Claim. Per Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity (1996), early Christianity came to dominate the Mediterranean world by sustaining a steady 3.42% annual growth rate — not through miracles, state legislation, or martyr spectacle, but through “united and motivated efforts of growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives and neighbors to share the ‘good news.‘”
Elaboration. Per take-a-time-peace-and-do: 3.42% annually compounds dramatically (100 → ~108 in two years, ~1,840× over 175 years) but is unspectacular in any given year — which is Hendricks’s intended takeaway against UC short-termism. Hendricks pairs this with the long-arc CAUSA / Berlin-Wall lesson (see causa-decades-long-strategy-as-template-for-church-growth).
Stark’s mechanism — relational invitation through pre-existing networks — is the same theory grounding stark-open-networks-theory-of-religious-growth (also cited in BR ch 6). Together these atomics give the sociological foundation for why populist-church form scales while closed-network high-cost organizations stall.
The number is empirically derived (curve-fit between known early-Christian population estimates), not normative — but Hendricks treats it as the realistic UC growth benchmark to plan against.
See also. stark-open-networks-theory-of-religious-growth, causa-decades-long-strategy-as-template-for-church-growth