November 2, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it still trusts anything it can't measure. Mere Orthodoxy runs a piece on scientism and the allure of control, and the diagnosis is blunt: we reach for data because data feels like mastery. The Gospel Coalition makes the same charge against Effective Altruism, a movement that treats human suffering as an optimization problem. Both pieces are circling something the church should recognize: the desire to reduce mystery to management. The Christian Post cuts against all of it. God doesn't work through your system, the argument goes. He interrupts it. That tension, between the gospel as efficient solution and the gospel as unwelcome intrusion, is as old as the Pharisees.

Christianity Today reports that evangelicals are picking up the Book of Common Prayer in growing numbers, which fits. Liturgy is the opposite of optimization. So is putting the phone down: CT also ran a piece arguing for phone-free worship, and the logic is the same as the liturgy piece, that formation requires limits, not just intentions. World Magazine adds surveillance to the pile, asking what it means to be watched constantly and whether the church has a theology for that. The Roys Report, separately, has a troubling whistleblower account about Compassion International failing to protect children from accused sponsors, a reminder that institutional trust is not a given and that accountability is its own form of faithfulness. On March 30 we were watching the question of pace and modern life surface in similar ways. It hasn't resolved.