June 26, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it actually wants to be told the truth — and whether its institutions are built for honesty or comfort. The Aquila Report puts it bluntly: what a congregation craves from its preaching reveals everything about its spiritual condition. Flattery or faithful rebuke. The demand for one crowds out the other. Relevant Magazine comes at the same pressure from the pew side — God, they argue, welcomes doubt in ways most local churches won't. That tension is real. A church allergic to hard questions and a church allergic to hard preaching are two symptoms of the same disease. Ryan Burge's data sits underneath all of this uncomfortably: megachurches keep growing while smaller congregations collapse. Whether that growth tracks with faithfulness or with palatability, Burge doesn't say. The question hangs there.

First Things is asking evangelicals to do harder thinking about war and moral obligation — updating just war theory for a moment when the old categories feel thin. The PCA, meanwhile, advanced a report pushing back on certain forms of Christian nationalism, per World Magazine. Two institutional acts in one week, both asking the church to resist shortcuts — theological shortcuts, political shortcuts. Aaron Renn has a quieter piece about suburban expansion erasing downtown sacred spaces, the kind of slow institutional loss that rarely makes headlines. And Mere Orthodoxy argues that digital life has turned connection into competition — which loops back to where we started. A church that won't tolerate doubt, can't sustain rebuke, and is slowly losing its physical anchors in communities is a church whose formation problem runs deeper than any single sermon can fix. That question hasn't gone away — earlier this week we were watching it surface around desire and the limits of the mind. Today it's about institutions and whether they're honest enough to help.