This Church Report article — The 50 Most Influential Churches — examines the fifty largest churches in the United States based on a survey that was sent to 2,000 church leaders with the goal of ranking the nation’s fastest growing churches and churches with more than 2,000 weekend attendance.
Houston is well-represented on the list, with Lakewood Church ranking fifth (are there really four churches that are larger than one that holds its services in a renovated basketball arena?), Fellowship of The Woodlands at no. 17, Second Baptist Church at no. 33, and Windsor Village United Methodist at no. 43. The common thread through all of these mega-churches is that each of them is closely associated with a charismatic leader, and that is certainly true of the Houston contingent — Joel Osteen at Lakewood, Kerry Shook at Fellowship, Ed Young at Second Baptist, and Kirbyjon Caldwell at Windsor Village.

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Following on earlier posts on the same topic here and here, this article reports on an ominous development that flies under radar screen of most Texans and Americans — the increasing violence in the Mexican border towns along the Texas-Mexico border.
Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, ordered the closure of the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo for a week Friday night to assess the security situation just hours after rival drug cartels engaged in a gunfight with machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers in an upscale Nuevo Laredo neighborhood. The battle was fought Thursday night at a single-story house near a country club, which is about five blocks from the Nuevo Laredo’s main drag.
The Texas-Mexico border area of Texas — called the Rio Grande Valley or simply “the Valley” — has always been a fascinating and troubling part of Texan culture. The area is among the lowest in terms of per capita income in the United States, yet even the chronically depressed economy of the Texas side of the border is a fantasy of riches for many of those living in the poverty of the teeming Mexican border towns. The following is the way I characterized the area’s problems in this earlier post:

The region’s problems are complex and difficult, which makes the area prone to being ignored. The increased violence of late is the natural result of such neglect, and the usual response to such spikes in violence along the border — i.e., heightened law enforcement — is only a short term solution that often contributes to the animus that many of the Hispanic citizens of the area have toward the state. The area is desperate for leadership and a vision for solving its problems, yet those intractable problems tend to repel those in government who are in a position to do something about them. In short, the Valley needs statesmen, which are in short supply in the polarized American political landscape of the early 21st century.

With some politicians calling for the creation of state militia units to combat the increasing problems on the border, it’s high time for federal and state leaders to address the problems facing the Valley and devise short and long-term plans to address them. For if they do not, expect to see what happened in Nuevo Laredo on Thursday night to spill over to the Texas side of the border soon.