August 29, 2026

The church is asking today whether its habits — of worship, of prayer, of formation — have quietly gone hollow. Tara-Leigh Cobble put it bluntly in Relevant Magazine: five-minute transactional faith is not a relationship with God. It's a subscription you're barely keeping active. The Aquila Report ran a piece on sleep as an act of faith — the argument being that lying down every night is either trust in God's sovereignty or proof we don't actually believe it. Aaron Renn has a sharper version of the same problem: travel sports are consuming the weekend hours that once held church, family worship, and civic life together. TGC's piece on Moses and exhausted parents is trying to answer that. Quietly, without fanfare, it says discipleship happens anyway — in the margins, in the car, at the table. Earlier this week we were watching the tension between pace and formation from a different angle. The ground hasn't shifted.

William Lane Craig's rejection of Nicene orthodoxy is getting the response it deserves. First Things isn't just alarmed by Craig — it's alarmed that evangelicalism produced the conditions for it. Thin theology makes room for thin Trinitarianism. Wyatt Graham's piece on God's names in the Pentateuch reads almost like an antidote: Elohim, El Shaddai, Yahweh — three names, three covenants, a God who is not interchangeable. The Aquila Report ran something on truth-telling and unchallenged power that belongs in the same conversation. When leaders stop being correctable, doctrine drifts. Worship is drifting too. Christianity Today's study on worship leader burnout traces it to production pressure — the Sunday service as performance, the leader as content creator. Michael Cochren's new album, per Relevant, is a deliberate argument against that. And then there are nurses in a hospital who found a way to baptize a dying patient. World Magazine ran the item short. It deserved more space.