To each of you… bravo for your insight.  Just a couple points… I am a former HMB now called North American Mission Board, SBC, church planter (missionary).  My wife and I and countless other good intentioned, hard working, evangelistic Christians worked hard to win souls and establish new churches in the Northeast, just to be left on the field without strong enough support to get these mission churches off the ground.  In the south SBC churches prosper and for years were the majority in the Christian community.  I had one church that told me they were “turned off” by my begging for support.  With a family to care for and bills that were unpaid, we left the field after 4+ years.  My five page final report to the mission board centered on one theme.  I leave the field with a task unfinished due to the casual attitude of Christians toward winning the lost to Christ.  I told them that the American church would give our government permission to eliminate our Christian foundings and that we would be a country of little or no influence soon.  At the same time the SBC IMB was bringing in record offerings for foreign missionary work.  We sure missed the mark of Matt 28.  Less than 15% of Americans attend a religious service on the weekends.  Most come to be entertained.  Less than 1% have ever shared their faith with another person. 
On another point two large SBC churches in Dallas weren’t even mentioned… FBC and Second Baptist Church.  At one time FBC, Houston was the largest in the country.  We attended a Willow Creek/SBC affiliated church for 5 years before we moved.  They are still growing and are blessed with attendance of 400-500 weekly.  Our prayers for all churches big and small.

Lord help us to win those that will be saved and make disciples out of them so that they may endure.  Even so, Come Lord Jesus!

I was interested to see Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Alabama on the list. Last week I attended a “Church Health” conference in Australia which was conducted by Briarwood Presbyterian Church, with Harry Reeder as the main speaker.  The conference was called “Embers to a Flame”. It helped us Aussie church leaders to seek after church health rather than church growth. There was a strong encouragement for us to be committed to Bible teaching, prayer and discipling as the means of feeding (and consequently growing) God’s church. The pre-eminence of the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting was very, very heartening.

Harry Reeder had an evident appreciation of the spiritual warfare encountered by pastors in struggling churches and did not provide us with a slick formula promising that we could grow mega-churches. Rather, he taught from Ephesians, the importance of nourishing God’s people and allowing God to grow our churches. 

There are some churches which I pray would be less influential. But I am surely thankful for churches such as Briarwood Presbyterian which use the gifts God has given them to influence others so that God would be honoured through more churches proclaiming the saving message of the cross.