There is no shortage of purpose in our culture.
TED talks, self-help shelves, personality frameworks, coaching industries — all of them are, at their heart, in the business of helping you answer one question: what is your life for? Find your why. Discover your calling. Build your legacy. Live your best life.
This is not a bad impulse. The hunger for purpose is one of the most fundamentally human things about us. We were made to be for something.
The problem is not that our culture cares about purpose. The problem is that the answer it keeps offering is, in the end, too small. A purpose built around personal fulfilment, individual legacy, or even doing good things on your own terms is a purpose that will not hold the weight of a human life — let alone the call of the gospel.
Because the gospel has disrupted your purpose. And the disruption is magnificent.
You Are a Masterpiece — With a Mission
The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Ephesus, makes a statement that should permanently reframe how any follower of Jesus understands their existence:
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10
The Greek word translated “handiwork” is poiema — the same root from which we get the word poem. We are God’s work of art. His masterpiece. Not a utility, not a project, not a raw material to be shaped by cultural hands — but something crafted with intention, with beauty, with deliberateness.
And the poiema has a purpose built into it. “Created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance.” Before you were born, before you had formulated a personal mission statement, before you had discovered your strengths or identified your values, before neuroscience got into your head, God had already prepared the works that would constitute the meaning of your life.
This is not the purpose industry’s answer to the question. This is its disruption. Your purpose is not discovered by looking inward. It is received by looking to the One who made you — and then stepping into the works He has already laid out.
A Commission, Not a Suggestion
Before he ascended, Jesus gathered his disciples on a hillside in Galilee and gave them something that has shaped the whole of Christian history since:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” — Matthew 28:18–20
Notice the order. Authority comes first — all authority in heaven and on earth. Then the commission: therefore go. The mission does not rest on our capability, our resources, or our cultural influence. It rests on the authority of the risen Jesus. And that authority is absolute.
This is not an invitation to those who feel particularly gifted for evangelism. It is a commission to the whole community of Jesus-followers. The disruption of purpose is this: if you have encountered the risen Jesus, your life is no longer oriented around your own agenda. It is oriented around his.
John 20:21 frames the same commission with startling intimacy: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” The pattern for mission is the incarnation itself. Jesus was sent into the world — not to shout at it from a distance, not to critique it from the outside, but to enter it, to take up residence in it, to love it from within. And that is the shape of the mission he hands to us.
The Apostolic Genome
The early church had a DNA that was explosive. It was, by nature, a movement — sending, multiplying, advancing, turning cities upside down (Acts 17:6). They had, in Alan Hirsch’s language, an apostolic genius wired into them from the beginning.1
But something happens to movements over time. Movements become monuments. Pioneers become settlers. Apostolic urgency gives way to pastoral maintenance — and before long, a community that was sent out has turned entirely in. The wine has been turned back to water.
Hirsch identifies what he calls mDNA — the missional DNA of the church — as having six elements, all of which must be active simultaneously: Jesus is Lord, disciple-making, a missional-incarnational impulse, an apostolic environment, organic systems, and communitas — the deep bonds formed not through comfortable fellowship but through shared mission.2
The insight that cuts deepest is that last one. Community gathers around shared interests. Communitas — the deeper thing — forms around shared mission. When people struggle together, advance together, take risks together for the sake of the gospel, something is forged that no shared hobby or social event can produce.
The church was never designed to be a comfortable gathering for the already-convinced. It was designed to be a community on mission — a people sent into the world just as Jesus was sent into the world. Lesslie Newbigin, one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating missiologists, put it this way: “The Church is the hermeneutic of the gospel.”3 (hermeneutic = meaning or explanation) The community of Jesus-followers does not merely carry the message. The community is the message. How we live together, how we love, how we sacrifice, how we welcome — all of it is either a compelling advertisement for the kingdom or its embarrassing contradiction.
What Living on Mission Actually Looks Like
There is a version of “living on mission” that sounds large and demanding and reserved for a particular type of person — the church planter, the missionary, the evangelist. If that is your picture, the gospel wants to disrupt it.
N.T. Wright argues that Christian mission is participation in God’s ongoing work of new creation — and that this work is happening everywhere, in every sphere, through every faithful act of love, justice, beauty, and service.4 The person who repairs broken things with excellence and care, the teacher who sees each student as made in God’s image, the businessman who conducts commerce with honesty and generosity — all of these are participating in the renewal of the world when they do their work as unto God and in love for their neighbour.
Mission is a posture before it is a programme.
It is the posture of attentiveness — noticing the people in front of you, the names you learn at the coffee shop, the colleague who is quietly struggling, the neighbour you have always meant to speak to. Jesus did his most extraordinary work in the margins — in conversations by wells, at tax collectors’ dinner tables, with people the religious establishment had written off. He was perpetually present to people. That is the missional life.
It is also the posture of empowerment. Acts 1:8 is not an aspiration — it is a promise: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses.” You do not live on mission in your own strength, on your own resources, with your own courage. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is at work in you — equipping, emboldening, going before you into the spaces you inhabit.
Movement, Not Monument
At Ikon Church church our declaration bears repeating here: “We are a movement, not a monument. We are pioneers. We are multipliers, not maintainers.”
Every generation faces the temptation to preserve what was built rather than risk what is next. To protect the institution rather than advance the mission. To invest in the comfort of the gathered rather than the reaching of the lost. Craig Groeschel is right: “The greatest enemy of future success is present success.”5
The question for every church, every leader, every follower of Jesus is not: how do we maintain what we have? It is: what has God prepared in advance for us to do? What are the poiema works of this generation, in this city, in these relationships, in these spheres of influence?
The wine is not gone. The miracle-working Jesus has not retired. The Spirit is still being poured out. The commission still stands, still backed by all authority in heaven and on earth, still accompanied by the promise of his presence to the very end of the age.
Fill the jars with water. Bring your ordinary, your obedience, your availability. He will do the rest.
Three Moves
Know your poiema
Before the Great Commission is a strategy, it is an identity. You are God’s masterpiece, crafted with intentionality, designed for specific good works. Spend time asking: What has God uniquely equipped me to do? What works has he placed in my path — not in theory, but in the actual people and places and opportunities of my actual life? Mission begins with attentiveness to what is already in front of you.
Go where people are
Jesus ate with tax collectors. He stopped for the woman with the bleeding. He called fishermen from their nets. The incarnation is the model: enter the world of the people you are called to love. The missional life rarely looks like organised outreach. It looks like genuine friendship with people outside the church, sustained over time, with no agenda other than love and the willingness to speak when the moment comes.
Receive the power
You are not sent alone. Acts 1:8 is the precondition, not the afterthought. Ask for the Spirit’s filling. Make space for it. Trust that the God who calls also equips — that the works prepared in advance come with the resources to accomplish them.
The disruption of purpose is not a burden. It is a release — from the exhausting, ultimately futile project of constructing your own significance, into the freedom of a life that is for something vast enough to deserve your whole self.
Post 6 of 7 in the Disruption series. The final post brings it all together — what does it actually look like to live the disrupted life? Coming next: Living the Disrupted Life.
Footnotes
- Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements (Brazos Press, 2006), pp. 19–34. ↩
- Ibid., pp. 81–100. See also Alan Hirsch & Tim Catchim, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church (Jossey-Bass, 2012). ↩
- Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (SPCK, 1989), p. 222. ↩
- N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (SPCK, 2007), pp. 205–220. ↩
- Craig Groeschel, widely cited; cf. Winning the War in Your Mind (Zondervan, 2021). ↩
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Paul Benger 