WHEN I taught at Ashridge Business School, the way to impress people was to drop diffident references to Aristotle into the discourse, when one wasn’t name-dropping about c-suite lunches and accidental CEO encounters in the executive lift. In the Church of England, the equivalent is bumping into Iain McGilchrist whilst on a casual stroll along Talisker beach, and propping one’s sash windows open with both volumes of The Matter With Things.
Everyone knows that McGilchrist is one of the most important thinkers of our generation, but not everyone has the courage to tackle his extraordinary books, let alone to apply his thinking to other spheres. We are extremely fortunate that Jonathan Kimber discovered McGilchrist 23 months into his doctorate on leadership and was able to course-correct in time to do so. His book will make McGilchrist accessible to a new readership, and offers a helpful challenge to current fashions of thinking about leadership in the Church.
To apply McGilchrist to leadership in the Church of England, Kimber needs a bogeyman who epitomises the kind of left-hemisphere bias that is at issue. This he finds in the “Church Strategic Leadership Discourse”, which seems to be a composite of mission action-planning, the Strategic Development Funding regime, and his experience of a diocesan leadership development course in 2007 (the infamous national Strategic Leadership Development Programme is very carefully not mentioned).
He also needs a user-friendly summary of McGilchrist’s thesis, which he establishes by separating the left and right hemisphere foci into “clear-cut” versus “holistic” thinking, using the example of the chaffinch on the book’s cover. It then becomes easy to argue — as McGilchrist would say of society in general — that the Church of England has, to its detriment, embraced a view of leadership which favours the clear-cut over the holistic. It is unlikely that anyone would disagree with this verdict, and the need identified for more balance and deeper theological engagement.
Drawing on the work of Jeremy Begbie, one solution that Kimber proffers is the rediscovery of improvisation as a framework for leadership. Begbie’s holy trinity of “contrast, interplay, and mutual enhancement” explains how disciplines such as jazz work: there has to be some (left-hemisphere) order, but this is in support of (right-hemisphere) improvisation, and is necessary largely in order to liberate it. The magic then happens in the dialogue in between.
He would argue that leadership tools such as budgets and plans should similarly be contextualised as just and only that: useful starting points for a rich engagement with life in all its fullness, but not as substitutes for it. He identifies five vital dispositions that would help with this: Responsive Attunement, Generous Receptivity, Discerning Incorporation (a sort of filtering process), Trusting Courage, and Deepening Desire (a will to improve). These he illustrates with the story from John 8.1-11 about Jesus’s leadership regarding the woman caught in adultery.
This book will suit anyone with a yen for McGilchrist and a thirst for how his thinking might be applied. It will also suit all those church leaders who are underwhelmed by the discourse on leadership which is generally in vogue in many influential church circles. It would make a good study-group book, too, as each chapter ends with Questions for Reflection.
If it opens up McGilchrist’s thinking to a fresh audience, and inspires critical reflection on church leadership, it will more than have justified the effort that has clearly gone into writing both it and the Ph.D. thesis.
Dr Eve Poole is executive chair of the Woodard Corporation and writes on theology, economics, and leadership.
Fullness of Vision, Fullness of Life: The divided brain, improvisation, and leadership in the Church
Jonathan Kimber
SCM Press £19.99
(9780334059141)
Church Times Bookshop £15.99