What I'm working on....

The following is an excerpt from a paper I'm writing for my church planting class. It provides the basis for the church plant some friends and I are working on. Let me know what you think....

The city of Abilene is also a visibly churched city. By visibly churched, I mean that in any given neighbor hood, there are several churches. The Abilene Baptist Association alone is comprised of fifty-four congregations in an area of approximately forty-nine square miles. That is .91 Baptist churches for every square mile of the city, and that is but one type of Baptist church. A Yahoo yellow pages search for Christian churches in Abilene listed 191 congregations in Abilene. Even if the city’s land mass comprised one hundred square miles there would be nearly two Christian churches for every square mile in the city.
The question, then, becomes “Why plant a new church in such a visibly churched city?” The answer is also found in the census data. According to the data I computed based on 2004 census population estimates there are roughly 35,214 people in Abilene who admit having no church affiliation, the equivalent of one hundred seventy-six congregations with two hundred members. The data also shows that 38,654 people have only “some” church affiliation, which means there are nearly 74,000 potential disciples of Jesus in Abilene in need of a church that meets the needs of the people.