April 19, 2026

The church is asking today whether it actually feels anything — and whether what it feels is the right thing. Relevant Magazine dropped a number that stings: only 22 percent of Americans think Christians show empathy. That's not a PR problem. It's a formation problem. The Gospel Coalition is running a piece this week arguing that Christians have confused sadness with discontent — that we've trained ourselves to treat grief as a spiritual failure, to push past it rather than sit in it. If that's true, the empathy gap makes sense. You can't feel with others if you've taught yourself not to feel at all. The Aquila Report goes further: winter, darkness, suffering — these aren't interruptions to faith. They're where faith deepens. The suffering saints still sing, but only because they let themselves suffer first.

Christianity Today ran something this week that cuts in a different direction. A writer who lived through church collapse — the institutional kind, the kind that breaks people — says the flood of exvangelical content, the podcasts and the books and the Spotify playlists, couldn't touch what she needed. Church crisis, she says, doesn't heal through content. It heals through presence. That's the same wall Desiring God runs into from the pastoral side — leaders who move faster than their people can follow aren't leading, they're abandoning. And TGC's piece on kids with learning disabilities isn't incidental here: it asks who the church slows down for, who it decides is worth the pace. On March 30 we were watching this same tension between speed and presence surface across formation writing. It hasn't resolved. The church keeps producing content about empathy without practicing the stillness empathy actually requires.