June 27, 2026

The church is asking this week what it actually owes people — in their anxiety, their poverty, their children, their souls. Max Lucado has a piece in Relevant Magazine arguing the church has shamed anxious people by reading Scripture carelessly. "Do not be anxious" has been wielded as a verdict rather than an invitation. That's a pastoral claim with real teeth. Christianity Today is running something sharper — a biblical case for radical redistribution of wealth, treating economic justice not as a political preference but as a scriptural obligation. And Albert Mohler is arguing that children's rights must take precedence over Obergefell, which puts him in a different conversation entirely about what protection the church owes the vulnerable. Three pieces. Three different populations the church is being asked to account for. The theological instinct underneath all of them is the same: the church has been too quick to look away.

The Gospel Coalition says churches that skip theology are raising kids who leave the faith. Not a new concern, but the piece puts it starkly — sentimentalism in children's ministry costs you the next generation. That question of formation hasn't gone away; we were watching it earlier this week in the conversation about desire and whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. Relevant also ran a piece on social media destroying prayer — attention colonized before it can be directed toward God. Mere Orthodoxy goes further, suggesting that not owning a smartphone at all is a kind of spiritual advantage, not a deprivation. First Things has a quieter item: what JD Vance actually found in the church before his conversion. Worth reading alongside the CT piece on despair — Christianity Today draws a line between despair as honest art and despair as self-indulgence, and that line is harder to locate than it sounds. The week's pressure, underneath the noise, is really about formation: what shapes a person, what the church is willing to say clearly, and who pays the price when it isn't.