August 18, 2026

Today the church is asking whether its institutions still hold — whether the structures we've built for formation, proclamation, and care are actually doing what we think they are. Lifeway Research dropped a study this week showing that nominal, low-demand Christianity is collapsing under pressure — not slowly eroding, collapsing. When faith costs nothing, it turns out it can't bear much weight. Christianity Today ran a long-overdue reckoning with the Passion Translation, documenting how its textual problems weren't hidden — they were visible, and the evangelical world largely looked away. That's a formation crisis wearing a Bible cover. TGC's piece on missing youth pastors completes the picture: the pipeline for reaching the next generation is drying up at exactly the moment that generation needs the most from the church.

The Aquila Report is asking a sharper version of the same question. Christians face a choice between power and faithfulness — the piece doesn't soften it. Pew's new numbers on refugee admissions are the data underneath that question: a 73% drop under Trump's second term, a policy the church has been largely quiet about. Silence is a kind of answer. O. Alan Noble wrote carefully this week about secular therapy — not dismissing it, not baptizing it either, calling Christians to stay discerning about what they're borrowing and why. That question hasn't gone away — on March 30 we were watching the same tension around desire and formation, whether our minds can be trusted to want the right things. Noble is asking it now about our therapeutic frameworks. A pastor at The Aquila Report drew a similar line about AI-generated sermons: the tools can shape a sentence, but they can't stand in for a soul that has suffered and prayed. The form can be borrowed. The presence cannot.