September 3, 2026

The church is talking today about what holds — what lasts when everything else gets dissolved. Albert Mohler put it directly: Christian schools face a choice between temporal success and eternal purpose, and most are drifting toward the wrong one. Mere Orthodoxy is asking something adjacent — whether Christians have lost the very language needed to name what's holy. Not a stylistic complaint. A formation crisis. If we can't name the sacred, we can't pass it on. TGC's resolution on AI lands in the same territory: when a tool starts functioning as an oracle, the church has handed something over that wasn't its to give. These three pieces aren't obviously connected. But they're asking the same question — what happens to a people who forget what they're for.

The other thread running through today is cost — what mercy actually requires. The Aquila Report runs a piece on grace that refuses sentimentality: God's mercy costs everything, and Christ paid it. Sean McDowell is covering Michael Heiser's rethink of demonic origins, which reframes spiritual warfare as older and stranger than most Sunday school curricula admit. Ligonier goes back to Eden — the first defeat, and what it set in motion. Earlier this week we were watching desire and formation surface as the central question; today that question has teeth. If the fall was a war for everything, then discipleship isn't self-improvement — it's contested ground. Christianity Today also broke news on Protestant churches publishing an abuse accountability database, naming names. The mercy conversation and the accountability conversation are not separate. They never were.