I was pleased to learn, after posting yesterday, that so many others were impressed by Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity. I got a gratifying bit of mail, and a respectable amount of traffic sent here from other blogs.

Stark’s statistical analysis of the early Church bowled me over, especially his contention that Christianity grew at a rate of 40% per decade through the first 300 years. Imagine if we could replicate that, or even get halfway there, today! There must be lessons there for evangelization and for family life.

That’s what David Mills thought, anyway. David is my long-suffering editor at Touchstone. He liked the Stark interview so much that he invited me to revisit the data and draw lessons for modern Christian family life. So I did that, and Touchstone kindly published the essay as Salt of the Empire: The Role of the Christian Family in Evangelization.