Posted September 21, 2026
We could start the week with bad news from the weekend, such as North Korea’s ballistic missile tests or the Houthis’ missile attack that targeted the capital of Saudi Arabia. But I’d rather not.
Instead, let’s begin the week with some good news in the news:
But there’s a but. The Washington Post headlines, “Retail sales rebound strongly in August, even as people are wary over economy.” Why are they “wary”? Consumers were less optimistic in August than in July about future business conditions, the labor market outlook, and their income prospects. Only 24 percent of Americans rate the economy “excellent or good,” while 76 percent say it is “only fair or poor.”
Such negativity can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the Post noted: “Consumer spending is a main economic driver, making up about two-thirds of the US economy. If consumers pull back, it can spell danger for economic growth.” I’m reminded of the toilet paper shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic: people became afraid that there would be such a shortage, so they bought up all they could find, which created the shortage they feared.
This pattern is especially relevant for those of us who follow Jesus, for reasons worth exploring today.
You’ve probably heard that “half of all marriages end in divorce.” This is categorically false. That erroneous number is derived by dividing the number of marriages in a given year by the number of divorces. For example, in 2003, 7.5 people got married per 1,000 people, while 3.8 got divorced, so the “divorce rate” was 50 percent.
However, if you (properly) compare the number of divorces in a year to the total number of marriages (not just those in a particular year), the percentage is far lower. The actual number peaked in the 1970s around 40 percent and has been declining ever since.
Years ago, I was discussing this issue with the counseling minister at the church I pastored, and he explained why the falsehood is more damaging than I realized: if people believe that half of all marriages end in divorce, they are far more likely to believe that divorce is more likely and acceptable for their own marriage.
The same pattern pertains to claims over recent years that Americans are abandoning the church to become “nones” (those who have no religious affiliation). As scholars Byron R. Johnson and Thomas S. Kidd write in the Washington Post, there’s no question that the decline in mainline denominations is real: Episcopalians dropped from about 3.4 million members in the late 1950s to about 1.6 million in 2022, for example.
However, they report that young men are attending church more than they did in previous generations; high-profile intellectuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have publicly announced their conversion to Christianity; and the “nones” have plateaued at less than 30 percent of respondents. The total number of congregations in metropolitan Boston doubled between the 1960s and the early 2000s. Johnson and Kidd also note that millions of people, most of whom are nondenominational, evangelical, or Pentecostal, attend church faithfully but never appear on the media’s radar.
Here’s my point: Jesus is conducting his ministry in the world today just as he conducted it when he visited our planet twenty centuries ago.
Christians are now the “body” of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). In and through us, Jesus goes where he’s wanted, meets felt needs to meet spiritual needs, and works by the power of his Spirit to build followers who manifest his character wherever they go.
Our problem in the West is that many have turned his movement into an institution and his lordship into a hobby. If we make Jesus our adviser rather than our king and serve him so he will serve us, we turn Christianity into a religion and ourselves into consumers rather than disciples.
We should therefore not be surprised that the Lord is leading many in places that were once America’s mission fields to become missionaries to us. As Dr. Ryan Denison noted in his Friday Daily Article, the West is now “the world’s newest mission field.” Jesus is as much at work today as he has ever been; the key is joining him by becoming like him.
The great philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard taught that discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you. He suggested that we should imagine how Jesus would do your job. How would he be a pastor, or lawyer, or doctor, or plumber? The good news is that we don’t have to wonder and then try to do what we presume he would—he wants to do our job in and through us today.
In The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dr. Willard writes,
“True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.”
Will you seek “true Christlikeness” today?
“‘That Christ be formed in you’ is the eternal watchword of Christian spiritual formation.” —Dallas Willard
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