There is a word that gets used a great deal in leadership and technology circles: disruption.
In those circles, it means something being overturned, made obsolete, replaced by something better. The disruption of the taxi industry. The disruption of retail. The disruption of media. The old thing dies; the new thing rises; the world is changed. And nobody asks whether the old thing had a say in the matter.
The Gospel is disruptive in exactly that sense. But it is not interested in your industry. It is interested in you.
Over the past six weeks, we have traced what happens when the Gospel is allowed to do what it actually does — not merely inform us, not merely add religious content to an otherwise unchanged life, but fundamentally reorder it. We have looked at six dimensions of that reordering: identity, desire, community, power, security, and purpose. Each one a site of disruption. Each one an invitation to die to something smaller and rise to something larger.
This is the final post in the series. But it is not a conclusion so much as a beginning. Because the disrupted life is not something you achieve. It is something you inhabit — one disrupted day at a time.
One Disruption, Six Faces
It is worth pausing to see what these six disruptions have in common — because they are not really six separate things. They are six faces of one transformation.
The disruption of identity asked: Who tells you who you are? And the Gospel answered: not your achievements, not your failures, not the verdict of anyone who has ever looked at you — but the One who formed you and redeemed you. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)
The disruption of desire asked: What is your heart actually running toward? And the Gospel offered not suppression but transformation — the slow, Spirit-worked reordering of appetite, until what you want most begins to align with what you were made for.
The disruption of community asked: Can you love people who cost you something? And the Gospel gave us the radical fellowship of Acts 2 as our answer — not a comfortable gathering of the like-minded, but a community forged by shared mission, shared sacrifice, and a shared Lord who has already broken down every dividing wall.
The disruption of power asked: What do you do with influence when you have it? And the Gospel pointed to a man who possessed all authority in heaven and earth — and picked up a towel.
The disruption of security asked: What are you standing on? And the Gospel offered not the removal of uncertainty but a deeper ground: the unchanging character of a God who refuses to waste anything, who can redeem even what He did not send.
The disruption of purpose asked: What is your life for? And the Gospel answered with the poiema — God’s masterpiece, crafted for works prepared in advance — and with the Great Commission, still backed by all authority, still accompanied by the promise of presence.
These are not independent disruptions. Pull on any one of them and you find the others. You cannot have a transformed identity without transformed desires. You cannot live on mission without a community to go with. You cannot serve without having released your grip on power. They are facets of a single revolution — the revolution that happens when the death and resurrection of Jesus becomes the shape of your life.
The Shape of It: Death and Resurrection
Paul, writing to the church in Rome, names that shape precisely:
“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” — Romans 6:4
Buried. Raised. New life. That is the pattern. Not the pattern of improvement — the gradual optimisation of an existing self. The pattern of death and resurrection: the old thing must actually die before the new thing can actually live.
This is why the disrupted life is uncomfortable. Not because God is arbitrary, but because you cannot be raised without first dying. The discomfort of the disruption of identity is the discomfort of letting a false self go. The discomfort of the disruption of power is the discomfort of releasing something you were gripping. The discomfort of the disruption of community is the discomfort of loving past the point of convenience.
Every disruption we have explored has this same death-and-resurrection structure. That is not coincidence. It is design. The cross is not merely the event that saved you — it is the pattern that shapes you.
Paul says the same thing to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20) This is not a once-for-all statement about the past. It is a present-tense reality — a way of inhabiting every day. The disrupted life is the cruciform life: cross-shaped, at every point.
Counter-Formed People
The Apostle Peter gives us the most compressed description of what the disrupted community looks like from the outside:
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” — 1 Peter 2:9–10
Four identities stacked on top of one another. Chosen people. Royal priesthood. Holy nation. God’s special possession. And all of them pointing toward the same function: you exist to declare — to make visible, to embody, to announce — the one who called you out of darkness.
The disrupted life is always, in the end, a witness. Not because you are trying to be impressive, but because a life shaped by the Gospel is genuinely strange by the world’s standards. The person who does not need to dominate in order to feel secure is strange. The person who loves generously without keeping score is strange. The person who faces loss without being destroyed is strange. The person who serves without needing credit is strange.
This is what Peter means by holy — not morally superior, but set apart. Distinct. Visibly different. The world has its own formation programme, running constantly: the liturgies of consumerism, self-promotion, and the pursuit of comfort. The disrupted life is a counter-formation — shaped by a different story, a different Lord, a different end.
The Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563, opens with a single question: What is your only comfort in life and in death? And its answer is one of the most beautiful sentences in the history of Christian thought: That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.1
Not my own. That is the summary of everything this series has been working toward. The disrupted identity, the disrupted desire, the disrupted power — all of it flows from this one reorientation: I am not my own. I belong. And belonging to Him is the only security that cannot be shaken, the only purpose that can hold the weight of a life, the only identity that nothing can take.
Not by Trying Harder, but by Training Wisely
Here is what the disrupted life is not: a project of sheer willpower, pursued through gritted determination.
Dallas Willard, one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating thinkers on spiritual formation, made a distinction that should permanently reframe how we approach transformation: “Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Effort is action. Earning is attitude.”2
We do not become the kind of person who lives the disrupted life by trying harder. We become that person by training wisely — by deliberately engaging the means that actually produce transformation at the level of character and desire. Willard called these the means of grace: Scripture, prayer, community, solitude, service, worship. Not performance. Training. The kind of training that shapes the person who can then, almost without effort, live the way Jesus lived.
He also observed that genuine transformation comes through what he called the Golden Triangle: the activity of the Holy Spirit; the spiritual disciplines we deliberately practise; and the suffering and difficulty that come to us uninvited, which God refuses to waste.3
All three are present in the disrupted life. The Spirit is at work in us — doing what no amount of willpower could produce. The disciplines are available to us — means of staying pliable, attentive, and receptive. And the hard seasons — the losses, the disappointments, the disruptions we did not choose — are not accidents. They are the third point of the triangle, the unplanned formation that, held rightly, produces what nothing else can.
Three Postures for the Long Haul
Stay surrendered
The disrupted life is not a one-time choice. It is a daily returning to the posture of open hands — releasing, again, the control you reached for overnight. Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 16 was not decide once; it was take up your cross daily. The surrender is renewed every morning. That is not weakness. That is how cruciform people are shaped.
Practise together
The disrupted life was never designed to be lived alone. The transformation of the person happens in and through the community — the friction of genuine fellowship, the sharpening that comes from shared mission, the encouragement of people who see you on your bad days and call forth what God sees. Find people who are pursuing the same counter-formation. Submit to being known by them. That community is both the context of your transformation and its most visible fruit.
Trust the whole process
You will not arrive at the disrupted life as a completed project. You will keep being disrupted — by your own remaining sin, by the stubbornness of old desires, by the parts of you that have not yet been touched by the resurrection. That is not failure. That is the path. Willard’s VIM model — Vision, Intention, Means — is not a formula for fast results. It is a framework for a whole life.4
The vision is the person you are becoming in Christ. The intention is the settled decision to pursue it, not merely admire it. And the means are the practices, the community, the disciplines, and even the hard seasons that close the gap between what the Gospel declares and what you actually live.
The Miracle Is Still Happening
We began this series with a miracle at a wedding in Cana — water turned to wine. We end here.
The miracle-working Jesus has not retired. The Spirit is still being poured out. The works prepared in advance are still waiting to be done. The commission still stands, backed by all authority, accompanied by the promise of presence to the very end of the age.
The disrupted life 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.
We were buried with him.
We were raised with him.
We too may live a new life.
That is the disruption. And it is magnificent.
Post 7 of 7 in the Disruption series. Thanks for reading — and for taking the disruption seriously.
Footnotes
- Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 1 (1563). ↩
- Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (HarperOne, 2006), p. 61. ↩
- Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (NavPress, 2002), pp. 85–90. See also John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring for the Most Important Part of You (Zondervan, 2014), pp. 40–44 for an accessible introduction to the Golden Triangle. ↩
- Willard, Renovation of the Heart, pp. 77–84. ↩
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Paul Benger 