Dr Paul Allen

by Ted Peters Our church—evangelical, mainline, Catholic or Orthodox–seems like a sandcastle on an ocean beach. We can stand back and admire our craftsmanship. Then a wave washes up high, and a few grains of sand get eroded. Another wave erodes more of the castle. Wave after wave finally leaves the beach the way it had been before our architectural triumph. Wave after wave of cultural change is eroding our church under our very eyes. Silently and almost invisibly, the digital world is replacing the biblical world. The world of Bible study, hymn singing, praying in unison, and using God as the subject of sentences is becoming forgotten. What now absorbs our attention is a complex array of video gaming, net surfing, Instagramming, Zooming, texting, and sexting. The digital world is actually a disorganized composite of min-worlds. In only half an hour, any teenager can be introduced  to the worldviews of QAnon, Sufism, yoga, new age meditation, naturalism, spiritual-but-not-religious,...

It’s a word that has probably been uttered in every start-up pitch meeting in the last decade. Silicon Valley tech bros toss it around enthusiastically, and Wall Street investors react to it sceptically. Disruption . Or it's the buzzy adjective:  disruptive . Originating in the 1990s with the “ disruptive innovation ” theory of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, the term has since become ubiquitous. The list of “disruptive” companies—game-changers who rewrote the rules of their respective industries—is long and growing: Uber disrupted the taxi industry, Airbnb the hotel industry, Crossfit the fitness industry, Spotify the music industry, Netflix the movie industry, and so forth. For the last 10 years, CNBC’s  Disruptor 50 list  has testified to the way “disruption” has basically become synonymous with tech-driven, innovative entrepreneurship. If there’s a recipe for entrepreneurial success in the 21st century, disruption seems to be a key ingredient. B...