July 20, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it can still hear — whether the habits we're building, digital and otherwise, are making us deaf to the things that actually matter. The Gospel Coalition's Silicon Spiritualities podcast puts it plainly: AI isn't just a tool. It's reshaping what we love, quietly, at the level of habit and attention. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that pastors are using AI to write sermons — which raises a question the piece doesn't quite answer. What is a sermon for, exactly, if not the formed voice of a particular person speaking to particular people? Desiring God runs a related piece on pride and Scripture: the same self we trust to prompt an AI is the self that decides whether to open the Bible at all. Tim Challies, meanwhile, is writing about God's goodness in the form of refusal — that a divine 'no' carries the same weight as a 'yes.' That's a hard thing to receive in a moment when the culture, and increasingly the church, is optimizing for frictionless yes.

The Aquila Report runs a sharp piece on postmillennialism's pull — the way eschatological optimism can slide into political triumphalism, sanctification traded for strategy. That question hasn't gone away — on March 27 several writers were watching the same tension between transformation and activism play out in different registers. The Lifeway Research numbers this week show churches hemorrhaging disengaged members with no clear plan to reach them. And then there's the story Christianity Today ran on Pastor Saeed Abedini — survived Iranian prison, now caught in a U.S. custody dispute. The suffering church doesn't always look like persecution from the outside. A mother in The Guardian, finding no ritual home for her daughter, built one herself. That's not a feel-good story. It's an indictment. The church is asking what it's for — and some people stopped waiting for an answer.