June 12, 2026

Today the church is asking a single question from a dozen different angles: who actually belongs — to God, to the church, to the faith itself? First Things says Latter-day Saints don't, and World Magazine reports the Pentagon is now tangled in exactly that dispute. The boundary question isn't abstract. It has chaplains, courtrooms, and careers attached to it. Meanwhile TGC's reading of John 4 runs in the opposite direction — Jesus crossing every social and religious line to reach one Samaritan woman. The doctrinal boundary and the boundary-breaking savior sit in the same week's feed, unresolved.

Mere Orthodoxy says the kingdom belongs to children, which is another way of saying it belongs to people we've stopped taking seriously. That lands differently alongside Ryan Burge's data showing Gen Z trusts almost no one — not institutions, not leaders, not the church. We were watching that generation's longing for belonging back in March, and the numbers haven't moved. Christianity Today adds a harder edge: can you pray for a leader and against him at the same time? Scripture, it turns out, doesn't make that easy. And underneath all of it, TGC's piece on the cry of dereliction — what actually happened when the Father forsook the Son — keeps the whole conversation honest. If that moment is real, then belonging costs something. It always did.