May 5, 2026

The church is asking today what holds a human being together — what shapes the self, what breaks it, and who gets to say. Christianity Today's piece on sin doesn't offer easy answers. It sits with the question of what drives a boy to do the unthinkable, and it names sin as a tyrant — not a mistake, not a symptom, not a product of environment. A real power. Carl Trueman's new book, reviewed at The Gospel Coalition, argues that philosophy corrupted the modern self long before the internet did — that the crisis of identity we're watching isn't new, just accelerated. Ryan Burge has the data to match: his latest graphs show that Americans increasingly say religion is important to them while attending church less. Belief without behavior. The self that claims faith but won't be formed by it.

World Magazine is reporting that seniors are slipping out of churches quietly, and almost no one is following up to ask why. That sits next to TGC's conversation about therapy and church — the claim isn't that therapy is bad, but that it cannot do what the body of Christ is supposed to do. Two different institutions, two different anthropologies. Matt Chandler told Relevant that we've made sanctification too complicated — that formation is simpler than the self-help industry wants it to be. Earlier this week we were watching desire and formation pulled in opposite directions. That tension hasn't resolved. If anything, today's pieces tighten it: the self is being contested, the church keeps losing people quietly, and the question underneath all of it is whether the community of faith can still form a person into something — or whether it's just one more option among many.