Futuros

Hispanic or Latino is the Census term, and these are ACS five-year estimates— table B03003 for the totals and B03001 for the origins — not a headcount. The change from 2018 to 2023 is the shift between two overlapping five-year windows (2014–18 and 2019–23), so say “ACS five-year estimates”, never “residents counted”. Every cell carries a margin of error; a small number in a single ZIP area is indicative, not exact.

A Spanish-language church is identified by its name. The Church of God locator publishes no language field, so a church counts as Spanish-language when its name matches words like Iglesia, Hispanic, Templo, Ministerio, Misión or Centro Cristiano. It is a proxy: it will miss a Spanish-language congregation with an English name, and it can catch an English-language church with a Spanish name. Treat the count as a floor and check a specific church before acting on its distance.

There is no Hispanic forecast. Georgia and Tennessee publish official population projections by county, but not by ethnicity, and no official Hispanic forecast exists below state level. So where the main planting score looks forward on an official projection, the Futuros score looks forward on the observed five-year shift alone. It describes momentum that has already happened.

Distances are miles, converted from kilometers. The engine stays in kilometers so it is identical to the model the rest of the tool runs on — rings of 3 miles (5 km), 6 miles (10 km) and 12 miles (20 km) — and the reader sees miles. The Futuros score is 0.86 × growth + 0.14 × viability — growth varies far more than viability, so in practice the ranking follows growth, the same construction and the same weights as the main priority score, applied to the Hispanic figures. How near a Spanish-language Church of God church is shown as context and carries no weight.