The heart of GACX is to facilitate collaboration so that disciples and churches can be multiplied in every place. A key activity in this is to help organizations share what they know and collectively report their progress. This creates opportunities for better tracking where the church is growing, the impact of various methods, and identifying places that still need to be reached. 

Tessie Stone from OneHope, a GACX member organization, points to the importance of research in any ministry’s calling. “Sometimes we think research doesn’t have a place," she says. "But what OneHope realized is that research reveals the reality that the Holy Spirit has called us to. Research helps us know those people we’re going to—the community, the belief system, the area.”  

A good example of research enabling collaboration is Coalition of the Willing (COTW) began at the 2019 GACX Forum in Denton, Texas when Jared Nelms of The Timothy Initiative (TTI) and Scott Cheatham of e3 Partners shared their thoughts and questions about how to better use data and research in their ministries. The idea for COTW, an organization dedicated to mapping churches and populations, was born.

“We all wanted to get the gospel everywhere and a church for every people and place, but lacked the tools and meaningful strategies to implement that vision,” said Nelms of TTI.  “To have a simple mapping system is a potential game-changer.”

While COTW is not officially part of GACX, many of its members are, with all dedicated to helping advance GACX’s 1:1000 goal. Said Nelms, “We’re not aware of any mapping [of churches] that’s been done for the entire planet. Mapping every single location in every single country feels historic, feels new.”

Currently, COTW has mapped about 1.4 million villages or settlements around the world. The goal is to map out every country down to the village level before this time next year. For Nelms, the mission, with help from research, data, and mapping, is crystal clear: “The current best estimate is that there are approximately 12 million populated places in the world. We want to see the day when every one of those places has a church and has the gospel.”