November 4, 2026

The church is talking today about whether it actually knows what it claims to know. Two-thirds of regular churchgoers failed a basic Bible literacy quiz, according to Lifeway Research. Not occasional attenders. Regular ones. The Gospel Coalition put the generational trend plainly: Christians are reading Scripture less than their parents did, and the gap is widening. That matters because ignorance of the text isn't a neutral condition. It's a vulnerability. A church that can't locate what it believes is a church that can't tell when something has replaced it.

The Gospel Coalition ran a separate piece this week on Christian anthropology, twelve theses on what it means to be human, and the implicit argument is that doctrine forms people whether they study it or not. The question is whether the formation is intentional or accidental. Christianity Today reported that churches are also struggling to fill worship leader positions, which means the people shaping the emotional and liturgical imagination of congregations week to week are increasingly hard to find and harder to train. That's a formation crisis layered inside a literacy crisis. On March 30 we were watching writers argue about whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. This week's data suggests many congregations aren't giving their people the material to find out.