July 15, 2026

The church is asking this week what it actually means to encounter God — in the pulpit, in suffering, in the slow work of formation. The Aquila Report put it bluntly: sermons are not TED Talks. They are not information delivery. They are moments where something happens between a congregation and the living God — and a church that forgets this trades encounter for performance. That sits uncomfortably next to Tim Challies, who this week admits he is finding his spiritual habits harder to break than he expected. Not harder to keep — harder to change. The grooves run deep. Which is either an argument for the power of formation or a warning about what we've been forming ourselves toward. Christianity Today adds the sharpest edge: when suffering arrives, the instinct is to charge God. The piece refuses to offer cheap comfort. God is not the villain of your story — but the question itself, the raw accusation, is treated as theologically serious rather than spiritually immature.

Lifeway Research is watching Gen Alpha slip past the church almost unnoticed. The argument isn't complicated: if you want to reach the children, you have to reach the parents first. Earlier this week we were watching that same tension around Gen Z — whether the church has something real to offer a generation or just programming. The answer here is formation again, upstream and slow. Meanwhile, World Magazine reports that pro-life advocates are pressing for a full defunding of Planned Parenthood following recent closures, and GOP congressmen have joined a court filing against the Johnson Amendment — the law that restricts political speech from tax-exempt churches. Two legal stories with the same underlying question: what does the church owe Caesar, and what does Caesar owe the church. Pew Research's new data on evangelical political realignment is sitting underneath all of it, mostly unread.