In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 11-20.

In 2023 The Aquila Report (TAR) posted over 3,000 stories. At the end of each year we feature the top 50 stories that were read.
TAR posts 8 new stories each day, on a variety of subjects – all of which we trust are of interest to our readers. As a web magazine TAR is an aggregator of news and information that we believe will provide articles that will inform the church of current trends and movements within the church and culture.
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 11-20:

A Response to: “Music at the GA and the PCA”

What all those times of worship at our General Assemblies have had in common every year was enthusiastic congregational singing, from metrical psalms to classical hymns to contemporary songs.  All of that made the recent article, that was so critical of the singing at the Assembly, to be so very disappointing.

Are Evangelicals Selling Their Souls for Israel?

With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the numbers are exaggerated. In fact, the situation could be much more dire. The question Evangelicals must answer is this, “Can Christians continue to support Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians without losing their soul?” The question should be answered with all haste because a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes. Evangelicals need to come to terms with the reality that the modern nation state of Israel in not biblical Israel. Zionist Israel is a secular political entity unrelated to biblical Judaism.

The Train is Leaving the Station

Stanley dismissed Biblical texts against homosexual behavior as “clobber” verses and said, “If your theology gets in the way of ministry—like if there’s somebody you can’t minister to because of your theology—you have the wrong theology.” This is not a misunderstanding. This is a trajectory that points to the Unconditional Conference and two speakers married to other men on the platform. This is a clear and tragic departure from Biblical Christianity. The conference has not been held yet. No doubt there will be a good deal of conversation once it has been held.

The Two-Kingdoms Theology and Christians Today

First, the kingdom of God and the institutional church are wrongly equated by 2K advocates.  There is a rough consensus among New Testament scholars that the kingdom of God is a much more comprehensive reality than the institutional church, and this misidentification of the church and the kingdom has all sorts of unfortunate results, such as confusion over the nature of “kingdom work” and the silencing of Christians from speaking to societal issues.

Danger from Within: A Warning from the Book of Jude

We need to be aware of what the main things and the plain things are so that we can set theological alarms in our hearts and minds. Because these false teachers creep into our churches, our ministries, and our Christian schools, we need pay attention and measure everything we hear by the standard of God’s Word.

Shannon Harris Kissed Truth Goodbye

Shannon seemed to be an eager and vivacious woman trying her best to live up to manmade commands without experiencing a life built on Biblical Truth.  As with so many young men and women who have shared this experience, Shannon has chosen to identify as a victim seeking truth and wisdom from within herself. She sees God, if there is one, is a complete killjoy who wants to squash your dreams and thwart your liberty.  Shannon, now free from this bondage, has begun her crusade to liberate everyone else.

A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

PCA Minister, Rev. Harry Reeder, Briarwood Senior Pastor, Killed in Car Accident

Briarwood Executive Pastor Bruce Stallings released this statement to AL.com: “It is with a deeply heavy heart that I communicate to you that our Lord has called Pastor Reeder home through a car accident. Please pray for Cindy, Jennifer, Ike, Abby and their entire family as well as our staff and church family as we all grieve this tremendous loss together. But we do not grieve without hope because we know our pastor is with His Savior and has been received by grace with – ‘Well done My good and faithful servant.’’’
12 Rick Warren Knows Exactly What He Is Doing
Rick Warren and Saddleback have done us the service of showing their hand. They want to persuade us to abandon what the Bible teaches and follow them in another direction. How will we respond in New Orleans?

An Overview of “Embracing the Journey”: A Ministry For Parents of LGBTQ Children

In early 2020, Saddleback pastor Chris Clark and his wife, Elisa, co-founded a Saddleback chapter of Embracing the Journey, a ministry for parents of LGBTQ children, with long-time Saddleback members, Doug and Shauna Habel. By the end of 2021, an ETJ newsletter revealed that Saddleback was hosting four ongoing ETJ support groups and one small group.
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“The good news is that every day, 100,000s of online searches (Google, Bing, etc.) are conducted for search queries related to the Bible and Christianity. The bad news is that, more often than not, search results for Bible-related queries never connect people back to confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches — despite our robust commitment to the Bible as the inerrant and infallible Word of God.”
Reformed Churchmen Publications, publisher of The Aquila Report, is announcing a new sister publication, the Bible Answers Project.
The goal of The Aquila Report is to build up the peace and purity of the Church, especially the Reformed and Presbyterian branch.
By contrast, the goal of the Bible Answers Project is to reach the lost, and connect them to Reformed and Presbyterian congregations.
For most of us, connecting with unchurched people is hard
“Fostering connections with unchurched people” is a major problem for most churches and pastors, including confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches.
Most of us are probably familiar with the growing body of research:

In 2021, Gallup reported: “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.” As of 2020, only 47% of U.S. adults were members of “a church, synagogue, or mosque”  … down from 70% in 1999. Meanwhile, the National Congregations Study published in 2021 found that “there are now about as many synagogues, mosques, and Buddhist or Hindu temples in the U.S. (9% of all congregations) as there are Catholic parishes (6% of all congregations)” and also that “one quarter (25%) of congregations teach the prosperity gospel – that God gives financial wealth and physical health to those with enough faith.”
In 2022, Lifeway’s “Greatest Needs of Pastors study” reported that the two greatest needs of U.S. pastors were (1) “seeing their churchgoers grow spiritually” and (2) “making connections with those outside of their churches.” They also said that “disciple making and technology are the two areas of skill development they most need to invest in.”
Last year (2023), Jim Davis and Michael Graham (a couple of RTS Orlando alums of the Reformed Baptist persuasion) published their book The Great Dechurching, sharing the results of their path-breaking research study: “As a nation, we’re currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of the United States… About 40 million adults (16 percent) in America today used to go to church but no longer do.” Not to be outdone by our Baptist brethren, the OPC published an important New Horizons cover story entitled “Presbyterians and Nonverts”: “People who once identified with a Christian religious tradition but now identify with none are the fastest growing group in America today.”
Earlier this year (2024), Pew Research reported that “28% of U.S. adults are now religiously unaffiliated” and Gallup reported: “three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services regularly, led by Mormons at 67%”

The news headlines are dire and daunting for Bible-based, Christ-exalting believers of all denominations – including those of us in the confessional Presbyterian and Reformed camp.
But all is not lost. As our dear brothers on the Larger for Life podcast have recently been reminding us, King Jesus still rules and reigns! Christ has been exalted in his resurrection (WLC Question 51-52) and ascension (WLC Question 53). Christ is exalted in his enthronement at the right hand of God, where he makes intercession for all believers (WLC Questions 54-55). And Christ will be exalted when he comes again to judge the world in righteousness (WLC Question 56).
Answering the most popular search queries about the Bible and Christianity is a massive opportunity for P&R churches
Aaron Renn gave wise counsel at the end of his recent article about “the end of Protestantism”: “Rather than bemoaning the loss of the products of America’s Protestant culture,… perhaps we should instead look at what we can realistically do from here with the pieces that are actually on the board today.”
So … what are some of “the pieces that are actually on the board today”?
There are many things we could mention, not least the personal relationships we have with family, friends, neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, and co-workers. Each one of these relationships is a treasure to be stewarded for God’s glory and our mutual joy.
What happens online is another one of “the pieces on the board today.” So what is happening online? Here there is good news and bad news.
The bad news is that many of our neighbors spend so much time online that we may literally never cross paths with them offline: “Non-religiosity is highly correlated to spending large portions of one’s social life online” (“Losing Their Religion,” by Benjamin L. Mabry, First Things, August 2023).
The good news is that every day, 100,000s of online searches (Google, Bing, etc.) are conducted for search queries related to the Bible and Christianity.
The bad news is that, more often than not, search results for Bible-related queries don’t connect people back to confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches — despite our robust commitment to the Bible as the inerrant and infallible Word of God.
For example, consider the following common search queries which each receive 10,000s of searches every year:

“How many books in the Bible?” (40,000+ searches per year). Unless I have missed it, there is no Presbyterian or Reformed website in the top ten search results. And, to make matters worse, uber-skeptic Bart Ehrman’s website shows up near the top.
“Spiritual ringing in the ears in the Bible” (25,000+ searches per year). As you might expect, the search results page for this query is full of false teachings. And there is no Presbyterian or Reformed witness in the top 10 search results. This search query (bizarre as it is) is an example of the hundreds (if not thousands) of popular Bible-related search keywords which are “weird,” “off-the-wall,” and “unhinged.”
“What kind of woman was Esther in the Bible?” (30,000+ searches per year). Again, this popular query does not result in any answers from a P&R source. Maybe there is less uniquely “presbyterian” and “reformed” to say about Esther than about some other topics. But it is nevertheless a very popular search query, and represents a missed opportunity for outreach and engagement.

The good news is that, by working together, we can do something to change this lamentable state of affairs.
This is where the Bible Answers Project comes in.
The confessional Presbyterian and Reformed world is blessed with an abundance of excellent writers and teachers. I have no doubt that we can come up with top-quality, God-honoring, Christ-exalting answers to the most popular questions people are asking about the Bible today. Some of these questions are bizarre: “Does the Bible say anything about spiritual ringing in the ears?” Others are commonplace: “What kind of woman was Esther?” Many are crucial and foundational: “How many books are in the Bible?”
In fact, in many cases, these questions are already being answered by P&R writers and teachers. But they are not showing up at the top of search results. This is because they are being answered in a piecemeal fashion, across multiple tiny websites, without application of the principles of search engine optimization.
As I mentioned above, 100,000s of online searches are conducted for search queries related to the Bible and Christianity on a daily basis. Many of these searches are undoubtedly conducted by Christians who are already members of reformed churches. However, my hypothesis is that the vast majority of them are not. Two reasons: First, we know that the membership of NAPARC churches is less than 0.3% of the total population of the United States. Second, many of the most popular Bible-related search queries are weird and off-the-wall, addressing topics we rarely if ever discuss in our circles: “spiritual ringing in the ears in the Bible” or “meaning of 222 in the Bible” or “Jophiel in the Bible.”
For these reasons, I believe it is safe to say that the majority of Bible-related searches are being conducted by people who are not already part of a presbyterian or reformed church. In many cases, they may not be a part of any church (i.e., unchurched, dechurched, nonvert, etc.). Exactly how many searchers fall into this category is anyone’s guess. But I believe that  we can reasonably assume that some unchurched people occasionally search for Bible-related topics online.
The question is this: When they conduct that Bible-related search, are they going to find a reliable answer? And are they going to be pointed to Jesus Christ and to a Bible-saturated church?
Leveraging search engines to connect unchurched people with P&R churches is simple, but not easy
From a 30,000 foot view, reaching unchurched people by publishing content to the most popular Bible-related search queries is simple:

Research the most popular search keywords
Create the highest quality content
Connect website visitors to P&R churches and pastor

This is the stated methodology of the Bible Answers Project.
It isn’t rocket science. It is a simple and proven methodology. But it is not without challenges.
For one thing, researching popular search keywords requires the use of specialized software. This software has a bit of a learning curve.
For another thing, using a website to convince an unchurched person to step foot into a P&R church will undoubtedly fail without the Lord’s blessing. “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps. 127:1).
But the hardest part is creating the highest quality content. It is not impossible, but the online marketplace of ideas is crowded. We should not underestimate the difficulty of standing out in the crowd. It will require wise stewardship of time, money, and talents over a long period of time. This is not an enterprise for the faint of heart. It is a task for “good soldiers,” “athletes,” and “hard-working farmers” of Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 2:1-7).
Despite the toilsome hardships, the journey of creating top-quality, search-optimized content for unchurched people is worthwhile
Yes, the journey will be hard, but it will be worthwhile.
First, God who cannot lie has promised to build his church and gather his elect from the ends of the earth. As URCNA pastor Rev. Michael G. Brown recently wrote: “The Spirit sends us to plant and water in the field that belongs to Christ, and Christ will ensure the increase (1 Cor. 3:6), for all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him” (“The Mission of God as the Grounds of Church Planting”). Or, in the words of the apostle Peter: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
Second, by stretching yourself to consider the most popular Bible-related search queries, you will be better equipped to build relationships with unchurched people. Every day thousands of people ask thousands of weird questions about the Bible, many of them strongly influenced by skepticism or superstition. But that is the world we live in. These are, in the words of Aaron Renn, “the pieces on the board today.”
Finally, it is my belief that, by engaging in the work of the Bible Answers Project, thousands of unchurched people can be introduced for the first time to Presbyterian and Reformed churches and pastors. If we publish one top-quality article per day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year, optimized for the most popular Bible-related search keywords, it is sure to make a difference!
How you can get involved with the Bible Answers Project
If you want to help the Bible Answers Project specifically, you can:

Pray: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places… Therefore take up the whole armor of God … praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication (Eph. 6:12,13,18).
Give: Our goal is to publish 300 top-quality search-engine-optimized articles over the next year, starting in July. Writing, editing, and publishing these articles with the highest standards of excellence is going to require a lot of time and energy. So we intend to pay our writers and editors competitive market wages. For this reason, our budget for June 2024 to May 2025 is about $300,000, meaning that we need to raise at least $25,000/month for the next 12 months. Click here to learn more about making a donation. Reformed Churchmen Publications, the 501(c)3 organization which publishes The Aquila Report, has adopted the Bible Answers Project, and pledged $30,000 of seed money to get it off the ground.
Write/Edit: We are looking for 40+ writers and four editors. Visit the “Join the Team” page on the Bible Answers Project website to learn more and apply.
Connect: We are probably only two or three degrees of separation from everyone we need to know to make the most of these opportunities. Who do you know who might be interested in writing and/or editing? Giving? Praying? Please connect us with them!

No matter what, you can prepare your heart, your household, and your church to grow in hospitality, outreach, evangelism, and apologetics.
The Bible Answers Project is emphatically not designed to be a replacement for the worship and work of local congregations. It is simply an attempt to steward the collective talents of Presbyterian and Reformed content creators for the purpose of outreach. The local church with her ordinary means of grace is where “the real action” is. That’s the point: To draw unchurched people out of cyberspace into the life of local churches.
Daniel Vos serves, starting 1 June 2024 officially, as Project Manager of The Bible Answers Project. He is also Chief Executive Officer of Five More Talents, a digital agency which equips churches to use technology wisely in obedience to the Great Commission.
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Treating religious claims as strictly experiential-expressive can help carve out a space for religious free exercise, over against its cultured despisers. But this is a profoundly unstable space. For one thing, it generally abandons the possibility of giving a normative account of the good of religion as such. One can point to the meaningfulness of religion in the lives of its adherents, but it is denied any possibility of relevance to reality itself. And, of course, one forfeits any principled reason to claim that the Satanic Temple is “not a religion”—even though, by any standard definition, it clearly is not.

Last month, a grotesque little display popped up in the Iowa Capitol: a shrine to the horned god Baphomet, erected by the “Satanic Temple.”[1] To be clear, the Satanic Temple doesn’t revere a literal Satan. It’s a secular-progressive organization with a 1980s edgelord aesthetic, swiping at conservative appeals to religious liberty.[2] You say you want religious freedom? Well, that means freedom for us Satanists too. See how you like it now!
The display didn’t last. Ex-fighter pilot Michael Cassidy tore it down (and was later arrested).[3] Since then, much of the conversation surrounding the incident has focused on whether Cassidy did the right thing—and whether any legal rationales for the Temple’s use of the space can justify having a Satanic display set up in the halls of governance.
Those debates are noteworthy. And yet, beneath the surface of these arguments is a much deeper question: what is a “religion,” and who gets to define it?
Most people naturally intuit that to the extent it exists solely to mock other faiths, the Satanic Temple isn’t a bona fide “religion.” Its “fundamental tenets” are nothing more than banal left-liberalism, such as the claim that “[b]eliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.”[4] There is nothing here of divinity at all, and decidedly no affirmation of an actually existing Satan to whom one swears fidelity.
But the category of “religion” becomes slippery whenever such notions are invoked. For instance, insisting on belief in “a Supreme Being” as the sine qua non of religiosity would seem to exclude traditions widely understood to be “religions.” Could such a definition extend to the “emptiness” lying at the core of Theravada Buddhism, or the theologies of immanence that characterize modern neopaganism?[5]
Plenty of academics have thrown up their hands and declared the question simply hopeless. As Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm notes, “most scholars trained in Religious Studies today now consider it naive to presume ‘religion’ as a concept. . . . in many quarters the rejection of ‘religion’ as an analytical object approaches the consensus view.”[6]
Such a rejection, though, is a discipline-specific luxury. The First Amendment flatly declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The category of “religion,” for all its conceptual instability, is firmly embedded in American constitutional law (and echoed in a myriad of statutes). Justices and judges can’t simply make the postmodern move and refuse to answer the question—at least not if they want to keep their jobs. Somehow, “religion” must be defined—and yet, supposedly, it cannot be.
To be clear, this is not a theological-philosophical problem that can be resolved in the space of a single article. What this piece aims to offer is something far more modest: a direction of inquiry that judges and Justices might consider when (inevitably) they are forced to reassess the matter. As appeals to “religious liberty” grow more and more contested, the Satanic Temple, or its imitators, will keep coming, pushing at the boundaries of the concept. The ultimate goal seems to be that scandalized Christians eventually settle for some sort of laïcité and a sterile public square. Christians ought to seek a better world than that.
Begin by clearing away some jurisprudential brush. Some might argue that the question of defining “religion” can be deferred indefinitely through consistent application of originalist methodology—that is, by pointing to historical examples of what counted as “religion” at the time of the Founding, which the First Amendment clearly protects.
The point is well taken. Courts can in practice make this move and avoid the deeper question. The Supreme Court, with its power of discretionary review, need not entertain cases likely to disrupt its existing precedents.[7] (The same is true of many state supreme courts.) From a public-order perspective, there are probably good reasons not to reopen the issue.
But from a theoretical standpoint, this is not especially satisfying. And it leaves questions unanswered that are not clearly resolvable within a narrow historical frame.
It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment’s protections are not limited to Christian (or even Abrahamic) faiths.[8] But there is ample reason to believe that the eighteenth-century drafters of the Constitution, like most other Westerners of the time, would have superimposed Western Christian conceptual frameworks upon religious traditions that in principle diverged sharply from the Jewish-Christian tradition. For example, assuming arguendo that Native American religious practices were originally cognized by the First Amendment, when these traditions speak of a “Great Spirit,” are they referring to a transcendent Creator (e.g., the God of the Abrahamic faiths), or referring to an immanent life-giving power not metaphysically distinct from the world?[9] If the latter, would those Native traditions count as “religions” at all? In the same vein, John Adams’s remarks on Hinduism suggest that he interpreted the tradition through a decidedly Western/Abrahamic lens.[10]
Hence, the deeper question can itself be transposed into an originalist key. To what, exactly, does the First Amendment’s protection for free exercise extend: a religious tradition as such, or the Founders’ inapt understanding of that religion? Is there principled room in the First Amendment for “religion” that does not in fact fit an implicitly Abrahamic paradigm?[11]
In general, the Founders were not what are today called “theologians of religions” or “comparative religionists.” Their use of a familiar theological-philosophical category (that is, religion) was an unanalyzed use (though understandable given the limits of the time). But now, when confronted with more challenging cases and the benefit of deeper knowledge of theological traditions, judges are not exempted from the responsibility to think through this question more systematically.
And that is, in fact, what the Supreme Court has tried to do—for better or worse.
Today, the vast majority of religious liberty cases heard by the modern Supreme Court do not involve fringe groups. The highest-profile court battles usually involve clashes between defenders of traditional Christian commitments and advocates of contemporary views on sex and gender. These cases are selected precisely because they offer clear opportunities for unsettled legal questions to be resolved and (for the most part) avoid getting bogged down in messy procedural issues or questions of disputed fact.[12] In this context, there is simply no reason to reopen questions regarding the nature of religion as such. Nobody seriously contends that Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam) is not a religion for First Amendment purposes.
But in at least two particular contexts, the question becomes much more difficult: cases involving the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), and determinations of conscientious objector status. As relevant here, RLUIPA (enacted in 2000) protects the rights of prisoners to their free exercise of religion while incarcerated. In practice, this often looks like providing special diets or other exceptions to standard prison practice (such as, in the case of a Muslim prisoner, the privilege to grow a short beard).[13] In making such determinations, courts must evaluate whether a prisoner’s supposed religious practice is in fact religious at all.
And the matter becomes even more fraught when questions of the military draft—questions of risk of death—are involved. That’s why, during the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was required to address directly the sort of belief that properly counts as “religious” for purposes of conscientious-objector status.
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