Something is happening in the church right now and it’s not just the usual theological debates. Those have always been there, and we’ve all engaged in them. What is happening in 2026 feels different. A battle that is more alive. Even the argument itself has fractured. It feels very much like whatever has been simmering beneath the surface for years is finally breaking through.
I’ve been watching it, trying to name it. I’ve written more than one post from those observations and introspections. The best I can come up with, to date, is this: At the very core, we are watching evil prey on those who have not fully surrendered to God, who have not grown in faith and who do not draw from that faith.
In short, we are watching an ego-soul split play out in real time, at scale, and in public. It’s not a left-right divide at its root. It’s a spirit divide. It’s the age-old contest between who we are in the flesh and who we are called to be in Christ — just running at full volume right now, amplified by a cultural and political moment that has forced everyone’s hand.
It’s not comfortable, but we are going to sit with it, examine it, and talk openly about it. Otherwise, it will steal many more.
Ego and Soul
I’ve written about ego versus soul many times and from many perspectives. I keep coming back to it because it’s a topic that can’t be escaped or even fully fleshed out. It’s at the absolute root of everything. It requires repetitive examination, each time digging deeper and deeper to access what inevitably tries to hide or cover itself up.
To boot, to see the ego through the lens of soul, as guided from the map of Scripture — well, that is a lens that, once you see through it, you simply can’t unsee what it’s shown you. Nor should you.
The ego isn’t inherently evil. There are levels to ego, and there is healthy, necessary ego. Ego is the self constructed for survival. It’s the part of our individual humanity that manages image, avoids threat, seeks belonging, and calculates risk. It has its uses. But it was never meant to drive itself, or us.
The soul is the part of us made in the image of God. The part that recognizes truth even when truth is costly. The part that can sit in mystery without needing to collapse it into something manageable. The part that responds to the Spirit and is being, slowly and sometimes painfully, renewed. The soul is the heart of us, and what should be in the driver’s seat.
Paul explains this very plainly in Romans 8:5-6:
Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.
This is not abstract theology. It’s a diagnostic tool. When you want to understand why someone, or a whole movement, or an entire wing of the church, behaves the way it does, the first question worth asking isn’t political. It’s this:
Is this ego talking, or soul?
Evil Doesn’t Need a Reason. It Just Needs an Opposite.
I recently posted this thought to X, and I want to consider it very carefully and in depth here:
Evil is threatened by, and hates, what is good.
That sounds almost too simple, but I keep returning to it because it explains things that are otherwise nearly inexplicable, including certain cultural alliances that make no coherent sense on the surface.
When someone has been shaped primarily by opposition rather than conviction — when the animating force isn’t what I believe is true but what I am against — then anything representing genuine goodness, moral clarity, or transcendence becomes a target. Not through reasoned argument. Through something older and less rational than that.
Isaiah named it thousands of years ago:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Isaiah 5:20
That verse may be thousands of years old, but it describes with clarity something we are watching right now. When the categories invert and naming genuine harm gets you labeled as hateful, when moral clarity gets dismissed as arrogance, when love rooted in truth gets reframed as violence, then you are watching Isaiah 5:20 in action.
This isn’t about scoring points. It’s not about winning the argument or being “right.” It’s about recognizing what’s actually happening beneath the noise so we can respond from soul, not ego.
The Church Split
The fracture happening in the church right now tracks this same fault line. There are people in the church operating primarily from ego. Those people are motivated by belonging, status, fear of cultural exile, or the need to be seen as one of the good ones. More importantly, they are motivated by false doctrines and by voices who grift and seek to serve self and destroy anything that doesn’t serve them.
The theology of this group of people has been shaped more by the spirit of the age than by the Spirit of God, and it shows not always in obvious heresy, but in the particular incoherence of their positions, the selective application of their compassion, and the intensity with which they respond to anyone who names what’s happening.
There are also people operating from soul — imperfect, still being formed, still wrestling hard — but genuinely submitted to Christ and the Word. They’re not tidy. They ask uncomfortable questions. They hold tensions without resolving them falsely. They can say “I don’t know,” and “this troubles me,” and “let me look again.” But their center holds, and it’s important to understand the difference.
Questioning does not automatically mean ego is driving. That distinction is in the way people move, how they live, and most importantly, the conclusions they come to and whether they are led by the Spirit toward truth, or anchored to a conclusion they’ve already decided to protect.
Jesus prayed in John 17:
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
That’s not a call to cultural withdrawal. It’s a call to a different center of gravity. You can be deeply engaged with the world — in politics, in art, in every arena — and still be not of it, because the thing orienting you isn’t the world’s approval, the world’s definitions, or the world’s fear.
That’s the dividing line in the church right now. Not denomination. Not politics. Ultimately, it is whether you are being formed by the Spirit or shaped by the age.
The Renewing of the Mind
Romans 12:2 might be the most practically demanding verse in the New Testament:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.
The renewing of the mind. It’s not a one-time event, but an ongoing, daily, and sometimes (often) uncomfortable process of having your thinking reshaped from the inside out.
This is the work, and it’s why ego and soul are always in tension. The ego prefers comfort, familiarity, and social legibility. The ego wants to fit. The soul, submitted to Christ, often doesn’t. It isn’t concerned with “fitting in” because it’s being formed according to a different pattern than the one the world is running.
To be in the world and not of it isn’t a posture of superiority. It isn’t tribalism wearing religious clothes. It’s simply knowing whose voice you’re listening to, and letting that be the thing that forms you.
In a moment when the ego-driven voices are loudest, like the moment we are living in and walking through today, the confusion is real, and the split in the church is deepening. That quiet, stubborn orientation matters now more than ever. Keep your lamp filled with oil. In Matthew 25:1-13, Christ Himself warned what happens when we don’t… and it isn’t simply inconvenience. It’s missing the moment entirely. This is not a time to be walking blindly in the dark.
Closing Thoughts: The Anchor Holds
In the middle of all of this, and through the split, the noise, the inversion of categories, the exhausting work of staying oriented when everything around us is spinning, I want to end here:
Biblical hope is not wishful thinking.
It is not the uncertain language of maybe or I hope so or things might get better. That’s not the hope Scripture describes. The hope Scripture describes is an anchor.
This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast. Hebrews 6:19
An anchor holds because it’s secured to something stronger than the storm around it. Not stronger than your storm. Stronger than any storm. That anchor is the character and faithfulness of God Himself.
God is not a man, that He should lie. What He promises, He fulfills. Numbers 23:19
That isn’t poetry or romanticism. That’s the foundation everything else rests on, so that when the voices are loud, when the church is fracturing, when the cultural moment is disorienting, when the ego-soul battle feels exhausting — you are not cast to the side and left hoping things work out. Instead, you are anchored to a God who does not leave things unfinished.
He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6
That is the confidence available to the soul that stays submitted to Him. It’s not certainty about every outcome, but about the One who holds every outcome. That’s what we stand on.
May we live from that place today.
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