May 6, 2026

Today the church is asking a pointed question about idolatry — not the distant, abstract kind, but the kind Christians practice while believing they aren't. The Aquila Report catalogs the substitutes: comfort, certainty, therapeutic peace, national identity. Christianity Today runs a parallel piece on Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — Christians in institutional settings who refused the gold idol even when the furnace was real. The contrast is sharp. The Aquila Report is describing people who bow slowly, over time, without noticing. CT is describing people who wouldn't bow at all. Chris Martin complicates both by arguing that the "let go and let God" instinct is itself a kind of evasion — a spiritualized way of outsourcing what God actually calls us to do ourselves. Three pieces, one diagnosis: the church has a worship problem, and it cuts deeper than anyone wants to admit.

Mere Orthodoxy goes somewhere few outlets will — arguing that evangelical obsession with youth and bodily optimization is a form of gnosticism dressed in wellness language. The body isn't a project. Aging isn't failure. Tish Harrison Warren's new book gets a review from Christianity Today that lands in the same territory: resilience, the reviewer argues, is the world's word. Resurrection is the church's. That gap matters. Lifeway Research is out with a piece on men's ministry that, whatever its practical suggestions, is really about formation — whether the church can disciple men toward something more than camaraderie. And Reformation21 is raising the women-in-ministry question inside the PCA with the kind of structural seriousness that signals this isn't going away quietly. We've been watching the formation question resurface all week from different angles. Today it's wrapped in the body, in gender, in what the church asks of people and what it actually gives them in return.