June 15, 2026

Today the church is sitting with a hard question about visibility — who gets seen, who gets rewarded, and whether the church has confused prominence with faithfulness. Tim Challies puts it plainly: heaven doesn't sort by platform size. The most-followed Christians don't necessarily receive the most joyous welcome. That cuts. Mere Orthodoxy runs a companion piece, though it doesn't frame itself that way — a reflection on motherhood as a vocation that goes almost entirely unseen, wounds that never fully heal, labor that the church rarely stops to name. The two pieces belong together. One asks who we celebrate. The other asks who we miss. Meanwhile Ligonier is insisting that mental illness is not a problem to defer until glory — the church has a responsibility now, not later, to those who suffer in ways that aren't visible from the platform.

Nigel Biggar at First Things is making a different argument this week, one that has real friction with the quieter, inward-facing pieces above: liberalism, he says, has to fight and win, or something worse fills the space. Pierre Manent gets a full treatment in the same issue, warning that humanitarianism — detached from politics, from particularity, from any real account of human nature — corrodes democracy from inside. The PCA's report on Christian nationalism lands in the same week with tensions American Reformer says remain unresolved. And then the BBC reports that Chinese authorities raided an underground church mid-service on Sunday and detained its leaders. That story doesn't need commentary. It just sits there, next to all the debates about visibility and political theology and who counts, asking whether the church in the West knows what it actually costs to be unseen.