1. Why the Search for the Church that Meets Your Needs is Futile: Carey Nieuwhof asks, “Should the criteria of a church meeting your needs be the reason you change churches? Well, what if the church was never intended to meet your needs? What if the furthest thing from God’s mind when he created the church was to meet your needs?”

2. Why You Should Name and Feel Even Negative Emotions: Lara D’Entremont reflects, “I rarely dealt with or named my emotions—at least not the “negative” ones. They had to be killed, banished, ignored, and stuffed. I learned this from both Christian circles (like the counselor above) and my own fears. I didn’t want others to see my emotions. Negative emotions always equaled sin and weakness in my mind, a reason for people to look down their noses at me. So I tried to kill my negative feelings with kindness—or gratitude. But what if there’s goodness in every emotion—even in the ones we don’t like so much?”

3. Expressive Individualism and the Death of Mental “Illness” Samuel James’s point is worth considering. He says, “Here’s one guess: Personality profiling is the last politically-acceptable way of receiving an identity, rather than crafting one. And many people today are weary of crafting their own custom identity and would very much like to belong to something instead.”

4. Prayers That God Will Not Answer: Tim Challies begins, “There are times when it seems like God does not hear us. There are times when it seems like God has become deaf to our prayers and unresponsive to our cries. There are times when we seek but do not find, knock but do not find the door opened. Why is it that God sometimes does not answer our prayers?”

5. Beneath Our Social Justice Strife: Thaddeus Williams has four questions for both sides. He begins, “Over the last five years, the topic of social justice has become something of a jackhammer in some churches, reducing congregations to rubble, shaking denominations, even fracturing fellowship between old friends. Online cloisters have formed in which anyone to our left must be a social-justice-warrior snowflake or a neo-Marxist. And, in other cloisters, anyone to our right is probably a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, the exhausted majority feels caught in the crossfire, hoping for some new way forward.”

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash