Thursday's Catch: 'Something spiritual is afoot' And More

St. Paul's, Darien, Connecticut 

Arthur Brooks’ Best Advice for Preachers (How to Reclaim 20 Hours of Sermon Prep Time)
Includes a report by David Kinnaman on recent Barna research findings on growth in the church.

Why we are not in a Catholic revival — despite increase in adult baptisms
Across the country, scores of catechumens were baptized into the Catholic Church for Easter this year. Many of these new Catholics were young people. Even though precise figures won’t be available for some time, there is enough anecdotal evidence from both pastors and secular media to draw attention.

Pentagon-Vatican meeting latest flash point in Trump's clash with religious leaders
The increase in faith-fueled militaristic rhetoric is pitting the president against a growing list of faith leaders, ranging from local clergy to the pope.

S.C. Priest to Be Missionary Bishop in Liberia
The Rev. Canon Wilmot Merchant II was planning to retire from ordained ministry this year. And so during a trip to Liberia, where he was born, raised, and ordained a priest, he did not take seriously the thought of becoming a bishop suffragan in the Episcopal Church of Liberia, one of the dioceses in the Church of the Province of West Africa.

Easton diocese’s church becomes overnight shelter to keep unhoused people from facing jail time
An Episcopal parish in Ocean City, Maryland, is facing a potential new legal clash with city officials after it last week began allowing unhoused people to sleep inside the church.

Flagship Charismatic Episcopal Church to Be Demolished
The former flagship parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut — St. Paul's, Darien — is being demolished to make way for multimillion-dollar homes, according to local news reports.

Also See: Settlement reached in St. Paul’s Darien, Connecticut, cases; Episcopal Church plans to demolish Darien church, build four homes; and St. Paul’s History (partial)

Miracle In Darien book review. What happens when a church listens to God together...
Miracle in Darien captures the extraordinary story of St. Paul's Episcopal Church and their transformative new rector, Terry Fullam. Despite his initial reluctance to lead a local congregation, Fullam found himself divinely guided to this small Connecticut church where God had remarkable plans in store.

Also See: Miracle in Darien

Village church remembers 1926 national broadcast
A village church has recreated a concert that took place a century ago and was thought to be the first live outside broadcast from Cambridgeshire by the BBC.

Call to pray for ‘helpless’ seafarers in the Gulf
Seafarers in the Gulf have become the helpless victims of the battle being fought around them – according to the head of a charity supporting nearly two million crewmen and women working on ships across the world.

Peter Rouch, secretary-general of the Mission to Seafarers, and an Anglican priest, has described the helplessness experienced by seafarers in the Arabian Gulf, on ships that could find themselves under attack. The charity’s latest prayer diary encourages prayer for seafarers in the region.

College students losing ability to participate in class discussions since they offloaded their thinking to AI 

It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: elementary students are losing cognitive skills, leading them to tank their exams.

Harder to quantify — but impossible to miss if you’ve spent any time in school lately — is the situation unfolding across classrooms, where students from all layers of society have become empty vessels that parrot the outputs of AI without critically engaging with the subject matter at hand.

When No Children Come Forward: How Churches Can Grow Young Again
If you’ve watched the number of children in worship shrink year after year, you’re not alone. But renewal is possible. Laura Heikes gives us four practical, joyful steps that helped one church go from “no kids this week” to a vibrant, diverse, growing group of children who are now woven into the life of the congregation.