The divided brain – what can neuroscience offer the Church?

We asked Jonathan Kimber to introduce us to Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain hemispheres and his own work applying this to Christian leadership and life.

Hello Jonathan. Tell us about your new book. What is it about?

Fullness of Vision, Fullness of Life can be described in several ways. It is about patterns of attention and thinking that shape our lives, our churches and our subcultures, often without our noticing. It is an introduction to one major understanding of neuroscience (that put forward by the polymath Iain McGilchrist), in conversation with Christian theology. And it puts the case for the need to rebalance dialogue around leadership – in the Church, and more generally. It offers a viewpoint and a vocabulary, a way of seeing and understanding, that is ultimately applicable in all settings.

What inspired you to want to write it?

The crystallising experience for me was a diocesan course, Godly Leadership, which I attended in 2007. I was a new vicar at the time, and keen to develop my leadership ability in ways consonant with ministry. The main strands of the course focused on having a clear church vision, which would lead to specific priorities, each with measurable (SMART) objectives. Some course participants seemed to find this all very convincing and helpful, some really didn’t see what it had to do with ministry, and some of us were somewhere in between.

This experience started me on a research project. My initial hope was at least to enable some depth of conversation between leadership and ministry. I spent a long time feeling like I was getting nowhere. When I first encountered the work of Iain McGilchrist, clarity was almost immediate. This not only enabled conversation, but also offered a proposal that I found theologically and practically convincing. All this led to my doctorate in 2015.

While based in my doctoral research, this book is a total rewrite, with three main differences:

• I have switched out of academic mode. I hope people will still find it thoughtful, but also even more engaging than a typical doctoral thesis.
• Four of the first five chapters offer something of a stand-alone introduction to and summary of the seminal work of Iain McGilchrist, bringing familiarity with the strengths of the two hemispheres, and the nature and rationale of relating between them.
• The idea of improvisation was mentioned in my thesis, but only briefly. Much thought and many drafts have led to something that I hope is now much more integrated, ministerially realistic and theologically convincing. Improvisation (as I describe and develop it) offers a holistic outworking of what healthy Christian leadership, drawing well on both brain hemispheres, might look like over time.

Some readers might not be familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s work – can you give a quick introduction to his research on the left and right hemispheres of the brain and what he found?

McGilchrist’s primary question is ‘Why is it that we (and other animals) have a brain so substantially divided into two hemispheres?’ His short answer is that we need ready access to two contrasting but complementary forms of attention, which broadly correlate to the two brain hemispheres. The hemispheres each have distinctive strengths, and we need plenty of both. The relationship, however, is not symmetrical. In particular, although the more holistic right hemisphere knows it needs the more clear-cut left, the reverse is not the case. There are thus understandable reasons why the relationship can become increasingly skewed towards left-hemisphere dominance – and there is some evidence of cultural trends in that direction.

You’ve applied McGilchrist’s ideas to what you call the Church Strategic Leadership Discourse – what do you mean by that?

In recent decades, organisations in many sectors have used leadership approaches like the one I encountered on my 2007 course. Sometimes leadership is portrayed as the primary concept, sometimes strategy, sometimes something else. I needed a label for this whole mode of approach, this whole family of ways of thought, perception and assumption – and my choice was the Church Strategic Leadership Discourse, or Church SLD. Many other sectors have their equivalent SLD. And some have now let go of such approaches, or perhaps developed them into something different.

One key idea you discuss in the book is the idea of improvisation. Can you talk a little about what this is? Does it mean we all need to become jazz musicians or comedians?!

No we don’t. However, I found powerfully insightful some of the writing on what’s actually going on in improvised music and acting. At its best this integrates being and doing, initiating and responding, sufficient planning with flexibility in the moment, generous receptivity to what other group members offer, discerning incorporation of what has gone before into something fitting and creative for the next step, and mutual growth in attitudes, relationship and learning.

It’s a potent metaphor for the shape of our living – learning to participate ever more deeply, with others, in the ongoing unfolding of the divine life and love.

 One crucial insight is that we should shape our own ‘moves’ or ‘offers’ as wisely, creatively, kindly and faithfully as possible – but we have a very different relationship to the moves/offers of others. We are not responsible for them, nor can we control them.

On the cover of the book there is an image of a chaffinch. What is this illustrating here?

Imagine looking out your window, watching a chaffinch on the path. It pecks at some seeds, then looks around; pecks some more, then scans again. It needs to eat, but not be eaten; to satisfy its hunger, and to ensure its survival. It’s a useful initial introduction to our need for two distinct and complementary modes of attention. And it’s how the book begins. By the end of page two, however, things are already more complex!

If there is one thing/key message that you’d like people to take away from your book, what would it be?

It’s always very hard to narrow it down to one thing – so I won’t. These few answers at least give a taste for some of the scope and content of the book:

• We can easily, but mistakenly, expect a clear-cut answer/response to something that simply isn’t clear-cut
• The direct approach is sometimes helpful, and sometimes counter-productive.
• The activity of planning, done well, can be of the highest value. And the purpose of a plan should be to help us improvise well together.

What are your hopes for the book? Who would you like to read it?

The themes and content of the book really are pertinent to all of life. So I would love anyone interested in fullness of living to read it! Yes, the general principles are generally worked out in the context of church examples, but readers in all sectors will find it relevant and thought-provoking. For readers involved in church life, its relevance is at every ‘level’, local and national.

I hope that readers will come away with a fresh vantage point, strengthened vocabulary, and enriched appreciation of broad perspectives and of significant details. I hope they will look with fresh imagination and insight: at other people, at the shared life of any group, at their own thinking, and paying of attention; and at the possible presence and work of God.

Thanks for your time, Jonathan.

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Image credit: Aarón Blanco Tejedor at Unsplash.com (https://unsplash.com/@the_meaning_of_love)

Jonathan Kimber is the Interim Chaplain at King's College Cambridge.

Fullness of Vision, Fullness of Life is published this month and can be ordered here (with 20% off all pre-orders in June 2025).