Week four of Compass Church’s Foundations series is called “Serve in Teams.” It’s built around Mark 1:29–31 — Peter’s mother-in-law, healed of a fever, gets up and makes a meal for the disciples. From that single verse, the sermon extracts four “motivations” for service: gifting, community, significance, and gratitude. It’s a warm message, well-illustrated, and it closes on its strongest note — gratitude as “the Titan of motivations,” anchored in 2 Corinthians 5:15.

But sit with one number the sermon offers almost in passing: 2,662 volunteers serve at this church every year, unpaid. The preacher marvels at this. “That’s mindblowing,” he says. “These are thousands of people who work, who give the best of who they are, time and energy and expertise, and they don’t get paid.” He calls it “puzzling” in “a self-centered culture where it’s normally about... you better pay me.”

Here’s the thing nobody in the room says out loud: the person saying this is being paid. So is the other pastor on stage. So are the worship directors, the campus pastors, the executive staff. The sermon spends real energy marveling at the spiritual impressiveness of not being compensated for kingdom work — while being delivered by two people compensated for exactly that.

There’s a real and biblical argument buried in the idea that Christianity’s shrinking cultural footprint isn’t evidence of God’s absence. Israel was never more than a sliver of the ancient world’s population. Elijah once thought he was the last faithful man on earth and was wrong by exactly 7,000 people (1 Kings 19:18). Jesus said plainly that the way is narrow and few find it (Matthew 7:13-14). A Christian-majority West was always closer to a historical exception than a birthright, and its erosion doesn’t, by itself, mean God has withdrawn.

That much is worth saying, and worth hearing by anyone grieving the visible decline of American church culture.

But a recent piece making that argument — “Don’t Be Afraid, Jesus Is For The Few” — pairs a solid premise with a much shakier conclusion: that the shrinking numbers are best explained by a world that “hates the true God,” that emphasizing love and acceptance over repentance is a subtle capitulation to that hatred, and that the people leaving are, in effect, rejecting truth because they’d rather have comfort. It’s a clean story. It’s just not the story the evidence — or the text it’s built on — actually supports.

There’s a particular kind of religion writer who has spent the last year very worried about AI. Not worried the way you’d worry about a tool that might be used badly — worried the way you worry about a rival. John Piper has used part of his retirement to publicly campaign against pastors touching ChatGPT. The Gospel Coalition announced it won’t accept AI-written or AI-assisted submissions, on the theory that no computer program can determine truth. A recent podcast I listened to spent seven minutes theorizing about why evangelicals are unusually “AI-pilled” — political reasons, theological reasons, and, the panel’s favorite, a psychological craving for certainty that a computer can supposedly satisfy and a church full of denominations can’t.

Not one of the three hosts, despite having laptops open in front of them, typed a theological question into the AI they were discussing and looked at what came back.

That’s not a minor oversight. It’s the whole pattern.

There’s a story that gets passed around Christian social media like a mic drop. A believer asks a skeptic where human rights come from, if not from God. The skeptic says “natural law.” The believer asks, “and that comes from...?” The skeptic has no answer. Everyone in the comments nods. Case closed: without God, ethics is just vibes.

I don’t find it the mic drop people think it is, and here’s the argument for why.

The whole story rests on a single move: someone couldn’t articulate a foundation for their ethics on the spot, in casual conversation, so therefore no foundation exists. That doesn’t follow. Ask most Christians to give a non-circular defense of why God’s commands are good rather than just arbitrary — instead of good because God said so, which makes “good” meaningless — and you’ll get the same stammering. This isn’t a new problem; philosophers have been poking at it since Plato. Not being able to defend your position in the moment isn’t evidence the position is indefensible. It’s evidence that most people, regardless of what they believe, haven’t rehearsed metaethics at the dinner table.

There’s a version of the Gary, Indiana blackout story that’s gotten a lot of traction this week: socialism did this. Government-run utilities, chasing wind turbines instead of keeping the grid up, left one of America’s poorest cities baking in the dark. It’s a clean story. It has a villain, a moral, and a policy prescription. It is also, when you look at who actually runs the power grid in northwest Indiana, almost entirely beside the point.

Here’s what actually happened. On August 11th, a derecho tore through the region with winds up to 99 miles per hour. It snapped roughly 300 utility poles and 44 transmission poles, and knocked out 27 substations. It was, by the utility’s own account, the largest outage in its 137-year history — more than 300,000 customers lost power at the peak. Nine days later, tens of thousands of people in Gary were still sitting in the dark, and full restoration wasn’t targeted until nearly two weeks after the storm.

Notice what’s missing from that paragraph: any mention of solar, wind, gas, coal, or “the energy mix” at all. No sun. No solar. No wind. No turbines. No heat. No gas. No coal. What went down was wood and steel — poles and transmission towers, snapped by hurricane-force wind and falling trees. A distribution grid built on 1950s-era infrastructure, sitting under a summer canopy of mature oaks and maples, in a region that just got hit by one of the more violent wind events in its recorded history. That’s the whole story of why Gary lost power. It would have been exactly as true if every electron on that grid came from a coal plant, a nuclear reactor, or a bank of solar panels — wind doesn’t care what generates the electricity it’s about to disconnect from your house.

A study crossed my timeline recently, packaged into a tidy, inspirational tweet from Adam Grant: a single quotable line distilling four studies’ worth of psychology. “Leisure is not a bug. It’s a feature of a good life.” The stat was real — in about 1 of every 7 leisure moments, people feel guilty for not being “productive.” Grant doesn’t say much beyond that; the tweet is short, and it isn’t making an explicit argument about causes. But that’s exactly the problem. In the absence of an explanation, the post leaves readers with the easiest one to reach for: guilt is a mindset, and the fix is to stop feeling it. That’s less a claim Grant is making than a vibe the format defaults to — the whole inspirational-tweet genre runs on compressing research into permission-slip one-liners, and this is what gets lost every time.

Read past the headline number, and the study (Ding & Bench, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science) tells a much more specific story. Leisure guilt isn’t evenly distributed. It clusters — higher among women, people with lower socioeconomic status, and younger adults. That’s not a mindset problem. It’s a pattern, and patterns like this usually point to something structural rather than something personal.

Start with money, because it’s the most concrete thread. The study found that people with lower socioeconomic status report more leisure guilt. That tracks with something anyone who has lived paycheck to paycheck already knows in their body: when your hours are precarious, your schedule is not your own, and every dollar has already been spent before it arrives, “free time” doesn’t feel free. It feels like time you’re not being paid for, time that isn’t solving anything, time you’ll pay for later when the bill comes due and you didn’t pick up the extra shift.

A woman named Monique called into The Ramsey Show recently with a problem. She’s a self-made millionaire. She’s spent half a million dollars putting her two daughters through college. And now she doesn’t want to leave them a dime, because — and I’m quoting her directly here — “they’ve turned into socialists.”

Dave laughed. Of course he laughed. It’s a good bit. Rich lady, poor kids, culture war, twelve minutes, done.

But here’s the detail that got skipped past on air, the one nobody on the show seemed interested in sitting with: both daughters are socialists. Not just the one making $50,000 a year, the one you’d expect to have opinions about the distribution of wealth because she’s on the wrong end of it. The other daughter too — the one in the top 1% of earners, married, doing great, by every metric Dave Ramsey has ever used to measure a human life, winning.

There’s a moment in the third installment of Compass Church’s “Foundations” series where the pastor reads the same verse twice, almost like he knows it’s the key to the whole thing, and then walks right past what it’s actually saying.

The text is Mark 1:35–38:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”

Imagine your company announces a new remote-work policy. You can work from anywhere. There’s just one catch: if you move to Bangalore, your salary drops 50%.

Nobody would accept that framing at face value. You’d ask the obvious question: did my work get worse? Same output, same hours, same skill, same laptop. The only thing that changed is the price of rent on the other side of the world. And yet this is, functionally, the policy a large and growing share of remote-first companies already run — just calibrated in smaller, more digestible increments. A 2025 LinkedIn Workforce Report found that 68% of fully remote companies now apply some form of location-based pay adjustment, up from 41% just three years earlier. Move somewhere cheaper, and your ability suddenly seems to be worth less. Move somewhere expensive, and it’s worth more. Nothing about your ability moved. Only your address did.

We’ve absorbed this as normal because it’s dressed up in the neutral, technocratic language of HR: “cost of living adjustment.” “Geographic pay differential.” “Location-based compensation.” But strip away the spreadsheet language and ask a simple question: if I can move to India tomorrow and do precisely the same work, at the same standard, for the same company — why does my employer suddenly deserve to keep half my salary?

Jubilee’s “Face Off” format is built for viral clips, not footnotes — sixteen minutes per topic, no time to slow down and check a citation. Which is a shame, because both Allie Beth Stuckey and Monte Mater throw a lot of citations: Augustine, the Southern Baptist Convention, Ephesians 6, Randall Balmer, Matthew 19. Some of it holds up perfectly. Some of it doesn’t. And on the genuinely contested questions — abortion, gender roles, same-sex marriage — both sides are doing real interpretive work that Scripture doesn’t settle on its own, which is exactly why sincere Christians land in different places on them.

Here’s a claim-by-claim accounting: what’s textually solid, what’s overstated, what’s flatly disputed by historians, and what neither debater actually addressed.

The real exegetical fight buried under this debate is nephesh/ruach versus imago Dei — and both sides are pulling from real texts, not inventing them.

Everyone agrees deconstruction is happening. Almost nobody agrees what it is. And I think that confusion isn’t an accident — it’s the whole game.

Ask a pastor and you’ll usually get some version of: deconstruction is doubting, questioning, testing your beliefs to see what holds up. Ask Skye Jethani, who has spent years talking about this on the Holy Post podcast, and you get a similar move — deconstruction is a modern word for doubt, and whether it means “leaving the faith” depends on the person. You’ll find the same basic model all over Christian media: deconstruction as an audit you run on your doctrines, one at a time, keeping what survives.

Notice what that version does. It locates deconstruction entirely inside your head. It’s an audit of propositions. You pick up a belief, you hit it, it either breaks or it doesn’t, and you move on to the next one. Nothing structural is ever actually at stake. Nothing with power over you is ever actually in the room.

There’s a moment in every airport security line where a grown adult, holding up two hundred people, sits down on the floor to remove their shoes like they’re changing for gym class. Socks come off. Feet — bare, often damp, occasionally fragrant — make contact with a floor that has been walked on by thousands of strangers since it was last mopped. Nobody drafts a letter to the Department of Transportation about it. It’s just Tuesday at DFW.

So there’s something almost funny about the fact that this week’s actual controversy wasn’t the bare feet on the floor — it was a proposal to stop that from happening.

The story, briefly: Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was evaluating a project — somewhere between $120,000 and $300,000, depending on which estimate you believe — to add ablution stations to restrooms in Terminal D: low sinks with a foot rest and proper drainage, so Muslim travelers performing wudu, the ritual washing required before prayer, could do it without perching on a regular sink or leaving the floor slick. DFW already has one such station on the post-security side of that terminal. This would have added one pre-security. Houston’s Bush Intercontinental has had one for years, with an adjoining prayer room, without incident.

Open the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the first thing you notice isn’t a boundary line or a debt clause. It’s a prayer.

“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity... It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the Hearts of the most Serene and most Potent Prince George the Third... and of the United States of America, to forget all past Misunderstandings and Differences...”

Before David Hartley, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay get to a single boundary marker, they invoke the Trinity, Providence, and reconciliation. The document that formally ended the Revolutionary War doesn’t read like a contract. It reads like a covenant — the kind of document you’d expect to find sealed with an oath before an altar, not signed by diplomats in a rented room in Paris.

A new study made the rounds recently claiming something genuinely surprising: the Left and the Right agree on what exploitation is. Show people an abstract vignette — a stranger selling mugs, say, under conditions of unequal power and unequal gains — and libertarians, socialists, philosophers, and ordinary people from the US and UK will all point to roughly the same ingredients as morally troubling: injustice, power, inequality of outcome, unmet needs. Rank them, and the order barely moves no matter who’s doing the ranking.

The authors, writing in Jacobin, take this as vindication. If everyone agrees on the anatomy of exploitation, they argue, then the Left’s structural critique of capitalism isn’t a partisan invention — it’s common sense, buried under decades of culture-war noise. Dismantle the noise, and the public’s own moral intuitions point toward sectoral bargaining, wealth taxes, and universal housing.

I think this gets something right and something importantly wrong, and the gap between the two is worth sitting with, because it explains why arguments about capitalism go in circles.

A recent video making the rounds asks a deceptively simple question: if God proved his existence directly, why would that take away anyone’s free will? The creator posed this to Christians on TikTok and got back a pile of contradictory answers — most delivered with total confidence, few backed by an actual verse.

So I went and checked. Here’s how each answer holds up when you put it next to the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Jesus’ own recorded words.

This is the most common answer, and it’s the one with the weakest direct scriptural basis. That’s a deliberately careful phrasing: there are real theological arguments connecting divine hiddenness, coercion, and human freedom — they’re just mostly philosophical constructions built on top of scripture rather than things scripture states outright. You can make a philosophical case for this. It’s surprisingly difficult to make a biblical one.

There’s a comforting story going around, and Christianity Today just gave it another push: technology rotted our brains, and that’s how we ended up here. Doomscrolling did it. The algorithm did it. TikTok, Twitter, the infinite feed — pick your villain, as long as it’s made of silicon.

To be fair to that argument before I take it apart: it isn’t a stupid one. Technology really has changed how we encounter and respond to information — the speed of it, the reflex to reach for the take before the facts are in, a lower tolerance for sitting with ambiguity. Russell Moore’s version of this critique, in particular, comes from inside institutions he watched get captured by exactly the dynamics he’s now naming, and he’s not wrong that something about the medium itself — the speed, the infinite scroll, the reward loop of a notification — makes careful thought harder to sustain than it used to be. That’s a real phenomenon and worth taking seriously.

But I’d push back on the framing a little further than causal priority. This isn’t really an attention-span story at all — it’s a headline-and-bumper-sticker story, and that story is much older than any app. Books have always been ignored by people who were determined to stay ignorant. Local news has been running twenty seconds of substance around twenty minutes of sports and weather for as long as local news has existed. The format that rewards the shortcut over the complicated answer isn’t a new mutation technology introduced into a previously careful culture — it’s the format that grievance-and-certainty media has always run on, cable news and talk radio included, long before a phone ever buzzed in anyone’s pocket.

There’s a genre of viral video by now: a man stands up mid-flight, or plants himself in front of a Panda Express table, or climbs a step stool in a town square, and starts telling strangers they’re going to hell unless they repent. When people push back — visibly annoyed, sometimes furious — the preacher often reaches for the same defense: this is what the prophets did, this is what John the Baptist did, this is what Jesus did. I’m just being obedient.

It’s worth taking that claim seriously enough to actually check it. Not because tone or manners are the ultimate test of truth, but because if you’re going to invoke scripture as your justification, the theology has to actually hold up — not just gesture vaguely at “the Bible says to preach the gospel to every creature” and stop there. Precedent matters. So does which precedent, and what it actually shows.

To be clear about the standard being applied here: the question isn’t whether scripture explicitly forbids preaching to a captive audience. It doesn’t, and this piece won’t claim otherwise. The question is whether the biblical examples routinely cited to justify the practice actually resemble it. If someone claims captive-audience preaching is justified because it reproduces biblical models of public proclamation, the burden sits with that claim — and it has to survive contact with what those models actually looked like.

A recent sermon from The Compass Church’s Foundations series — week two, titled “Connect in Groups” — uses the healing of the paralyzed man in Mark 2:1-12 to argue that Christian community, specifically participation in a small group, is a spiritual essential. It’s a well-built sermon: a gripping true story (the 1909 Cherry, Illinois mine disaster and the twenty-one “8-day men” who survived by working together), a live illustration involving balanced nails, and a tidy five-point takeaway — gather, bond, notice, help, seek.

But a sermon can be well-crafted and still worth pressure-testing against the text it claims to represent. Here’s how its central claim — that this passage teaches the necessity of small-group community — holds up against the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Jesus’s own recorded words.

The Hebrew Scriptures do supply real support for the sermon’s underlying premise, even though Mark 2 itself is a New Testament text. Genesis 2:18 — God’s assessment that “it is not good for the man to be alone” — is worth a caveat before it gets used here: its immediate concern is the man’s lack of a suitable counterpart, resolved by the creation of woman and marriage, not small-group life as such. Stretched too far, it becomes a version of the same move this article is critiquing the sermon for making with Mark 2 — taking a true general principle from a text whose actual subject is more specific. The honest claim Genesis 2:18 supports is broader and still useful: human beings are made for relationship rather than radical self-sufficiency. Ecclesiastes 4 is the cleaner text for the sermon’s actual point. It makes a practical case for mutual assistance directly: two are better than one because they can help each other up when one falls, and “a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” That’s genuinely the same logic the sermon is reaching for with its 21 survivors and its ten-person rescue party.

I got into it with a stranger on LinkedIn recently, and it accidentally produced one of the cleanest illustrations I’ve seen of how unpaid domestic labor actually gets valued — which is to say: generously, right up until the moment someone might have to pay for it.

A financial advisor posted a humblebrag dressed up as sound financial planning: he carries $1M in life insurance on himself, and $500K on his stay-at-home wife. His logic was straightforward — if she were gone, replacing everything she does (childcare, the household, “a dozen other line items”) would be expensive. So he insures against that loss. The post was framed as a lesson: don’t make the mistake of only insuring the breadwinner.

On its face, it sounds thoughtful. He’s acknowledging that unpaid labor has real economic value — more than a lot of husbands ever bother to admit. But sit with the framing for a second, because it’s doing something sleight-of-hand: it treats her value as something that only becomes visible, and only becomes payable, in the event of a catastrophe.

My church recently sent out a stewardship email from Heather, one of our pastors. It was a good email — warm, personal, careful to say tithing isn’t a magic formula. It closed with an invitation to “test God” on tithing for six months, built around Malachi 3:10. It got me thinking enough that I want to respond to it here, in public, because I think there’s a better way to read that verse than the one the email lands on — one that actually grew out of my own experience with giving, before I ever went looking for a verse to explain it.

First, some background on where I’m coming from.

Heather’s email opens with her own story of growing up Baptist, where the church mailed everyone offering envelopes — one for every Sunday of the year, and not just to the adults, kids got them too. She learned to tithe the full 10% from elementary school on. I grew up Lutheran, and my version was smaller and less formal: my parents gave me two dollars every two weeks, and fifty cents of it went into the plate. Twenty-five percent, if you want to do the math on a kid’s allowance, though nobody was calling it a tithe.