June 1, 2026

The church this week is asking whether it actually has anything real to offer — or whether it's been selling a thinned-out version of faith that can't hold weight. The Aquila Report puts it bluntly: shallow spirituality can't save you, and the Jesus most people meet isn't the biblical one. Mere Orthodoxy lands nearby — the promise of liberation turned out to be a mirror, and the mirror is empty. O. Alan Noble is watching the same thing happen with Gen Z: they want belonging, but they want the community without the Gospel. That question was already live earlier this week, when the church was asking whether it had anything real to give a generation suspicious of institutions. The answer then was uncertain. It's still uncertain.

Hollowness shows up at the structural level too. Relevant Magazine ran a church planter's warning that COVID didn't just empty pews — it emptied the relational core, and the church never noticed. The Gospel Coalition is tracking women leaving in numbers that should alarm anyone paying attention. Tim Challies is asking a quieter question: Christians are sitting on generational wealth and passing it down without thinking theologically about what they're doing — that piece deserves more attention than it will get. Meanwhile Christianity Today reports that Brazilian psychologists are being told they can't identify as Christian at work — a professional licensing body, not the state, doing the suppressing. Institutional pressure on faith isn't only a headline problem. It's showing up inside the church and outside it, in different clothes.