June 20, 2026

Today the church is asking who gets to define faithfulness — and whether the definitions we're using have quietly become self-serving. O. Alan Noble puts it starkly: evangelicals are leaving over sex and love, not doctrine per se, but because the church failed to model what it preached. The Aquila Report lands harder — we've become what we condemn, trading genuine moral witness for the performance of it. Aaron Renn is watching something adjacent: personal optimization rhetoric has colonized discipleship language, turning formation into self-improvement with Scripture attached. That question hasn't gone away — earlier this week writers were asking whether our desires are even properly ordered enough to know what faithfulness looks like. The women in ministry debate sharpens the problem. Samuel James is asking egalitarians to reckon honestly with denominational belonging. Relevant Magazine notes that N.T. Wright has stepped into the Southern Baptist controversy directly. Desiring God and Wright aren't even in the same argument — one is doing exegesis, the other ecclesiology. Both sides think the other is missing the point.

Christianity Today reports that the US is deporting religious refugees to a country they've never lived in. Sudan has produced the world's largest displacement crisis — 13 million people — and Relevant Magazine notes the church has largely stayed quiet. These aren't peripheral items. The Aquila Report's piece on Christ's suffering argues that the cross wasn't a flaw in God's plan but its architecture — which means the church's posture toward the suffering of others is a theological statement, not just a humanitarian one. American Reformer is making a different kind of structural argument: Christian nationalism needs total depravity as a guardrail, or it will reproduce the same corruptions it claims to resist. The Gospel Coalition's piece on retrieval theology asks whether borrowing Thomas Aquinas costs Protestantism something it can't afford to lose. And TGC's Juneteenth piece demands that evangelicals reckon with what the Bible actually said — and didn't say — about slavery. Faithfulness, it turns out, requires knowing where your tradition got it wrong.