Who is on the other side of the page?

Evangelistic literature fails in two opposite ways. It fails when it is doctrinally sound and emotionally deaf: technically correct, arriving in the hands of a grieving widow or an exhausted single mother like a legal brief. And it fails when it is warm and doctrinally hollow: it moves the reader and never tells him what to do to be saved.

These twelve profiles are an attempt to avoid both failures at once. Each describes a group of people who live around a congregation's building, what they say they need, what Scripture says they need, what usually stops them, and where the gospel meets them. Each has a pamphlet written for it, longer than a tract and shorter than a book, that teaches the same gospel through the door that group is most likely to walk through.

You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? Luke 12:56, ESV

The door and the house

The whole program turns on one distinction.

A felt need is what a person would say if you asked what is wrong. I'm lonely. I'm tired. I can't stop drinking. I miss my husband. I want my kids to turn out all right.

A real need is what is actually wrong at the level of his standing before God: he is separated from God by sin and cannot cross that distance on his own.

Felt needs are the door. The real need is the house. A pamphlet that addresses only felt needs is self-help with verses attached, and the reader closes it comforted and lost. A pamphlet that ignores felt needs never gets read past the first paragraph. The rule for every piece in this program is to enter through the felt need, arrive at the real need, and not linger in the doorway.

What does not change

Every pamphlet teaches the same gospel without hedging: the plan of salvation in full, with the texts printed rather than cited, and baptism stated plainly as immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins, the point at which the blood of Jesus washes away a person's sins for the first time. What changes between pamphlets is the door, not the house. The apostolic pattern in Acts is that Paul began at Athens with an altar inscription and at Antioch of Pisidia with the history of Israel, and both sermons ended at the same place: the resurrection of Jesus and the command to respond. The starting point changes. The destination never does.

How the profiles were built, and the doctrine every pamphlet teaches

The twelve profiles

1. Profile 1

   The Untethered

   Young adults with no religious frame of reference at all

   Known · 20 pages

2. Profile 2

   The Young Man Looking for Something Solid

   Men roughly 18–34 who are actively searching

   A Claim on Your Life · 32 pages

3. Profile 3

   The Young Woman Walking Out

   Women roughly 18–34 leaving faith, for reasons they can state

   He Saw Her First · 24 pages

4. Profile 4

   The Casually Dechurched

   Adults who stopped attending for entirely ordinary reasons

   You Can Come Back · 12 pages

5. Profile 5

   The Church-Hurt

   Adults who left because of what was done to them

   When the Church Failed You · 28 pages

6. Profile 6

   The Cultural Christian

   Believers who have never obeyed the gospel

   I Thought I Was Already Saved · 40 pages

7. Profile 7

   The Man in the Middle

   Working-age men carrying shame, isolation, and often dependence

   The Weight You Carry · 20 pages

8. Profile 8

   The Woman Carrying the Household

   Single mothers and caregivers with no margin

   You Are Not Invisible · 16 pages

9. Profile 9

   The Bereaved and the Aging

   Adults 65 and older facing loss and mortality

   Not Without Hope · 16 pages

10. Profile 10

    The Newcomer

    Immigrants, refugees, international students, and the second generation

    You Are No Longer a Stranger · 20 pages

11. Profile 11

    The Self-Sufficient

    Comfortable, successful adults with no felt need

    One Thing You Still Lack · 36 pages

12. Profile 12

    The Young Family Under Pressure

    Married couples with school-age children, afraid for them

    The Thing You Cannot Give Them · 16 pages

Sized for your congregation's field

These twelve profiles are national. Each congregation's Community Intelligence Report works with the same twelve, under the same numbers, and estimates how many people or households in each live around that congregation's building, where they are concentrated, and which are largest there. Profile 6 on this page is Profile 6 in the report. Only the sizes and the order are local.

In the sample report for Fairview Church of Christ, a congregation invented for the purpose and given an address in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Cultural Christian comes first, at an estimated 67,000 to 77,000 adults, followed by the Casually Dechurched and the Bereaved and the Aging. Each profile's page shows how the report sized it, or why it could not.

The numbers carry into the Campaign Portfolio as well. Every campaign names the profile it is built to serve, so an eldership can turn from a campaign to the page describing the people it is meant for. The report's literature list draws only on the twelve pamphlets on this page, and says which are in print and which are available from Kairos Intelligence on request.

Why the lengths differ

Length is a strategic decision, not a formatting one. It is set by how much doctrinal content the reader must absorb before he can act, and by how long that particular reader will keep reading. The shortest pamphlet is twelve pages because its reader needs an on-ramp and one honest question, not persuasion. The longest is forty because its reader already has assertion and needs evidence he can check. One pamphlet, for the self-sufficient, is deliberately the least emotionally engineered of the twelve, because for that reader restraint is the emotional appeal.

Where to start

If the whole program cannot be produced or distributed at once, this is the default order, and it is a national ordering. A congregation with a Community Intelligence Report should weigh this order against the local sizes in that report, which may put a different profile first.

1. I Thought I Was Already Saved (Profile 6). The largest addressable audience, and it carries the central doctrinal distinctive.
2. You Can Come Back (Profile 4). The lowest cost and the highest conversion rate per contact.
3. The Weight You Carry (Profile 7). The highest urgency. Lives are literally at stake.
4. A Claim on Your Life (Profile 2). A window that is open now and may not stay open.
5. He Saw Her First (Profile 3). The most urgent long-term problem, and the window is closing.
6. The Thing You Cannot Give Them (Profile 12). In a suburban, family-dense field this is the largest single group. Time distribution to August and January.
7. The remainder as resources allow.

A caution before you use any of it

A profile is a tool for preparing, not a verdict for pronouncing. No one you meet will be a profile. The church-hurt woman is also a caregiver; the young man reaching for structure may also be an addict; the widow may never have been immersed. Use the profiles to anticipate, then listen to the person in front of you and let him correct you. And do not confuse a demographic with a soul: every profile here describes millions of people, and each of them will stand before God individually (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Using these pamphlets

The pamphlets themselves are not posted on this site. Each profile page describes its pamphlet, why it is the length it is, how it is built, and shows its opening panel. If your eldership would like to see a pamphlet in full, or talk through which of these fit the people around your building, write to us.

Write to us about the pamphlets

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Based on Gospel Audience Profiles, version 2.0, August 11, 2026. Statistics were current as of July 2026.