On Sunday, Reverend Dave Haney started his sermon with a promise. “For the last while—I don’t know how long it’s been, a few weeks, months—it seems like everything is controversy,” he told a few hundred congregants gathered at Riverbend Church, a sprawling stone campus tucked into the West Austin hills. “It seems like everything is upsetting someone. Well today I am not going to be controversial at all. Because today we are going to talk about babies.”

This was a joke on two fronts. What followed—a warning of spiritual infantilism, as told through a study of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians—was hardly a feel-good sermon; and the earlier “controversy” Haney referenced was not what he’d said from the stage but what he hadn’t.

A week prior, Haney did not mention the murder of Cha

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