The Disruptive Church (and How Greystone Is Helping the Cause)

It is trendy these days to be disruptive. Though it is a word that may seem to refer to a negative reality, “disruptive” is a word used in business, academic, and in many other contexts to refer to an upset that is needed and salutary. Is there a sense in which the concept and language of disruption may help the Church capture something important about her identity and nature, and how does the answer to this question inform who Greystone is and what Greystone is doing?

Culturally, we live in a time when upsetting the status quo is appealing, exciting, and assumed to be necessary for the common good. We are all revolutionaries now, and revolution is the new normal. To the same extent, and probably for similar reasons, tradition, age, and established ways are unappealing, and pejoratively characterized in terms of sterility and stagnation. As you know well by now, Greystone shares neither of these assumptions and in fact labors quite explicitly against these trends in all that we do. Still, the concept of disruption does commend something to us regarding the Church and her place in the world that is both traditional and timely. In this episode of Greystone Conversations, we sit down once more with Pastor Jesse Crutchley of the Greystone Chesapeake Learning Community at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA), and we run the concept of disruption through the filter of the three elements of the order of reality: time, space, and vocation. This in turn sets up a frankly rather exciting moment in Greystone’s life as we are then able to announce a key degree program collaboration that we suspect many of our listeners will want to know about. For more on that announcement, you can chase your time with this episode with a heavy dose of our brand new website, greystoneinstitute.org.

As we now sit down again with Pastor Crutchley, let us also thank you once again for spending some time with Greystone today to reflect together on the shape and direction of greater faithfulness to our triune God. Your prayers, support, and partnership truly mean a great deal to us and to the many we are honored to serve. Thank you.