Here’s a term that’s become popular and prevalent across the workplace, as initiatives like Uber, Amazon and Facebook upend entire industries, and forever change the way we do business. I was fascinated, a few months back at a spiritual offsite with some ministry leaders, to learn about the history of disruption in the Church. When we look back through Church history, we find disruptive change – true upheaval – taking place approximately every 500 years: the “Great Transformation” two thousand years ago, which we mark today as the difference between BC (Before Christ) and AD (“anno Domini”, or “in the year of our Lord”); the “Great Decline and Fall” fifteen hundred years ago, which we now call the Dark Ages of social collapse; the “Great Schism” of a thousand years ago, when Orthodox Christianity was evicted from the Western experience; and the “Great Reformation” five hundred years ago, which gave birth to Protestantism. Chronologically speaking, the Church is due for another disruption. Could it be that new technologies for human interaction, like digital “platforms” that undergird the Ubers, Amazons, and Facebooks, represent an emerging new dimension of the Church? Something for you to ponder, when you’re not consumed with responses to all your emails, text messages, voicemails, and social media posts!
Disruption
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