Q&A about Samaritans's Purse response to hurricane Helene
2024-12-18 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
Hurricane Helene, a category 4 hurricane that came ashore late on September 26th in the Big Bend region of Florida, became an overwhelming tropical storm once it slowed over the Southeast United States, devastating a large swath of the Appalachian Mountains with torrential rains and wind. The rains soaked the high country of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, causing widespread flooding that was beyond many people’s wildest expectations.
Samaritan’s Purse’s backyard is Western North Carolina, so we quickly became both those affected by the storm and those that were responding to the needs among our neighbors and friends. Our GIS groups in both North American Ministries and International Projects were called in to help with analysis of the impacts and how we could best respond.
This presentation will be a Question and Answer time that will dig into Samaritan’s Purse’s efforts utilizing GIS to respond to Hurricane Helene and what we learned to help us respond to other major disasters in the future.

FedGIS2025: Christians in GIS Lunch meeting
2025-02-24 12:30 - 13:45 (America/New_York) | Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mt. Vernon Place NW, Washington, DC, DC, 20001, United States
We welcome Christians and anyone willing to respect the guiding principles of this group reflected in the Apostles Creed.
Let’s meet and have lunch together.
Find us at the doorway entrance to the lunch room.

Sutherland Maps: Exploring God's Creation, One Map at a Time
2025-02-25 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
Exploring God’s Creation, One Map at a Time. That’s been my goal while hand drawing maps for over a decade now. And in a greater sense glorifying God through the process.
During February’s webinar you’ll hear the theology behind making maps, see my process for hand drawing them, and Lord willing be inspired to make your own. Michael Sutherland currently serves as Senior GIS Analyst for Cushman & Wakefield. He’s worked with GIS in both the public/private sectors since 2016 to create/maintain geospatial databases and fulfill project requests for commercial real estate brokers. He also runs Sutherland Maps, his freelance cartography business. Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his wife Maggie, their two dogs Bam and Buzz, running, hiking, and hand-drawing maps.
Michael Sutherland/Senior GIS Analyst at Cushman & Wakefield

Experiencing Spatial Analytics in Business
2025-04-15 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
In this webinar, Dr Girju (professor of marketing and analytics) and her students, will present a series of hands-on, experiential studies in spatial analytics in business developed in their Spatial Analytics in Business class at California Baptist University. Students will present a study of church membership at a medium size church with 4 locations in the Inland Empire area. Other projects with non-profits and churches will be described. Much more can be accomplished by Christians in GIS, so Dr Girju will make a call for stronger connections with the Christian GIS and Christian business world.
Dr. Marina Girju has 20+ years of industry experience and holds degrees in computer science, marketing and Management Science. In the Strategic Business Analytics and Insights concentration dr. Girju designed Spatial Analytics in Business, a key class with a strong focus on experiential learning. All learning materials are case studies of business problems and opportunities and in every class there are a few hands-on consulting projects with non-profit organizations and churches. She is currently writing a book of case studies for spatial analytics in business and is looking for Christian organizations eager to collaborate with her classes to solve business problems with spatial analytics.
Dr Marina Girju is professor of Marketing and Analytics and Associate Dean at California Baptist University in the JABS School of Business.

Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place
2025-07-01 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
Our identity as followers of Jesus can and should transform how we live in the physical world. We need a far more expansive Christian imagination for land and place. Common American narratives that reduce land to commodity, or irrelevant background miss the consistent emphasis in the biblical story that God created and cares for land and place. We should grapple with complicated American histories of land and Indigenous people, race and social class, and reapproach Biblical themes of land as home, gift, sacrament, and kin to help prompt Christian groups and individuals to work toward a Christian vision of land mattering in the past, present, and future. We can recover Christian practices for living faithfully as members of our human geographies. And perhaps most importantly, we can receive the world itself as the gift it was intended to be.
My dissertation (PhD – Azusa Pacific University) explores how people learn and grow and how educational sectors become ideological battlegrounds, using a regional study of Palestinian colleges and universities in the occupied West Bank.
Director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East and author of upcoming book Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination.

Esri User Conference Lunch
2025-07-14 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | San Diego Convention Center, 111 Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA, 92101, United States
For those of you attending the Esri User Conference July 14 – 18, we are meeting during lunch time, Monday, July 14 at 12:30 PM. We will meet in Room 27 A.
We aren’t able to provide lunch so you will need to make plans to bring your own food.
We have had this meeting at many User Conferences in past years.
It has been a great opportunity to meet others in the group face to face.
If you are able to be at the conference, hope you can make it.

THE AI JOURNEY AT MISSION AVIATION FELLOWSHIP
2026-09-15 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Paris)
In the past six months a subset of the MAF IT team has been looking into the ways that AI can be used to facilitate MAF’s work across the world. The talk will explore some of the things that the group has come up with and demonstrate how the MAF GIS team is currently using AI for application support and creation.
In the early part of his career Frank was the GIS Manager for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe. Frank joined Innovate Inc. in 2011 and coordinated a very talented group of solution architects and geospatial programmers as IT Director. His team primarily crafts mobile and web-based geospatial solutions for clients throughout the USA. In October 2024, Frank stepped down from his role at Innovate, and started his work at MAF as their Global Data Architect. In addition to his work at MAF, he has spent the last year as a fractionated CTO for two different start-ups (GeoTrace Systems and Vacation Clean).
When Frank isn’t thinking about technology, he fills his time by making music with his wife and taking his children and grandchildren fishing as much as possible.
