April 23, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it still knows what it's for — and the answers coming back are uncomfortable. Russell Moore has a piece in Christianity Today warning that the church is being reshaped by gambling culture: dopamine loops, short odds, the thrill of the next thing replacing the long patience of faith. The Gospel Coalition is watching the same drift from a different angle — Silicon Valley's transhumanist promises, they argue, are just Gnosticism with better funding. The body is a problem to be solved. Death is a bug. Both pieces are diagnosing the same disease: the church absorbing the spirit of the age instead of resisting it. Lifeway Research drops nine data points suggesting the crisis isn't coming — it's here. Declining biblical literacy, institutional trust collapse, youth attrition. The numbers don't argue. They just sit there.

Mere Orthodoxy brings the sharpest piece of the day: a meditation from Belfast on a killer who was also a mentor, and what happens when communities celebrate the good a man did while refusing to name what he did wrong. No repentance, no eulogy virtues — that's the argument. It's a harder version of the question on March 27 about what transformation actually looks like and what it costs. Christianity Today also ran a piece on just war theory and Iran — the logic is supposed to be frustrating, they say, because it's designed to make war harder to justify, not easier. That's a counter-intuitive claim and they mean it. Meanwhile CT asks whether the church can enter the guys' group chat — the informal digital spaces where young men are actually forming each other. American Reformer closes the loop simply: Christians are not permitted to despair. Not as a feeling to suppress, but as a theological category. Providence means something, or it doesn't.