June 18, 2026

Today the church is wrestling with what it actually means to be formed — by God, by community, by suffering — and whether the institutions meant to do that work are up to the task. Tim Challies put it bluntly: technology is fast, sanctification is slow, and Claude can't do it for you. That's not a cute observation. It's a diagnosis. Formation requires time, friction, accountability — things no algorithm can supply. Mere Orthodoxy is asking a related question: how we confess sin reveals what we actually think sin is. If confession has become therapeutic — a way to feel better rather than be changed — then the whole project of sanctification is quietly hollowed out. That question hasn't gone away. Earlier this week several writers were circling the same tension between transformation that's real and transformation that's performed.

Aaron Renn has a piece arguing that evangelicals built a money machine they can't convert to power — the same organizational instincts that funded a movement now prevent it from leading one. It's a structural argument, but the theological stakes are underneath it: what does the church exist to produce? Christianity Today is asking something quieter and harder. Dad friends are drowning, and nobody is checking on them. Ligonier says there's a manual for Christian fatherhood — Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Ephesians — and it keeps getting ignored. First Things went somewhere more uncomfortable, reading a fascist intellectual to recover what suffering without despair might actually look like. Strange source. Real question. And a Lifeway Research piece about a person who walked through gender dysphoria names three things the church got right — presence, patience, truth — which turns out to be a formation story too. The thread running through all of it is the same: who shapes us, and how, and at what cost.