That fact always surprises people, says Dr. Ken Sanchagrin, director of the Nashville-based Glenmary Research Center (GRC). In addition to leading the GRC, Sanchagrin is chair of the sociology department at Mars Hill College in North Carolina.

Since the U.S. Census Bureau stopped asking questions about religious affiliation, the numbers collected and published by the GRC are the best source of religious data available anywhere. These numbers have been collected every 10 years since 1970 as a joint effort of the Association of Statisticians for American Religious Bodies (ASARB) and is supported in part by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.

Each denomination handles the collection of its own membership data, except for the U.S. bishops. Glenmary has always taken responsibility for collecting Catholic membership data-and picks up the costs involved. Glenmary sees this as part of its commitment to provide home mission leadership for the larger Church and to keep the missionary challenge before U.S. Catholics.

The data is published by the Glenmary Research Center in a book which, in previous years, has been titled Churches and Church Membership in the United States. This year, however, with increased participation by Jewish leaders, it will be titled Religious Congregations Membership Study.

From this same data Glenmary develops the maps it has become famous for over the years. These maps track Church membership numbers and denominations, number of unclaimed (those not affiliated with a specific denomination) in a county or region, immigration trends, number of ethnic groups within a county or region, poverty levels, etc. With the sophistication of computers, these numbers can be translated into color-coded maps which show trends and are especially useful to Glenmary in determining areas of greatest missionary need.

One of the newest maps Sanchagrin has developed for use by Glenmary in its future planning process shows the counties of the southeastern United States with greatest missionary need. The map was created based on four criteria: low percent Catholic, high percent unclaimed, high percent of persons below poverty and high percent multicultural.

Similar maps can be produced for any of the 133 different groups that cooperate in the Religious Congregations Membership Study. This time, Sanchagrin said, organizers have tried to cooperate more with Muslim, Hindu and other religious denominations so they, too, will be included in the study.

Information collected by the GRC is helping Glenmary plan for its future in this rapidly changing world, Sanchagrin said. "We're at a moment in the history of Glenmary when we're finding out what it means to serve and minister to a different type of world."

"One thing is obvious," says Glenmary president Father Jerry Dorn. "The whole effect of the migration of Latinos into rural America is having a tremendous impact on our ministry-and our plans for ministry in the future."

So new maps from the Glenmary Research Center will certainly track the influx of this new type of Catholic population.

But this is only one concrete instance of the complexity of population changes in the home mission areas, says Sanchagrin. There is also significant in-migration of Asians-some Catholic and some not-as well as "Yankee Catholics" (northerners who have moved south for jobs or for retirement).

This next year will be a busy one for the Glenmary Research Center. In addition to plotting the U.S. census numbers and religious congregation data, the GRC will continue helping Glenmary plan for its future as efforts continue to position priests, brothers and lay coworkers in areas of greatest missionary need.