How the profiles were built

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The purpose of profiling is to answer one question twelve different ways: who is the person on the other side of the page, and what does he or she actually need from the gospel of Jesus Christ? Every profile is built so a writer can move from a real person's interior life directly into the text of Scripture without a seam.

Four layers

Each profile was constructed from the same four layers.

1. A data portrait. National survey and mortality data, cited, establishing that the group exists at scale and is not a caricature.
2. An interior monologue. A first-person paragraph capturing how the person actually talks to himself. This is the most useful element for a pamphlet writer, because the opening sentence of a pamphlet has to be recognizable to the reader as his own thought.
3. A felt-need and real-need analysis. What the person says he wants, set beside what Scripture says he needs. These are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where evangelism happens.
4. A gospel correspondence map. A point-by-point matching of the person's actual situation to specific biblical teaching and specific texts.

The landscape behind all twelve

Six facts about the current religious environment shape every profile.

• The long decline has paused, but the youngest cohorts are the reason to be sober. Pew's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians and 29% are religiously unaffiliated, a share that has been relatively stable since 2019. But adults 18 to 24 are far less likely than adults 74 and older to identify as Christian (46% against 80%), to pray daily (27% against 58%), or to attend services monthly (25% against 49%).
• The gender pattern has inverted among the young. Women have always been more religious than men, and that has reversed in Gen Z. Among Gen Z adults who left their childhood religion, 54 percent are women, against 43 percent among Baby Boomers. At the same time young men are returning. This is why the young man and the young woman are treated as two profiles.
• Belief survives the collapse of belonging. Among the religiously unaffiliated, 70% say they believe in God or another higher power, and only 19% are strict nonbelievers. Most of the mission field is not atheist. It is people who believe in God, distrust institutions, and have never been shown the difference between a denomination and the church described in the New Testament.
• Most people who left did not storm out. The Great Dechurching estimates about 40 million Americans have left churches in 25 years, and that roughly 30 million of them left for pragmatic reasons: relocation, inconvenience, a family change.
• Loneliness is the universal solvent. Cigna's index found 58% of U.S. adults classified as lonely, with 18–24 year olds highest at 79%.
• The despair crisis is real and has begun to ease. Deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide fell 16 percent in 2024 against 2023, the first significant decrease since 1999.

The rule for every piece of literature

Enter through the felt need, arrive at the real need, and do not linger in the doorway. One panel of recognition, then Christ. Emotional identification that goes on too long becomes therapy.

A necessary honesty

No pamphlet in this program may promise that obedience to the gospel will end the reader's anxiety, grief, addiction, poverty, or loneliness. Some of those things it may relieve. Some of them a Christian carries to the grave. Paul had a thorn that did not leave (2 Corinthians 12:7–9), and the apostles were told plainly that tribulation was included (Acts 14:22). What the gospel promises is forgiveness, adoption, the indwelling Spirit, a body of people, and a resurrection. That is more than enough. Overpromising is not only dishonest. It manufactures the next generation of church-hurt people, who will conclude, reasonably, that they were sold something that did not work.

Doctrine every pamphlet teaches

Every pamphlet produced from these profiles teaches the following without softening, hedging, or delay.

The five objections that recur everywhere

These come up in nearly every profile and are handled the same way in every pamphlet.

1. "I was already baptized." Ask what it was for. Acts 19:1–5 is the model: Paul asked, listened, and taught. He did not assert. He examined.
2. "That's works salvation." Ephesians 2:8–9 with Romans 6:3–4. In baptism the person is passive: he is buried, he is raised. Grace is not diminished by being received the way God specified.
3. "The thief on the cross." He died under the old covenant, before the covenant took effect through Christ's death (Hebrews 9:16–17), before the Great Commission (Mark 16:15–16), and before Pentecost (Acts 2). Jesus forgave sins directly during his earthly ministry (Mark 2:5–12).
4. "All these churches, and you say you're the only right one." The plea is not that one group is right. It is that no group has authority, only the text does, and any person may read it and become simply a Christian (1 Corinthians 1:10–13; Acts 11:26).
5. "Christians are hypocrites." Concede it. Then Matthew 23. No one has condemned religious hypocrisy in stronger language than Jesus did, and that is an argument for him rather than against him.

Standards every pamphlet must meet

Every pamphlet in the program must:

1. Open inside the reader's life, not inside a doctrine. The first sentence should be recognizable to the reader as his own thought.
2. Reach Christ within the first sixth of the text, with one deliberate exception (He Saw Her First), where credibility must be established first.
3. Contain the full plan of salvation, with the texts printed in full.
4. State plainly that baptism is immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins, the point at which the blood of Christ washes away sins for the first time, and not a symbol of a salvation already possessed.
5. Quote the ESV accurately, cite chapter and verse for every claim, verify every reference against the text before printing, and carry the ESV copyright and permission notice.
6. Name the cost honestly. No pamphlet may promise that becoming a Christian ends anxiety, grief, addiction, poverty, or loneliness.
7. Never mock a denomination, a person, or a belief. Answer positions. Never ridicule people.
8. End with a specific next step and a real contact: a name, a phone number, a person who will actually answer.
9. Be readable at the audience's actual reading level, which for some profiles means roughly sixth grade, deliberately.
10. Be reviewed by at least one person who belongs to the target profile before printing.
11. Honor any structural requirement stated in the profile.
12. Record the version of the profiles it was built from.

Versioning

The profiles are a versioned document. Version 2.0 (August 11, 2026) added a twelfth profile, the Young Family Under Pressure, and its pamphlet. A major version is issued when a profile is added, removed, merged, or materially redefined, or when the pamphlet program or a doctrinal or production standard changes. A minor version refreshes statistics or corrects wording. Each pamphlet records the version it was built from, and when the profiles take a new major version, every pamphlet is checked against the version it names.

Sources

Statistics were current as of July 2026 and should be re-verified before any pamphlet that cites them goes to print.

Religious landscape and affiliation. Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study 2023–24 (February 2025) and Religious "Nones" in America (January 2024); Pew Research Center on Latin American Catholicism (January 2026) and U.S. Latino Catholicism (April 2023); PRRI, Census of American Religion (2025) and Hispanic religious affiliation spotlight (June 2026).

Generational and gender shifts. Survey Center on American Life, "Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers" (January 2026) and Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America (March 2025); Barna Group, State of the Church 2025 and Gen Z research (2025–2026); Religion News Service / PRRI (April 2026); Billy Graham Center Research Institute Gen Z survey of 2,365 adults (July 2026); Circana BookScan Bible sales data (2024–2025).

Dechurching. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge, The Great Dechurching (2023).

Loneliness and social connection. U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023); Cigna/Evernorth U.S. Loneliness Index; Gallup daily loneliness measurement (2024); Survey Center on American Life, American Friendship Survey; National Academies, Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults (2020); University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging.

Mortality and despair. Trust for America's Health, Pain in the Nation 2026; National Center for Health Statistics mortality data (2024).

Aging and kinlessness. Verdery and Margolis, PNAS; Verdery et al., Journals of Gerontology: Series B (2017).

Parents and adolescent mental health. Pew Research Center, Parenting in America Today (January 2023); CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2023).

Immigration and international students. Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study 2023–24; Institute of International Education enrollment data (2024–25).

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.