Larry Chapp, What We Need Now
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
The Church might indeed be a field hospital, but all too often these days it resembles a hospice for those with a dying faith rather than a center of restorative health that generates a robust belief in the Gospel. In other words, the contemporary Church is in dire need of better pastoral diagnosticians. The statistics surrounding the rapid decline of religious affiliation in the United States are sobering. The number of religiously unaffiliated Americans is staggeringly high, even as overt atheism is now the dominant “religious” view of many European countries. One of the consequences of this nihilism is the evacuation of genuine moral agency as the central defining characteristic of the human condition. The very concept therefore of “sin” is viewed as laughable.
