““We have seen, then, that it requires at least modest church planting in a city just to keep the body of Christ from steadily declining, and aggressive church planting is needed to grow the whole body — meaning ten to twenty relatively new churches in relation to every hundred existing churches. There is a problem with answering the question in this way, however. The goal should not be to conserve Christianity’s “market share” in a given area; it should be to serve, reach, and influence the entire city. How will this be done? Studies and anecdotal evidence indicate that if there is one church per ten thousand residents, approximately 1 percent of the population will be churchgoers. If this ratio goes to one church per one thousand residents, some 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population goes to church. If the number goes to one per five hundred residents, the number may approach 40 percent or more. The relationship of the number of churches to churchgoing people is exponential, not linear.7””
![“24 A few pages later, Delbanco writes the following: [Alexis de] Tocqueville’s detection of a “strange melancholy in the midst of abundance” has a special salience today — because while we have gotten very good at deconstructing old stories (the religion that was the subject of my first chapter…” quote by Timothy Keller](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/85a/timothy-keller-240_sad_24-a-few-pages-later-delbanco-writes-the_25320.jpg)
