09/07/2026
50-55 million souls in the mission field called the Northeast. Metro Philly is home to 6 million of those individuals. Church planting is an essential way to reach many of these individuals.
The bright ribbon of colour hugging the coast on this map is the Northeast Megalopolis, the almost continuous band of cities and suburbs that runs from Boston down through New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore to Washington. Though it covers only a sliver of American land, this corridor is home to roughly fifty million people, close to one in six of the entire United States population. The map, which shows population density around the year 2000, picks out the great urban cores in deep red, linked by an unbroken chain of dense suburban development along the interstate highways and rail lines that thread the region together. The geographer Jean Gottmann gave the phenomenon its name in his 1961 study, arguing that these separate cities had effectively grown together into a single urban system.
