The World and Everything in It: August 13, 2026

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

The organization that has set standards of care for the gender-confused now says those standards were merely “opinions.”

COLE: I think it's incredibly lousy of them to now backtrack to try and defend themselves

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Also, Iran flexes its cyberattack muscles. We’ll talk to an expert about the threat.

And, the UK works to fight a growing homelessness problem.

Also, a member of the Greatest Generation who is still going strong.

QUARLES: Well, I’m prepared, but I ain’t quite ready.

And WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney says a renewed interest in Jesus should also come with more visits to his church.

BROWN: It’s Thursday, August 13th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Leavitt stepping down » White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will be stepping down at the end of the month to spend time with her young family.

Leavitt called it a “bittersweet decision” in a social media post Wednesday shortly after President Trump announced she'd be leaving her role.

Former senior advisor to the president, Kellyanne Conway said of Leavitt:

CONWAY:  She will go down as one of the best White House press secretaries definitely for her work behind the podium, but her work behind the scenes that the public doesn't always see

At 28, she is the youngest person in history to hold the role and recently gave birth to her second child. She said that, since returning to the White House from maternity leave, she has felt she could not devote enough time or attention to both roles.

Trump said she will remain in the fold as one of his “top outside advisors.”

Crowley wins in WI » In Wisconsin, election officials had to keep counting the votes into Wednesday, but Democrat David Crowley pulled off a razor-thin victory over democratic socialist Francesca Hong.

CROWLEY:  Today, I stand before you filled with gratitude, with humility, and hope as I formally accept the Democratic nomination to be the next governor of the great state of Wisconsin.

It was an upset win, surprising pundits and pollsters who had long placed Hong as the front-runner.

That means Crowley will square off in November against Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany.

Former CFO of SPLC arrested » The Justice Department has charged a former Southern Poverty Law Center official with fraud. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher reports:

BENJAMIN EICHER: Authorities arrested Heidi Beirich [BY-rick] Wednesday. She ran the center's extremism research until 2019.

Prosecutors say she shared a bank account with a paid neo-Nazi informant she was dating.

They say the center told donors it was dismantling extremist groups, and instead paid over $4-million to people inside them.

Attorney General Todd Blanche says the center is—his words: manufacturing racism to justify its existence.

Beirich's lawyer calls the charges politically motivated. The center says the payments prevented violence.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Ukraine latest » In Moscow:

PUTIN: (Speaking in Russian)

A stern warning from Russian leader Vladimir Putin Wednesday. Speaking aboard a missile warship taking part in a naval exercise, Putin said the potential for conflict in the Asia-Pacific region is growing.

European countries have been seizing some Russian commercial vessels, mainly shadow-fleet tankers used to evade oil sanctions. Putin said if that continues, Russia will respond in kind, seizing European ships.

Meantime, Ukrainians formerly held by Russia say their captors are systematically torturing both prisoners of war and civilians captives.

One Ukrainian soldier said this week:

SOLDIER: I was lucky enough to survive. Not many of my friends were lucky enough. Two of my friends were beaten up to death in detention centers in the Donetsk region. Two of my friends died because of the conditions they were put in in Russian prisons and were returned in the plastic bags to their homelands.

He said Russian captors regularly employed beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse, and warned that thousands remain in captivity.

DOJ Chinese marriage fraud » Prosecutors say some soon-to-wed couples met for the first time just minutes before they picked up a marriage license because those marriages were shams.

The Justice Department charged 11 people Wednesday with arranging more than a thousand fraudulent marriages over a decade. Investigators say facilitators in New York recruited American citizens, paying them up to $30,000 to marry a foreign national, most of them Chinese. Attorney General Todd Blanche:

BLANCHE: The Chinese nationals would pay these facilitators as much as one hundred thousand dollars for assistance in obtaining a marriage, which then allowed them to apply for a green card

Prosecutors describe staged ceremonies in restaurants, couples changing into traditional Chinese wedding clothes for photographs, opening joint bank accounts, and rehearsing answers for their immigration interviews.

BLANCHE: This scheme was not a quick fly-by-night operation, but rather a years-long multi-million dollar cottage industry.

Federal agents arrested 10 of the 11 defendants Wednesday.

I'm Kent Covington.

Still ahead, Iran flexes its cyberattack muscles. Plus, the UK works to fight a growing homelessness problem.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 13th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up: Iran's threats.

President Trump on Tuesday confirmed reports of a secret operation to get out of Turkey after last month's NATO summit in Ankara. As fighting with Iran heated back up, the Secret Service learned of a threat against the President. So instead of flying out of Ankara on the new Air Force One, Trump rode an airport catering truck to board a military jet.

REICHARD: This comes as states in the American Midwest investigate cyber attacks on their water and energy grid systems.

Well, joining us now is retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery. He commanded a carrier strike group in the Pacific and now directs the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Good morning, Mark.

MARK MONTGOMERY: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

REICHARD: So glad that you're here. Well let's start with these cyber attacks. What is the damage and who's behind it?

MONTGOMERY: I'm pretty convinced that it's Iran. And I believe that this should not surprise us, right? A couple factors here. One, our critical infrastructures are insanely poorly protected. This has been documented by lots of organizations, including the Cyberspace Celarium Commission, a federally mandated commission that I was I ran that documented this pretty extensively four or five years ago. Water is especially weak because the cybersecurity of your water is really run by the s town and county utilities that provide your water. And these are historically organizations that don't have two wood nickels to rub together to fund and resource cybersecurity improvements.

And Iran in fact has attacked water in the past. About three years ago they attacked Pennsylvania water providers. In fact in the same sort of way through an OT system operation, operational technology system, that's out in the pumps and valves. The only thing that surprised me was that the Iranis didn't really take these attacks to their full measure. In other words, try to destroy equipment, you know, disrupt services, maliciously treat the water chemical, you know, apply the water chemicals to foul the water. It really was just a demonstration of a capability to penetrate systems.

REICHARD: You know, President Trump points to leaders of blue states for their poor cybersecurity systems, but it's red leaning states too, like Arkansas and South Dakota, that have reported cyber attacks on their water supplies as well. Now you mentioned this is handled at the local level, but is there more that can happen on a national level to strengthen security?

MONTGOMERY: Yeah, first of all, the president's completely wrong. I mean, this is not a problem of Tim Waltz's making, the governor of Minnesota. It's instead a problem, a historical problem of both the industry, the state and local governments that run most of our water, but also the federal government. On a bipartisan basis, the federal government agency charged with helping the water industry protect itself, which is the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA.

On a bipartisan basis for twenty-five years, it's been a failure. I worked at the White House back in 1999 and 2000 when we assigned this mission to the EPA. They grudgingly took it. Back then there were eight sectors, I think, and they were one of then. We then in 2020 one changed the law to very specifically say you are a sector risk management agency with these six or seven clear responsibilities, and they have adapted to them poorly; both in the Trump forty five when we first introduced them, then under Biden when they had four years to implement them and did a poor job. The EPA is an incredibly polarized agency between the two political parties on issues that have nothing to do with the cybersecurity of water. It has to do with emissions and pollution and such. The problem though is they fail to do their job.

And it's crippling to the water sector to have a poor performance by the industry, poor performance by the federal government. There's no way the collaboration between the two of them can be anything other than poor. It has been, and our adversaries know it.

REICHARD: Well let's turn to the president's plane switch in Turkey. Mark, what can we deduce about how serious Iran's threat to the president was by how US Secret Service responded?

MONTGOMERY: Yeah, I'm glad you said Secret Service because this is not a President Trump issue. This is a Secret Service, to some degree the US military, but the people who are responsible for the force protection of the President, they make these decisions. The President is wise to follow their advice. Clearly, something that they were told, either from their own intelligence sources or allegedly from Israeli intelligence sources, tripped a wire of significant concern. And based on that they did this sleight of hand where he walked on one plane, walked off the plane and then was trans transported over to a second plane.

I'm okay that when we're doing a force protection mission, that the government intentionally obfuscates their maneuvers. And for some amount of time afterwards you keep it that way 'til everyone's recovered from the event over like a twenty four or thirty six hour period and you and you've exfiltrated everything from Turkey. So I absolutely think they did the right thing.

REICHARD: Are there other Iranian threats or areas of US vulnerability that you're watching in particular?

MONTGOMERY: Yeah, the one that worries me the most is our ability to protect our military bases in the Middle East and to assist our Arab partners in protecting their critical infrastructures. The weapon that worries me the most are Iranian drones. They are hitting our bases and they are hitting our ally and partner’s infrastructure at an alarmingly high rate. To solve part of this we have to move back.

When we get strategic depth, and our air bases are in say Jordan and Israel and Western Saudi Arabia, then we have time to shoot down the drones using aircraft. Because there's usually three elements to drone defense: aircraft defense, where they shoot them down with rockets, ground based defense, which is where rockets around your bases or the infrastructure shoot down the drone, or jamming. We're only good at one of those. We're good at the air base defense, the one that requires strategic depth.

So we're able to shoot down four or five hundred drones headed to Israel, no problem. But 20 drones or 30 drones headed to Bahrain, which is only a short distance from Iran across the Arabian or Persian Gulf, we can't really defend against that. And the Iranians have exploited it. I think it's one of the principal reasons that we ceased combat operations after 40 days was that we just had no answer for these drone attacks. Iran is willing to take hundreds, if not a thousand, strikes a day against it.

The United States doesn't operate that way. We don't like our bases being hit at all. And as a result, you know, we basically hit pause. and they're still being hit infrequently now, but we're vulnerable to this until we get the right systems in place.

REICHARD: Mark Montgomery is a retired rear admiral in the US Navy and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mark, thanks again.

MONTGOMERY: I thank you for having me, Mary.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: shifting the blame

Last week, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—or W-PATH—asked a federal court to dismiss a government case against it.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: For years, the group has positioned itself as a medical authority, with Standards of Care it said were based on the best available science.

But WPATH now wants to avoid being penalized for what the group now calls medical opinions, and it pins the blame for harm caused to patients on clinicians.

WORLD’s Harrison Watters reports.

HARRISON WATTERS: When Forrest Smith was writing a memoir last year, he noticed something on his medical records: references to WPATH all over them.

SMITH: WPATH always appears on every referral letter, that this patient, that this case meets the WPATH Standards of Care.

For six years, Smith pursued living as a female. He underwent surgeries to alter his body in 2020..and within weeks regretted it. He is now a de-transitioner, working to undo the damage.

SMITH: I am sure that many of the people along my transition were really trying to help, and that they really cared not just about me but about all their patients, and they believe what they're being told.

Earlier this summer the Federal Trade Commission joined four states in a lawsuit…alleging WPATH made false claims about procedures for young people confused about their gender.

The FTC says WPATH misled doctors, patients, and insurance companies by presenting guidelines that actually relied on weak or flawed evidence. If the FTC wins its case, WPATH could be required to issue disclaimers about transgender procedures, and even pay damages.

But WPATH’s motion to dismiss claims it doesn’t make statements to consumers at all…calling its standards of care “non-binding.” Detransitioner Chloe Cole says many medical organizations worldwide see them differently.

COLE: The entire standard that these organizations follow…that's all based on the standards that WPATH has set over the last few decades.

WPATH last updated its Standards of Care in 2022 and said they were “based on the best available science.” Groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society cite them, and hospitals put them into practice, including for children.

COLE: They completely remove the age restrictions. If they're not recommending this treatment for children, why is there no longer a minimum age for which doctors should do this?

WPATH told the court it does not recommend medical interventions for minors. But when whistleblowers exposed the lack of evidence for pediatric transgender procedures, WPATH called out European countries and Republican-led states for pumping the brakes on interventions. WPATH condemned those moves as banning -quote- “medically necessary care.”

WPATH’s motion to dismiss now concedes that the science isn’t settled.

They say there is still “intense medical debate” about these treatments, and the government shouldn't cut WPATH out of the discussion.

COLE: I think it's incredibly lousy of them to now backtrack to try and defend themselves and say that well, this is just us practicing our freedom of speech…

The group also says that the blame for patients receiving poor treatment lies not with WPATH, but clinicians not following their standards of care.

In a separate case earlier this year, the president-elect of WPATH testified on behalf of detransitioner Fox Varian to say her psychologist was wrong to recommend surgery. Cole says the move was more about strategy than trying to do the right thing.

COLE: They are saying that, oh well, what happened to people like Fox Varian or the transitioning of children is actually something that does not align with their standards of care at all, so that they can cover themselves and avoid and end up escaping responsibility.

It’s now up to Fort Worth district Judge Reed O’Connor to rule on WPATH’s request to dismiss.

Forrest Smith sees WPATH’s argument as an attempt to avoid the inevitable.

SMITH: They're not really defenses; they're discrediting themselves. The responses that they're making, I think, are actually evidence of their guilt.

The judge asked both sides Tuesday to propose a schedule for discovery, the start of the phase where each side has to hand over its evidence.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: helping the homeless.

Last month, Labour Party leader Andy Burnham became Britain’s new prime minister. He pledged to solve the UK’s growing homelessness problem. In England alone, the government reports more than 130,000 families households and counting live in temporary housing, and some say that’s a significant underestimate.

WORLD’s Lauren Smyth has the story.

LAUREN SMYTH, REPORTER: A few hours outside London, the town of Bath is home to nearly 100,000 people—about the size of Boulder, Colorado. Official statistics say eleven of those people are sleeping in the streets.

ZOE CONN: But in reality, our rough sleeper outreach teams, our off-the-streets hostel, and now our day center in Bath see many more people than that on a daily basis.

Zoe Conn works at Alongside, the city’s only emergency homeless shelter. They’ve set up twenty beds in a Baptist church basement, and they’re completely full, with a long waiting list.

CONN: If you visit Bath, you'll see very quickly that there's a very visible problem with street homelessness, rough sleeping, lots of people forced to sleep and live on the streets.

“Rough sleeping” means sleeping outdoors or in a structure not meant to be lived in, like a parking garage or a derelict boat on the nearby Avon River. Across England, nearly 5,000 people are rough sleeping—a tiny but growing percentage of the population.

To compile official statistics, city authorities take to the streets at night and count how many rough sleepers they find.

CONN: So, rough sleeping, someone bedding down on the street, is kind of that highly recognizable indicator of a person in crisis. But homelessness can look different to different people.

That can include borrowing space on a friend’s couch, staying in abusive relationships as a means to have shelter, or sleeping in a car. Those scenarios make exact numbers hard to capture and could mean official numbers are lower than the reality.

In Bath, the cost of housing has increased by more than 70% over the last decade. Across the UK, low-income households feel cost increases the most, because more of their income goes toward necessary purchases.

Conn says that can create a difficult cycle:

CONN: We are seeing more and more people who have become homeless while they have been working, and then are trying to juggle the…challenges of being homeless with keeping up a job. And then ultimately they're more likely to lose that job and all these kinds of things, so that's really problematic.

She says Alongside has felt the squeeze, too. The shelter’s lease on the church basement technically ended months ago. They haven’t found a space that’s suitable and affordable, so they’ve had to ask for multiple extensions.

CONN: No one’s got any money, least of all the people who we support. And so, yeah, it’s a really difficult time to make all of that work and continue to provide and be there for people.

Bath’s homelessness problem pales in comparison with other UK cities. In Greater Manchester, where new Prime Minister Andy Burnham was once mayor, major reforms still left a couple of hundred people on the streets.

DIAMOND: They didn’t in his time as mayor eradicate street homelessness, but they have cut it quite significantly. And I think what he’s going to try and do is apply the model of Manchester to the whole country.

Patrick Diamond is a former policy adviser to the Labour government. He predicts Burnham will invest heavily in new temporary shelters. That would likely mean relaxing the previous Conservative government’s tight budget.

Power in the UK is more concentrated at the national level than it is in the US. Burnham plans to delegate some of that responsibility back to local governments, but homelessness is still a national-level issue.

DIAMOND: He's making a big push for English devolution, so basically putting more power down to local areas…. Even if there’s still quite a lot that we can do at national level, I think certainly a lot more than could be done in the US at the equivalent federal level.

Local governments in the UK will take on some of the cost. They will also likely rely on the generosity of individuals. That can take the form of formal donations but can also look less structured. Like the new set of bike tires and a bag of groceries left underneath a bridge crossing the Avon River, not far from Alongside.

CONN: That wouldn’t necessarily have been us, but that’s the kind of thing which we encourage people to do. So we’ll go out every day, and we connect directly with people. We’ll provide them with a hot drink and with some breakfast snacks and all that kind of thing.

Conn hopes the policies handed down from Westminster will help Alongside keep its doors open. But, for now, she’s taking the fight one day at a time.

CONN: Every time I see one person…who we’ve supported to progress into their own place or to leave an abusive relationship and set up on their own with their kids, or to avoid reoffending when they’ve left prison—every time you hear about one of those people, that's a little boost, and it keeps you going.

Burnham’s party has a strong majority in Parliament and, so far, has supported his reforms. Last month, Burnham pledged an additional £340 million, about $460 million, to build more than a thousand homes for rough sleepers.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Smyth in Bath, UK.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Animal services director Chris Davis has removed snakes from some strange places, but last week? A whole different ball game.

AUDIO: ...A car vent, in the engine, purses, backpacks. In a helmet? Never.

A high school football player in Arkansas felt strange movement in his helmet and made a potentially life-saving call, taking it to a coach for inspection.

A venomous 2-foot cottonmouth had nestled inside the padding. The experts had to drop the helmet in water, grab some tongs, and wait.

AUDIO: You gonna pull him out? You gon get to him? *splash*

Intercepted! And then passed right back where it belongs- into the woods.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, August 13th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a life lived well.

Life expectancy in the U.S. rose from about 50 years in 1900 to nearly 80 by 2000. Since then, gains have slowed.

REICHARD: Most Americans who lived through the Great Depression and World War II are now gone. But a small number of the Greatest Generation are still with us.

WORLD’s Kate Muntean met one of them in Greenville, South Carolina and prepared this report for the World Journalism Institute.

KATE MUNTEAN: Bill Quarles lives in a retirement community in downtown Greenville, but he’s quick to say that he’s independent.

QUARLES: This is not assisted living. This is just senior living. You’re on your own.

Bill uses a walker and his daughter, Allison Quarles, drives him around Greenville, but otherwise, he’s self-sufficient. In fact, Bill retired from a paperwork job only last year, at the age of 102.

QUARLES: A real, real tough job. Worked two hours a week.

Bill started his career in textiles at Clemson College—now Clemson University—but his studies were interrupted by World War II. As a 19-year-old pilot in 1943, he enlisted in the Air Force and learned to fly a B-24 Bomber.

QUARLES: I didn’t get overseas until near the end of the war. I only flew about four missions, I think.

When Bill was finally sent into action, the war in Europe had ended. Bill served in the Philippines until the nuclear bomb fell on Hiroshima in August 1945. Then, he waited to go home.

QUARLES: The first mission I flew was in July. And the war was over in August. So I stayed over there another 10 months before I could get home. When I went over, I flew over. When I came home, I came home on a slow boat.

When Bill returned, he finished college and got to work in the textile industry. He also married his wife, Mary Patricia, in 1953.

QUARLES: I married a Presbyterian. She wasn’t joining the Baptist Church because at the time they’d have to baptize her again. So I joined the Presbyterian church.

His only complaint? The Presbyterians’ choice of hymns.

QUARLES: I think that the Presbyterians sing these old, dry hymns. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

Bill and his wife had two daughters, Allison and Louise. Allison lives close by and visits Bill often. After years of visiting his six siblings, Bill is the only one left.

QUARLES: I was in the hospital last week with pneumonia and the doctor asked me—you know I’m 102 years old. The doctor asks me, he says, ‘If you have a heart problem and you have a heart attack do you want us to bring you back?’ I says absolutely not.

Average life expectancy for men in the U.S. was about 77 years in 2024. Of Americans older than 100, only two in ten are men. Bill is clearly an outlier, and he knows that.

QUARLES: But I thank the good Lord for another day.

Bill remained in his home in Greenville as long as he could. The decision to move into the senior living center came after Bill tripped on a vacuum cord and fell 2 years ago.

Bill lives in a retirement community that houses about 100 other individuals. Some of them Bill has met, others stay holed up in their rooms. That is one thing Bill wants to avoid.

QUARLES: I’ve seen people in these assisted living places. They just sit there, just waste away. So I know if they stick me in one of those places, it means I’ve given up. Well, I ain’t give up yet.

He exercises daily by going on walks outside his senior living complex, unless it’s too hot.

QUARLES: Then there’s, I can walk this building from one end to the other. I have to stop and rest occasionally but I try to keep going.

But no matter how slow or difficult it might be for Bill to get dressed and ready for the day, he still does it. On Sundays, he makes sure to wake up early so that Allison can take him to the early service.

QUARLES: When I don’t get to church, I don’t feel quite right. We go to church every Sunday.

Bill says he has no secret for living to 102. Perhaps it’s genetics or some other factor. But God has given him a long life, and he is determined to live it. Bill doesn’t know when he’ll meet his Savior, but as long as he’s breathing, he will continue living.

QUARLES: Well, I’m prepared, but I ain’t ready.

As Bill prepares to leave for lunch, he makes slow but steady progress down to the parking lot. Along the way, a guest pianist is leading a hymn sing…with good old Baptist hymns

Reporting for the WORLD Journalism Institute, I’m Kate Muntean in Greenville, S.C.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

For some time now, there have been indications of a renewed interest in Christianity among young people.

WORLD’s Janie B. Cheaney says turning, or returning to Jesus, is best when accompanied by time with his church.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: Our family rejoiced last month when one of our wandering members went down to the beach to be baptized at sunset. The Great Shepherd found a lost sheep and brought her into the fold – or not. She had a plan to meet weekly with a friend for Bible study and prayer, but that only happened once before schedules and interruptions got in the way. I have no reason to doubt that my relative’s inner life has profoundly altered, but her outward routine looks unchanged. Church attendance isn’t part of it.

She’s always been attracted to Jesus, yet for years has despised His Body, sometimes for understandable reasons. But many younger people, who never darkened a church doorway, don’t even have that excuse. It seems that more and more of them are attracted to Jesus, yet a big hole remains in their spiritual life.

In Christianity Today last month, a teaching fellow at Fordham University reported some startling observations. In previous years, none of Daniel Kunkel’s students recognized the picture of a very famous evangelist he showed at the beginning of a lecture. This year, at least half the class said, “That’s Billy Graham!”

BILLY GRAHAM: Now the bible says to study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman who does not need to be ashamed

They’ve been watching his sermons on TikTok.

Pastor Kunkel acknowledges there’s something to those reports of rising interest in traditional Christianity among the young. Besides his Billy Graham fans, he’s seen Christian musician Forrest Frank sell out Madison Square Gardens and Gen-Xers pack Manhattan churches, praying for revival.

Indeed, us older folks who became Jesus people in the 1970s take heart at the news of conversions among millennials, of young men leading the way back to church, of campus revivals breaking out across the USA,. But conflicting data creates a backwash: this survey shows growing enthusiasm for Jesus; that one indicates church attendance is still going down. And while campus ministers report record numbers of students seeking out the Neuman Center and the Baptist Student Union, what do their Sundays look like?

A year ago the Barna Group reported that “Millennials and Gen Z Christians are attending church more frequently than before and much more often than are older generations.” “More frequently” means that, “The typical Gen Z churchgoer now attends 1.9 weekends per month, while Millennial churchgoers average 1.8 times.” What are they doing the other weekends?

Daniel Kunkel notes that a ‘spiritual revival for one’ is no true revival at all if it excludes the church: Not just regular attendance, but regular commitment to the family. Throughout the New Testament spiritual formation is communal, not just individual. Individuals come to Jesus, but they abide in His body, like leaves on the vine.

But I’ve been hurt by the church, you might say. No, you haven’t. You’ve been hurt by a particular congregation, or people within it. So have I. But we’ve not been hurt by the body Jesus prayed and died for. We are citizens of a holy nation, not spiritual tourists. A congregation may have her all-too-human flaws (which you and I share), but the church is where love is tested, patience is tried, humility is seasoned, and joy is complete – both our joy, and His. Don’t stand apart; join in.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: John Stonestreet is back for Culture Friday.

And, the historical drama The Brink of War hits theaters this weekend. We’ll have a review.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says,

“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

Verses 3-6 of Philippians 1.

Go now in grace and peace.

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