July 12, 2026

Today the church is asking what it actually owes the world — and whether it still believes the stakes are high enough to say so. The Gospel Coalition ran a piece this week making the unfashionable case that hell belongs in evangelism — not as a scare tactic, but as an honest account of what's real. That argument lands differently when Christianity Today is reporting that both Washington and Tehran have gone quiet on religious freedom while Iranian Christians continue to suffer under the war. Two governments with every reason to speak. Neither one did. O. Alan Noble adds a harder diagnosis underneath all of it — his piece on the death of curiosity argues that Christians have stopped asking real questions, which means they've stopped caring about real answers. A church that won't be curious can't be honest about hell, or persecution, or much else.

Lecrae told Relevant Magazine he made an idol out of John Piper — not an enemy, an idol. Worth sitting with. The Aquila Report ran two pieces pulling in the same direction: one on justification as present reality, not something still arriving, and one on loving the church through her brokenness rather than waiting for a version you'd prefer. Together they sketch a kind of faith that can hold imperfect institutions without either leaving them or worshipping them. That question hasn't gone away — on March 27 several writers were pressing on what transformation inside broken communities actually looks like. A Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot was killed in Papua, Indonesia, and World Magazine is reporting that charter flights have been suspended as a result. A man went to a hard place and didn't come back. The church keeps sending people anyway. That's not nothing.