August 14, 2026

The church is asking today whether it's actually forming people — or just producing them. Ryan Burge dropped new research showing faith doesn't transmit automatically through families. You can raise your children in the church and lose them anyway. Christianity Today runs a piece from a mother arguing the helicopter instinct is part of the problem — that overprotection signals to kids that the world is too dangerous to engage, which is not a Christian anthropology. Lifeway Research adds a sharper edge: churches have a narrow window after summer conversions to disciple new believers before they drift, and most churches miss it. Tim Challies says the ordination problem runs even deeper — the wrong men are being put in pulpits to begin with, men trained to perform rather than care for souls.

The Aquila Report argues the attention crisis isn't a technology problem, it's a spiritual one — and that lands differently alongside 9Marks making a case for Sunday worship as a form of rest no sleep can replicate. Both are saying the same thing from different angles: formation requires a kind of structured, repeated attention that modern life systematically destroys. Mere Orthodoxy weighs in on science hitting its own walls — there are goods, including the goods of formation, that money and method cannot manufacture. That question hasn't gone away — earlier this week we were watching it surface around desire and whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. World Magazine has a quieter story underneath all of it: missionaries planting the first church on a Gambian island known for spiritual fear. Formation doesn't begin with curriculum. Sometimes it begins with showing up where no one else will.