“It was a normal church, trying its best to be a megachurch, but all that seemed to do was make it worse. What's wrong with being just a normal church?”
Jesus Never Told Us To Fill Church Buildings
Going to church was never the point. Jesus did not say work hard, gather a crowd, fill the building, and that is how I will know you love me. Yet look at how most pastors spend their week. The calendar, the budget, and the Monday morning gut check often tell a different story. We say we want disciples. We count attendance.
There is a steady drumbeat online longing for the good old days, back when sanctuaries were packed on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and midweek. Plenty of pastors feel that ache. Anyone who has preached to a thin crowd knows the sting of empty chairs. But the nostalgia hides three problems worth naming.
Why Churches Are Struggling More and More to Find Staff
In this episode, Thom and Sam tackle a growing challenge for churches across the country: finding qualified staff. What once seemed routine—posting a position and waiting for candidates—has become far more difficult. This conversation explores why the staffing pipeline has narrowed, how outdated assumptions are exacerbating the problem, and why churches that rethink staffing models and develop leaders internally will be better positioned for the future.
What the “Giving USA 2026 Report” Means for Church Leaders
The latest Giving USA Report offers a compelling snapshot of generosity in America and important lessons for church leaders navigating stewardship, fundraising, and financial sustainability. Jonathan Page highlights four key findings from the report and explores what they reveal about the opportunities and challenges facing congregations as they seek to fund mission-driven ministry in an evolving philanthropic landscape.
A Christian nation? At 250, America is still fighting over what that means
Scholars say American history is more Christian than secular advocates claim — and less religious than Christian nationalists would assert. A look at the complicated, contested history of America as a Christian nation.
The man America forgot to invite to its 250th birthday party
This man didn’t set foot in North America. He never signed a founding document. But there is a compelling case that our country’s great story would look very different without him.
500 years ago, the first New Testament in English was published – and stirred up a hornet’s nest
William Tyndale’s translation, published in 1526, was based on a then-radical idea: Anyone should be able to read the Bible in their own language.
'Evangelical' is about faith, not right-wing politics, says European body
The European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) has issued a statement intended to dispel the belief that evangelicalism is shorthand for right wing and potentially nationalist politics.
The EEA said that the term “evangelical” is being "wrongly linked to political movements and narratives that do not reflect the reality of evangelical communities in Europe".
SSPX defies Pope Leo, Vatican issues excommunication
The latest consecrations could prompt Pope Leo to end the Vatican’s decades of dialogue with the breakaway society.
Why Mormonism and Christianity Are Not the Same
Mormonism is recruiting Christians in record numbers, especially evangelicals. In 2025, the Latter-day Saints (LdS) reported more convert baptisms in a single year than it has seen in any of the previous 195 years. In the United States, this growth has been mainly in the Bible Belt. Of the top 10 states with LdS growth in 2022, only one, New York, doesn’t play in the SEC. Arkansas (4.05 percent), Tennessee (3.55 percent), and Missouri (3.43 percent) have seen the greatest membership growth.
In 40 Questions About Mormonism, Kyle Beshears, campus pastor of Mars Hill Church in Mobile, Alabama, explains many significant errors of LdS theology in a concise, charitable style. One reason Mormonism is growing so much in the Bible Belt is that potential converts are distracted by some interesting but secondary aspects of the LdS faith, like temples, garments, and the Word of Wisdom’s ban on coffee. Mormon missionaries are well-equipped to defuse the sensational rumors about these topics. Those discussions mask bigger doctrinal differences about the gospel, the purpose of the cross, and the nature of God.
America’s wheat harvest set to fall to lowest level in 150 years
America is expected to harvest its lowest acreage of wheat since 1877, due to drought, scorched crops, high input costs and uncertainty in export markets...
The figures have renewed concern about the long-term decline of one of America’s most historically important crops and raised questions about what it could mean for farmers, food prices and U.S. agriculture more broadly.
Glory in the highest to the God of heaven
Until the 1980s there were few metrical versions of the Gloria in Excelsis in hymnals, let alone in common use. With the liturgical expansion running parallel to the hymn ‘explosion’, several authors have now put this ancient Christian hymn into a more regular English form than its Prayer Book version Glory be to God on high....
Also See: Cuddesdon "Glory in the Highest to the God of Heaven!"Pope Leo applies Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence
The key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it
AI is already shaping who we are
The question is not whether AI will change us—it already has. The question is what it’s already doing to our sense of who we are.
AI could make people dull, one scientist fears. Here's why.
Artificial intelligence could one day supercharge human cognition, leading to significant advances in science, technology and other fields. It could also make us dull, new academic research suggests.
That's because the so-called large language models that power AI apps often yield information that is predictable and normative for the population as a whole, reducing life's complexity to a bland mulch of watered-down ideas.
Also See: The hidden cost of letting AI choose your lunch; Instant digital rewards may make hard thinking feel less worthwhileChildren are finding self-worth with AI. That's dangerous.
We used to worry about what children were seeing online. Now we have to worry about what answers they get back, sometimes in ways that can distort a child’s sense of self.
Children everywhere are asking questions and seeking advice. It's dangerous.
Prior waves of automation replaced routine and manual jobs, boosting the earnings advantage of cognitively demanding work. But generative AI is different. It excels at pattern-matching in ways that allow it to simulate human coding, writing, drawing and data analysis, leaving the lower rungs of these occupations vulnerable to automation.
On the other hand, because its output mimics patterns in existing data, generative AI has a harder time handling complicated reasoning tasks, much less complex problems whose answers depend on many unknowns. Moreover, it has no understanding of how humans think and feel.
This means that the "soft skills"—attributes that allow people to interact well with others and to be attuned their own emotional states—are likely to be ascendant. That's because they are integral to solving complex problems and working with people. Though soft skills such as conscientiousness and agreeableness are considered to be personality traits, research suggests these are emotional tools that can be taught.
Giving children smartphones is like handing them grenades. I should know
Something deeply sinister has happened to childhood in the last decade and a half, and anyone who denies it is simply not paying attention. Or they have never tried to wrestle an iPad off a demonically possessed nine-year-old. I have and it’s awful. After three hours on a screen, the sweetest kid is wired, agitated and voracious for more, a Jekyll unleashing his internet Hyde.
Smartphones are literally soul-destroying. (Vicars in their pulpits should preach against them.) Bad enough for adults who should know better, they are a life-blighting, mental-health catastrophe for the younger generation. We may as well give them heroin and be done with it.
1 in 10 young American children play outdoors just once a week
Despite the well-known benefits for children’s physical and emotional health, one in 10 parents of toddlers and preschoolers say that their child plays outside just once a week—or less.
This is the finding of a nationally-representative poll of 710 parents of children aged 1–5, conducted in August by researchers from the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
The team’s analysis revealed that outdoor and imaginative play remain common—but screen-based activities are quickly catching up as a daily fixture of children’s lives.
5 Reasons Evangelism is on Life Support in the US Church
1% of pastors say their church is “very effective” at evangelism.
Did you catch that? 99% of pastors admit that their church isn’t ‘very’ effective at reaching out to unchurched people.
That means evangelism is on life support. Have church leaders given up? Perhaps not entirely, but we can’t fix the problem if we don’t fully understand it.
So, in this video, I'll discuss five reasons that explain how the US church got here.
Image Credit: Saint Mary of the Snows (Anglican)
Children everywhere are asking questions and seeking advice. It's dangerous.
Also See: Dad discovers daughter, 6, talking to Alexa—then sees what it saidKids need soft skills in the age of AI, but what does this mean for schools?
Prior waves of automation replaced routine and manual jobs, boosting the earnings advantage of cognitively demanding work. But generative AI is different. It excels at pattern-matching in ways that allow it to simulate human coding, writing, drawing and data analysis, leaving the lower rungs of these occupations vulnerable to automation.
On the other hand, because its output mimics patterns in existing data, generative AI has a harder time handling complicated reasoning tasks, much less complex problems whose answers depend on many unknowns. Moreover, it has no understanding of how humans think and feel.
This means that the "soft skills"—attributes that allow people to interact well with others and to be attuned their own emotional states—are likely to be ascendant. That's because they are integral to solving complex problems and working with people. Though soft skills such as conscientiousness and agreeableness are considered to be personality traits, research suggests these are emotional tools that can be taught.
Giving children smartphones is like handing them grenades. I should know
Something deeply sinister has happened to childhood in the last decade and a half, and anyone who denies it is simply not paying attention. Or they have never tried to wrestle an iPad off a demonically possessed nine-year-old. I have and it’s awful. After three hours on a screen, the sweetest kid is wired, agitated and voracious for more, a Jekyll unleashing his internet Hyde.
Smartphones are literally soul-destroying. (Vicars in their pulpits should preach against them.) Bad enough for adults who should know better, they are a life-blighting, mental-health catastrophe for the younger generation. We may as well give them heroin and be done with it.
1 in 10 young American children play outdoors just once a week
Despite the well-known benefits for children’s physical and emotional health, one in 10 parents of toddlers and preschoolers say that their child plays outside just once a week—or less.
This is the finding of a nationally-representative poll of 710 parents of children aged 1–5, conducted in August by researchers from the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
The team’s analysis revealed that outdoor and imaginative play remain common—but screen-based activities are quickly catching up as a daily fixture of children’s lives.
5 Reasons Evangelism is on Life Support in the US Church
1% of pastors say their church is “very effective” at evangelism.
Did you catch that? 99% of pastors admit that their church isn’t ‘very’ effective at reaching out to unchurched people.
That means evangelism is on life support. Have church leaders given up? Perhaps not entirely, but we can’t fix the problem if we don’t fully understand it.
So, in this video, I'll discuss five reasons that explain how the US church got here.
Image Credit: Saint Mary of the Snows (Anglican)
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