August 24, 2026

The church is asking today who it can trust — and what happens when the people it trusted turned out to be wrong. Tim Challies has a piece that should unsettle anyone who's sat through a restoration announcement: disqualified pastors rarely walk away. They find new platforms. New congregations. New reasons why this time is different. World Magazine is reporting that courts have dismissed most of the remaining defamation suits against Gateway Church and Robert Morris — a legal outcome that resolves almost nothing morally. Meanwhile, First Things is watching church leaders scramble to get their bearings on IVF, an issue where the moral complexity isn't going away just because pastors haven't caught up to it. The pattern is the same in each case: institutions struggling to hold the line when the line has already been crossed.

The suffering underneath all of this doesn't wait for institutions to sort themselves out. The Gospel Coalition ran a piece on shame and unhealed illness — what it does to a person when healing doesn't come and God feels absent anyway. That question hasn't gone away — earlier this week the conversation touched desire and hope, what we expect from God and what we do when those expectations break. World Magazine's ongoing series on Kayla Mueller's kidnapping lands in the same territory from a completely different angle — her parents believed she was alive, and then that belief collapsed too. 9Marks reviewed a book on spiritual weariness that frames Jesus's offer of rest not as sentimentality but as the only honest response to exhaustion. The Aquila Report on lust, Desiring God on abortion as cosmic evil, Wyatt Graham on what the name YHWH meant for Moses — all of it circles the same question: when the structures fail and the healing doesn't come, is God still who he said he was?