May 4, 2026

Today the church is reckoning with who God actually is — and whether most Americans have any idea. Lifeway Research dropped a piece arguing that American churchgoers are largely worshiping a god of their own construction — therapeutic, vague, and nothing like the Trinity. That's not a new diagnosis, but the stakes feel sharper this week. The Aquila Report ran two pieces that push in the same direction from opposite sides: one sitting with what John 3:16 alone cannot carry — the full weight of judgment and grace that funerals force you to face — and another on how the resurrection answers mortality, failure, and regret in ways no softer gospel can. The God who raises the dead is not the God most people think they believe in. That question of who we're actually worshiping has been threading through this feed for weeks — on March 30 it surfaced as a question about desire and formation, whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things.

The Gospel Coalition's piece on Jonah presses the point in a different register — God redeems the people we've written off, including the ones who won't forgive him for it. Jonah is a problem for anyone who wants a tidy theology of grace. Tim Challies, meanwhile, published a sober factsheet on Canada's euthanasia expansion — numbers that should stop the scroll. World Magazine offered something stranger and more haunting: a history of carnival sideshows that kept premature infants alive before hospitals would, a story about human dignity arriving from the most unlikely corners. What holds these pieces together is a question the church keeps circling: what does it cost to believe that every life is made by God for something? TGC's piece on discipleship says the answer requires slowness — formation is not efficient, and treating it like a content queue is its own kind of heresy.