May 29, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it has the interior life to sustain the exterior witness it keeps claiming. Christianity Today ran a piece this week arguing discipleship has hit a wall — and that nobody wants to say why out loud. The diagnosis is uncomfortable: formation requires depth, and depth requires exactly the kind of slowness the church has spent twenty years optimizing away. American Reformer goes further, arguing that evangelicalism's version of piety has quietly gutted the Christian man — not by heresy, but by sentimentalism. Reduce faith to feeling, and you get people who can't bear weight. That question hasn't gone away — on March 26 several writers were already drawing the line between genuine faith and its sentimental imitation. The Aquila Report's piece on unconfessed sin lands in the same territory. Guilt is not a therapeutic problem. It is a theological one, and the antidote isn't self-compassion — it's confession.

Relevant Magazine asks, with some impatience, whether Christians who call themselves counter-cultural actually mean it. Fair question. Mere Orthodoxy is asking something sharper: when we outsource care — to institutions, to algorithms, to AI — what happens to the human being doing the outsourcing. Tim Challies picks up the AI thread directly, warning that the threat isn't just to productivity or privacy but to the soul. Meanwhile TGC's piece on Romans argues Paul never let his theology float free of the actual life of Jesus — doctrine tethered to a person, not a system. That's the connective tissue across all of this. A church that can't confess, can't form, can't care, and can't slow down is one that has kept the vocabulary of faith while losing its weight. Ryan Burge's data on collapsing Unitarian Universalism is worth a glance — not as a cautionary tale about liberalism, but as a reminder that content-free religion doesn't hold. People leave when there's nothing there.