April 18, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it has the staying power its own convictions require. Desiring God opens the week with a simple pastoral warning: leaders who move too fast lose the people behind them. That's a leadership piece on its face. But read it against the rest of the week's feed and it's something larger — a quiet confession that evangelical institutions keep outrunning their own formation. The Aquila Report asks what genuine repentance actually sounds like, insisting it has to meet three specific demands before it counts as words God receives. That's not a soft question. Meanwhile, a World Magazine survey found a severe decline in biblical tithing among evangelicals — which is its own kind of formation failure, slow and largely unnoticed. We've been watching this tension for days now: desire that drifts, disciplines that atrophy, a church that says it believes more than it actually practices.

Christianity Today runs a full piece on natural theology's renaissance — the argument from creation to Creator is getting a second hearing in serious academic circles, and CT thinks evangelicals need to know why. Sean McDowell's interview with a molecular biologist lands in the same neighborhood: can random chance actually produce life? The scientist says no, and the case is technical but the stakes are theological. What's interesting is the gap between that intellectual energy and the pastoral picture elsewhere in the feed. Relevant Magazine reports that young Christians are facing a genuine dating crisis, and the apps are making it worse — Stephen Chandler is trying to offer something more than swiping, but the problem underneath is loneliness and the collapse of community structures the church used to provide. Christianity Today also profiles Black immigrants reshaping American evangelicalism — again, the piece argues, not for the first time in American church history. The church is being rebuilt from outside its own assumptions. That might be the most hopeful thing in the feed today.