with their cable bill bill or help them set up a set up their water bill can be hugely life impacting for someone. And then the gospel is good news to a person. So the gospel is not just one message, but it's the it's a multifaceted message. And two, the immigrant, good news is a holy God who sees the stranger and defends the vulnerable without treating them as invisible. That's what they live their lives. And so it's good news that someone actually sees them. Again, if you want to unlock the full packet, you can do that. If it's an Ana Rondo County address, it's always going to be free. Go ahead and try that. You'll find some extra stuff in there. You'll find a full gospel presentation for this type of person. You'll see a Bible, a short little Bible study devotional that you can do to turn your heart toward your neighbor and to kind of start seeing them the way that Jesus sees them. Um but again, all of this is designed around trying to get you to be able to actually see your neighbor, love your neighbor, and eventually uh speak of Jesus in a way that is good news to your neighbor. I hope you guys enjoyed these tools. I hope you guys use these tools. I want to challenge you, look up your neighborhood, unlock your neighborhood packet, and then go do like a quick act of love that it tells you to do for your neighbor and start building those little foundational relational things that lead to a conversation about the greatness of Jesus. That's what makes everything special for me, that's what makes it all worth it for me. This is why I do all of this. If you ever want to go on a ride along to one of these areas around the county, hit me up. You can hit me up at aaron at thehood shepherd.com. That's my email address, and we can go out and we can talk evangelism and we can talk mission all day long. Until then, I'm the Hood Shepherd. Please love your neighbor, know your neighbor, and tell your neighbor about Jesus. I'll see you next time.