Frequently asked question by WORLD members: What do you think of Andy Stanley’s book, Irresistible (Zondervan, 2018)?

Answer: I’m impressed and depressed. Stanley notes rightly that “skinny jeans and moving lights” won’t keep many young people from abandoning Christianity. But he argues that the way to hold them, and win others who say they’re “spiritual,” is to abandon the hard things in the Bible and emphasize a smiling Jesus. C.S. Lewis brought us Mere Christianity. Pastor Stanley brings us Mere Sponge Cake.

Barbara Duguid was an MK, a missionary kid born in Nigeria who grew up partly in South America. She earned a degree in medical technology that equipped her to head a mission hospital in Liberia. She’s the author of Extravagant Grace: God’s Glory Displayed in Our Weakness and Streams of Mercy: Prayers of Confession and Celebration. She’s also married to a fine theologian, Iain Duguid. Here are edited excerpts of our interview in front of Patrick Henry College students.

Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the late evangelist Billy Graham, announced this week she was diagnosed with breast cancer in August. She said she is having surgery Sept. 18 and asked for prayer. Lotz described in a blog post both the initial discouragement and the ways she has seen God speak to her since the diagnosis. “Pray for God to heal me in whichever way He deems would bring Him the most glory,” she wrote.

J.D. Greear, 45, is the pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, N.C.—one of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the country. He’s also an author and the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Below are edited excerpts of Warren Cole Smith’s recent interview with Greear on Listening In.

Once upon a sunlit spot of ground, God bent down and shaped a mound of dust. The elemental particles that made up the ground were already in place, and so were the elements of a home: blue sky holding in a band of oxygen, springs of water welling up below, a sun making its stately march across the sphere. “Dust” seems an odd medium for shaping, as it doesn’t stick together. But by divine will it did; its Maker considered it beautiful, like everything else. It was a new shape, never seen before—like everything else.

What comes to mind when you hear the term “house church”? Perhaps you visualize a dozen believers secretly gathered in an apartment, singing hymns a cappella, listening to a short sermon, sharing a meal, and then going off their separate ways.

The tournament room is silent. Surrounded by the intense gazes of the watching crowd—and those of chess greats past and present staring down from photos on the walls—Wesley So, 24, prepares to defend his title of U.S. chess champion at the St. Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center in April. Eleven other top-rated players are there to try to take it from him.