June 13, 2026

Today the church is asking what it owes — to God, to the suffering, to the truth, and to each other. The Gospel Coalition runs a father's account of raising a disabled son that quietly dismantles every theology of God that's really just a theology of personal comfort. Relevant Magazine is asking why God answers some prayers and not others — a real pastoral question that rarely gets a real pastoral answer. The Aquila Report is pushing harder: surrender isn't optional, and God won't let Christians treat faith as a negotiation. O. Alan Noble goes somewhere most pastors avoid — shame, the specific kind that mental health language can't quite reach and the church has mostly declined to name. These aren't separate pieces. They're circling the same gap between the God Christians say they believe in and the one they actually bring their lives to.

Christianity Today takes up Jesus films this week — what Hollywood gets wrong, and why the wrong version keeps winning. The answer has something to do with which Jesus people actually want. That question runs straight into American Reformer's piece on Southern Baptist ontology, where the argument is that doctrinal lines aren't institutional defensiveness — they're descriptions of what's real. Mere Orthodoxy watches the EPC try to hold its identity together under pressure, and the diagnosis is sympathetic but unsentimental. We've been watching this tension build — on March 27 the question was whether transformation is real and what it costs. Today the question is whether the church even agrees on what it's being transformed into.