April 29, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it actually knows itself — its identity, its sources, its formation — or whether it's been quietly outsourced. The Gospel Coalition runs a piece on AI and self-conception: the algorithm offers endless validation, and Christians are taking it. The cost, the piece argues, is that identity stops being formed by Scripture and community and starts being curated by whatever affirms you. Relevant Magazine lands nearby — Bible reading plans are failing, not because Christians lack discipline, but because they don't know why they're reading in the first place. Bethel McGrew at Further Up presses deeper still, asking whether faith is fundamentally about hearing or seeing — Word or icon. That's not an abstract question. It shapes what kind of people we become, and what we reach for when we're lost. Earlier this week we were watching this same tension play out around desire and formation — whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. The articles this week suggest the problem may be more structural than we'd like to admit.

Christianity Today brings a different kind of urgency: political violence, Cole Allen argues, doesn't appear from nowhere — it grows from language Christians have often refused to police in themselves. The piece is uncomfortable. It should be. CT also runs something quieter but no less pointed: competence, not confidence, is what leaders actually owe the people they serve. J.A. Medders pulls Spurgeon in the same direction — real leadership is about faithfulness over time, not projection. Alexander Pappas, the Hillsong songwriter, asks Relevant whether the church can even tell the difference between revival and a good feeling in the room. Meanwhile a UK assisted suicide bill collapsed under the weight of its own failed safeguards — World Magazine has the item — and Mere Orthodoxy argues that the myth of the American West was never about land; it was about a self-image the country needed to believe. Taken together, the thread running through all of it is the same: the church keeps reaching for shortcuts — emotional, political, technological — and the shortcuts keep not working.