July 27, 2026

The church is asking today what it actually has to offer a world that's outsourcing everything — friendship, meaning, even humanness itself. Relevant Magazine ran a piece on the booming subscription-friendship economy and said the quiet part plainly: the church used to do this for free. The Gospel Coalition is asking a harder version of the same question — what happens to the image of God when AI can simulate the outputs of a person without the personhood. These aren't unrelated. Both are about whether the church knows what it has before the market finds a replacement. Tim Challies quietly dropped a piece about giving up his phone — not a rant, just a pastor's account of what he got back. Presence. Attention. The ability to be somewhere. That question about pace and formation hasn't gone away since March 30.

Desiring God put something uncomfortable on the table: losing your appetite for Scripture isn't a bandwidth problem. It's rebellion. Soft, quiet, respectable rebellion — but rebellion. Ligonier ran a piece on disability ministry framed as a single question a parent asked a church: are you here for all children or just most? No one answered it cleanly. The Aquila Report pushed back against any drift toward earned grace — salvation proclaimed, not performed. World Magazine covered Alaska Airlines firing Christian employees for opposing the Equality Act, a legal story with a simple edge: what happens when a conviction becomes a fireable offense. The thread running through all of it is authority — who holds it, who's been shut out of it, and whether the church is willing to say so out loud.