Look at the picture below:

This is a picture taken from a bridge that allows people to travel to a city. If you were to come into the city and look out the driver's side window, this is the scenery that you will see entering the city. However, to the spiritual mapper, this city appears differently to them. In their eyes, this is what they would perceive this city to appear as after their data is gathered and this city mapped in the "Spirit":

In the majority of instances read online about people who "claimed" to spiritually "map" their city, these people stated that their cities had this "big cloud" hovering over the city where the so-called "territorial" spirits lived exercising his power over the city. Therefore, the "big cloud" influenced everything that went on in that city and therefore, gave the spiritual mapper a justification of the context of the Bible verse where the Bible states that Satan is "The prince of the power of the air". The same verse many use to attempt to justify that television and radio is evil.

After they discover the "big cloud" full of territorial spirits, the spiritual mapper will then purchase a map of the city similar to the map pictured below:

Then, the spiritual mapper will start to sub-divide the city by spirits. In other words, this section may have the spirit of alcoholism while this section has the spirit of drugs. What usually happens is that the whole city is made exempt from the warfare. There is this tendency to map other neighborhoods while refusing to map their own neighborhoods. The mentality is "My neighborhood has no demons because I live there and because I am a child of God, everything must flee when I 'prayer walk' around my neighborhood". Some spiritual mappers go as far as to objecting to their neighborhoods being spiritually mapped. The mentality here is "I can map your neighborhood but you can not map mine".

Another area where spiritual mappers fail to map is the wealthy neighborhoods of their cities. For some reason, wealthy people's sins are seen as either non-existent or 'not as bad' as the sins of the red-light district. The spiritual mapper refuses to touch the wealthy and affluent neighborhoods in his plan of warfare. How quick we tend to forget that in many of the wealthy and affluent neighborhoods, some of the residents obtained the wealth to live in these wealthy neighborhoods by illegial activies, oppression of their employees, or cheating someone out of their rightful possessions. But the church fails to discuss this simply because many churches today are fueled by the almighty dollar more than the almighty God. In many churches, the ones who oppress and run corporate America run the corporate churches with the same cutthroat mentalities they run their businesses and corporate America. Why do some of the wealthy who made their finances through oppression and unfair labor practices live in the condos and developments protected by a high fence and security guards? Is it really for privacy? Is it really to distinguish myself from the lower classes of people? Or is it because they know within their consciences that they have done wrong and therefore fear a working class retaliation one day? The spiritual mappers are so scared that the church will lose lots of money in the name of exposing corporate evil and workplace oppression that they do not touch the rich. Therefore, the spiritual mapper usually concentrates his "focused territorial" warfare efforts on the "seedier" side of town similiar to the expanded map pictured below:

I always wondered what would happen if the spiritual mappers mapped their own churches out and dealt with their issues before mapping their cities. Why? Does anyone else want to see sin eliminated in their life? We have this mentality today that we can go fight demons anywhere in the world but when there is spiritual warfare within the church, we can not deal with the issues because we "either touch God's annointed" or we are "heresy hunters". If you look at one of the pictures below where I have made a "map" of the city, notice that there is no religious spirits on the map. The spiritual mappers usually never deal with this problem. In fact, the only religions they like to deal with are the occults and the cults. But what if the cause of the decline of the neighborhood due to the church failing to be the outreach and Great Commission center the Scritpures told it to be? What if the decline of the neighborhood was due to the churches moving out to surburbia or the church's attitude towards the neighbors? You see, we never deal with these issues. If someone spiritually maps a neighborhood and denotes a spirit of religion. It is usually done in a Charismatic / Pentecostal perspective and is usually blamed on the "mainline" Baptist, Presbyterian, and other historic denominations for not seeing things their way and for not "talking in tongues". In other words, let me remove the toothpick from your eye while I still have the log in my eyes. I find it funny and tragic where one of the favorite spiritual mapping verses used to promote this practice is found in Mark 4:22 where it states "For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad". In other words, the spiritual mappers hypocrite their own support Scripture by wanting to expose the sins in our city while not exposing the sins of their own churches, their own lives, and their own neighborhoods.

After the focus has been established, the spiritual mapper proceeds to do warfare and after the warfare is done on the "seedier" side of town, forgets the rest of the city and calls his battle done. The spiritual mapper will again take this subdivided section of the city and assign spirits to the various neighborhoods within the subdivided section as shown below:

Usually, the spiritual mapper will determine these areas by the hearing of other people talking about these neighborhoods. Usually, the spiritual mapper will not research the amount of crime and the types of crime done with each neighborhood through the help of the stats department within a local police department, newspaper clippings, nor crime related databases online. Most spiritual mappers will never visit nor drive through these neighborhoods to see these spirits in action manifesting through people. They never talk with the public relations section of the local police department, churches in these neighborhoods, people who have ministries to the people in these neighborhoods, and the actual people living in the neighborhoods. It is like this battle is completely fought from the outside from this "spiritual" perspective without any plan of ministry to the inside before, during, and after the mapping and warfare is done. The warfare usually takes place in a church sanctuary far and away from the actual environment being "fought" for where people will pray, fast, and "ronda-konda-shonda" for a specified amount of time calling it progress. If one spiritual warrior would drive in the neighborhood and take some time and talk to the neighbors, they may find out that there are neighbors in the neighborhoods who are also Christian and have the same desires to want the sin and the junk out of their own neighborhoods. But for reasons beyond their pleas for help, property being destroyed and family members beaten for saying no to the pusher or the pimp, or when the police sucessfully close down a crack and prostitution house and arrest the dealers, pimps, and prostitutes and get to court where their hands are tied when a judge finds a legal loophole or the criminal gets a reduced sentence because of the lack of room in the county jail, the battles are lost and hope becomes snuffed out.

But we tend to view all the people in these neighborhoods as seedy people and contributors to the cause of drugs, prostitution, or whatever it is that affects the life of the neighborhood. I have two friends that minister to these neighborhoods. One friend and his wife has an outreach to the homeless, junkies, and prostitutes where he feeds, nurtures, clothes, and ministers Jesus to them. The other friend and his wife have an outreach where they minister to children in the housing projects with the use of puppets bringing forth the message of Jesus Christ. Therefore, these two ministries see the inside of areas that are seedy and that spiritual mappers love to externally map and never touch. If you were to ask these two ministries if they spiritually mapped these areas before ministering to these areas, you would hear the answer NO! and when asked why, the response would be "God said GO, therefore we went" and "If we had 'mapped' this area, we might have rebelled and not gone to do His work". These ministries realize that change has to be done in the inside of people's hearts first before you can change the insides of people's neighborhoods and their worlds. These ministries face the reality that only a few people may change and the neighborhoods they live in may never change or may change for the worse. They realize that the children, the homeless, and the junkies are in enviromnents where these "spirits" manifest and therefore have to show Jesus as their protector and deliverer from these vices that the mappers "fight" to eliminate.

If you asked these ministries if their ministry is successful. Their response would be "YES! If only one child got saved, if only one prostitute got saved, it was well worth the fight". To the spiritual mapper, this would be seen as failure because the crack houses, crime, and homelessness statistics did not decrease and many crack houses still exist. But as I said in an earlier paragraph, the spiritual mappers usually fail to gather statistical data before the mapping and the warfare to have the ability to compare and see if "progress" has been made afterward. Therefore, their claims of success are usually unfounded. As I emphasized in my article Warfare Gone Wacko, Jesus went into cities and dealt with demonic forces torturing people. If spiritual mapping was really a Biblical concept, Jesus would have dealt with the religious territorial spirit of the Pharisees and Saduccees and casted the spirit from planet earth instantly during his three years of active ministry. But Jesus was into people. He told his disciples in Matthew 10:14 that "if a people refuse to receive the Gospel, shake the dust off your shoes when you leave that town". Jesus did not say to go find the territorial spirit, map it, and go to war in order to go back into the town. Instead, Jesus chose to do the will of his father and shed his blood for my sins to where I can enter the holy of holies. Later, God sent the Holy Spirit down at Pentecost to where I can have the Holy Spirit live in me to have power to minister to others.

Click here for part three of "Christian Cartography".