https://civicsanctuary.com/notes/ A weekly check on the neighborhood your congregation thinks it is in. en-us Thu, 05 Nov 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://civicsanctuary.com/notes/front-doors https://civicsanctuary.com/notes/front-doors Thu, 05 Nov 2026 09:00:00 GMT The claim in the wild Nearly every strategic plan a congregation writes contains a sentence like this one: We serve a neighborhood of about twenty thousand people. Nobody says it carelessly. It comes from a real place — a Census pull, a city website, a consultant's slide, a memory of what the neighborhood used to be. It is usually accurate as a count of people. It is almost always useless as a des