August 11, 2026

Today the church is asking what it actually means to form people — and whether the structures Christians have built are even designed to do it. The Aquila Report ran a piece arguing that churches organized around attendance metrics have quietly abandoned discipleship as their goal. The building fills, the numbers report well, and almost nothing changes in the people sitting in the seats. The Gospel Coalition takes the question outside the walls entirely — schools in many communities are calling churches for help, and TGC wants to know if those churches have anything ready to offer. That's a sharper challenge than it sounds. A church that hasn't formed its own people has little to bring anyone else. O. Alan Noble is working through purity culture this week, asking what evangelical formation actually produced — and what it cost. The formation conversation keeps surfacing damage alongside good intentions, and Noble doesn't let the good intentions do too much work.

First Things is asking whether love can survive secularism at all — whether virtue without theological grounding eventually hollows out, leaving the word but not the thing. That question runs underneath several pieces today. 9Marks revisits Calvin on what it means for God to be against you and for you simultaneously — the kind of theological grammar that keeps formation from collapsing into self-help. The Aquila Report's piece on killing sin makes a related point: mortification without something to put in sin's place leaves a person empty, not free. Relevant Magazine's forgiveness piece goes the same direction — forgiveness reframed not as a feeling to achieve but as a work on the heart. We were watching this tension on March 30 — whether our desires are even capable of being rightly ordered. Today the answer coming back is: not without real work, real theology, and structures that are actually built for it.