Mapping the Future

Mapping the Future is a real-time, open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) research platform for church planters, church planting organizations, and other researchers.

We need to increase our rate of church planting across the country, but we need to do it smarter with higher rates of church viability and community impact. Church planting is not only one of the greatest hopes for reaching people that do not know Jesus, it is also costly and requires a tremendous amount of sacrifice. For the sake of all involved, we need to do better.

We are creating a real-time, open-source national Geographic Information System (GIS) research platform for church planters, church planting organizations, and other researchers.

The user interface will be accessible to a broad diversity of end-users. We will use the collective impact model to identify key variables related to church plant viability and community impact. Those variables will be curated on the GIS platform in a way that does not require technical expertise to gain insight. However, any user will be able to import whatever data they want to explore, so the research potential is boundless.

Toby's family has been in California for four generations and he was raised mostly in San Diego and Monterey. He and his wife Rebekah were married in San Diego in 1999 and have three active and fun boys aged 15, 10, and 7. Toby earned his BS from UC Davis and after spending a number of years in the marketplace, he went back to school to pursue a masters at Westminster Seminary in California and a PhD at Stony Brook University in New York. While living in Brooklyn, God redirected Toby and Rebekah towards full-time ministry, and they came home to California in 2009 to plant a church in San Francisco.