July 29, 2026

The church this week is wrestling with a single uncomfortable word: acedia. Christianity Today runs an excerpt from Douglas Groothuis arguing that Christians aren't abandoning the faith so much as quietly settling for a diluted version of it — God-lite, low-demand, spiritually inert. The Aquila Report picks up the same thread from a different angle, asking why the spiritual highs of camps and retreats evaporate so quickly. The answer it gives is uncomfortable: the devil is patient, and we aren't. Groothuis is diagnosing a slow drift. The Aquila Report is diagnosing a structural problem with how we pursue formation at all. Earlier this week we were watching the same tension between desire and discipline — whether our appetites can even be trusted to pull us toward God, or whether they need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Relevant Magazine lands a piece arguing that Christians are manufacturing outrage over misinformation they never bothered to verify — which is its own form of acedia, a kind of spiritual laziness dressed up as engagement. Meanwhile 9Marks runs a quiet, serious piece on pastors leading through family crisis, refusing to pretend the pulpit insulates a man from brokenness. That's the counter-pressure: not performance, not manufactured intensity, but the slow, costly work of staying present. World Magazine adds a harder edge — a foster care episode on children aging out of the system while adults move through rehabilitation timelines that don't account for a child's sense of time at all. And Christianity Today reports that South African churches are publicly breaking with anti-immigrant mobs, which is the kind of costly, unambiguous witness acedia makes impossible. The thread running through all of it is the same: settling is easy, and the church keeps finding new ways to do it.