Summary: A look at whole-brained discipleship which uses insights from recent neuroscience to help develop Christian maturity.
A good friend recommended The Other Half of the Church to me about a year ago, and I have only recently gotten around to reading it. Many insights were not new to me because of work that either my wife or I have done regarding parenting, trauma, and attachment, or child development. I want to start with the fact that overall, I am glad that this book was written, and I commend it, even if I am going to spend most of my time discussing areas where I have concerns. The insights here into character development, group identity and its role in correction, and deep relationships are all important. Because of my training as a spiritual director and a couple of professional associations of spiritual directors which I am a member of, I know that more academic books in similar areas are being written. No book can address all of the nuance and potential areas of misunderstanding, so I am looking forward to reading more books to address different aspects.
This is a book that is co-written by Jim Wilder and Michael Hendricks. Much of the book is written in Hendrick’s voice, and he relates insights about spiritual formation and brain science from Jim Wilder. Part of what I appreciate about the framing of this book is that it is intentionally oriented toward a reader unfamiliar with the science. It is very accessible, and the authors know that stories are necessary to communicate not just the information but the meaning behind it.
Many will come to The Other Half of the Church with some background from gentle parenting (Whole Brained Child, Brain-Body Parenting, etc.) or insights from trauma, attachment, or adult emotional development. In many ways, I think discipleship is a bit late to the game with these insights. I also think that from my experience (which is obviously limited), many of my Gen X cohort or the Baby Boomers are less likely to have exposure to this type of whole-brained approach than the Millennial parents who have been at the forefront of the Gentle Parenting movement. Millennials are much more aware of trauma, abuse, and the science around those realities, which, again, have some overlap with the science discussed here.
The main content of the book is only about 200 pages. The first chapter describes the problem of how Christianity has shifted toward a right-brained, information-heavy orientation over the past several hundred years. Like many other chapters, I think this could have been much more developed. But again, I know this is designed as an introduction, and that whole books have been written in this area. However, one aspect that I think is not discussed and matters is that conscious theological and ecclesiastical decisions were made that oriented Christianity toward evangelism and away from a more holistic discipleship. Particularly because this was published by Moody Press (a historically dispensationalist publisher), I would have preferred at least some mention of how dispensationalism, especially an orientation toward the immanent return of Christ, fed into some of these discussions. (See Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism for more.)
Chapter two lays out the initial discussion about how people grow and introduces the metaphor of soil and plants that will carry through the whole book. I think this is a helpful metaphor. Plants grow not just because of light, water, and seed but the soil quality. The book suggests that many churches do not have healthy soil, so when people become Christians, it is not their fault for lack of growth because the soil they are in (the church community, theology, and people around them) is depleted of nutrients. This leads into the next three chapters of the different aspects of a healthy soil, joy, Hesed, and group identity. Again, all three could have more development, but they do have decent introductions. The Group Identity chapter (chapter 5) is my main complaint about the three.
As noted later in the book, group identity can be positive or negative. However, despite the later expansion of how group identity can be unhealthy, I do not think adequate attention has been paid to a more robust understanding of community and culture concerning group identity. In particular, Christians often have a very hierarchical understanding of Christianity (not what is presented in the book) that I think needs to be taken into account as part of what it means to have a safe Hesed community. Hierarchical thinking about race, culture, or gender is very common in Christian communities, and without addressing those directly, the later Healthy Correction chapter can’t work.
Again, I am not saying that the authors of The Other Half of the Church don’t know this, but that they are writing an introduction, and this is an area that I think needs to be developed more fully to implement the ideas in the book. NT Wright’s biography of Paul talks about how Paul encouraged boundary crossing, and the early church intentionally called Christians to view the boundaries between gender, economics or social status, and ethnicity as permeable within the Christian community. Paul was able to do this because he reframed their identity as being one in Christ. Today, some also try to do a similar thing, but they do it in a way that denies the existence of social divisions. Some go as far as claiming that to identify harm from social divisions is to deny Christ. Because of this reality, I think that a lack of grappling with those social realities does a disservice to women, racial or sexual minorities, people of different immigration or class backgrounds, etc.
Without a more robust understanding of how gender, economics, class, disability, race, and other issues work in the modern world, there can’t be a healthy community that can call people to a better group identity. One of my other concerns about group identity is that the history of the Homogenous Unit Principle within the church growth movement has a very sketchy history. It was very much used to perpetuate segregation, to enable white normative churches and culturally homogenous churches, not just as a method but as the only God-ordained way for churches to operate. The very nature of Hesed as it is being used here, I think, means that a church that is unwelcoming to a particular demographic would make me question whether it could be practicing Hesed as intended. But at the same time, many churches that have been discipling people for generations discipled them into belief in segregation. So there is a lot of history that has to be unpacked there.
One of the other red flags for me in The Other Half of The Church is the repeated and regular call to think of the church as a family. The family metaphor is common in scripture, and I don’t want to dismiss what the authors are trying to do by using the family metaphor, but it is hard not to see family as a red flag. Many unhealthy churches or Christian non-profits consciously use family language as a type of hierarchical dominance. That violates the principle of Hesed presented earlier in the book, but it has to be named.
Many unhealthy Christian communities use biblical language in unhealthy ways, which then impacts the ability to use that language in healthy ways. It is similar to the discussions of “evangelical.” Many who like the term evangelical point to the theological meaning, the root of the word, which means to share the gospel. But those who resist the term note that it is often understood now as a racially coded political marker or a consumer identity group. Again, the book does mention that group identities can be negative, but I think part of the nature of introductions to topics is that they can’t get into as much detail as is necessary if you were going to fully develop a concept. In this case, I suspect that many people who may be interested in the concepts of the book have not grappled enough with their understanding of race, gender, culture, or class and will attempt to incorporate cultural preferences within their group identity in ways that can harm other Christians.
The book’s most important chapter is chapter six, which discusses how people develop character through health correction. I do not like the chapter’s subtitle (stop being so nice), but I appreciate the main point. In summary, people need some “healthy or appropriate” shame to be motivated to change emotionally. When we focus on behavior management, it uses conscious thought as a means of behavior change. There can be some value to that, but the deeper, preconscious thought change that is possible has to be done at a deeper level than simply conscious behavior change. This requires engaging that deeper emotion, and that can only be done well if the “soil” (Hesed, joy, and group identity) allows a person to be safe in a relationship to know that the change they are being called to will draw them into the community not be shunned or alienated from the community.
I have many personal antidotes where I think this happened to me. I remember someone talking to me about not using the idea of all women being treated well because they were all someone’s “wife, sister, mother or daughter.” There was a sense of shame when he explained that it only gave them humanity through their relationship with other men. I had emotional resistance to correction, and at the moment, I do not think I responded well (although I don’t remember my response. What I remember was: 1) a sense of shame that I hadn’t already understood that. 2) clear knowledge that even if I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it, I knew he was right. 3) a conviction that I needed to change. I can remember corrections from a seminary professor and friends and a number of corrections from people on social media, where I also had similar reactions. While I do think that a close community is the best place for correction, I do think that when people are open to it, and it is framed as a call to identify (something like, “as Christians, we talk about people in this way”), it can still work without in-person relationship. (But I also know these things can go quite badly.)
The final two chapters—a good discussion of the problem of narcissism within the Christian community and a concluding chapter that pulls together all of the previous chapters—round out the book.
Again, I think this is a very helpful book. My complaints largely concern what is not here or not developed enough. But this is intended as an introduction, so I don’t want to complain about what is not here and that this was written to the audience that it was. I have some comments on several of my highlights that you can see here in places where I have concerns beyond what I have raised here. (I mostly listened to this as an audiobook, and I did not realize it wasn’t synced with the Kindle when I got it. So, all of the highlights and comments I made, I had to find in the Kindle.)
I also want to link to my post on Brain-Body Parenting because I raise a concern about how whole-body parenting or discipleship can become a technique in the Ellul sense of the term. I think my concern there applies here as well.
Update: I wanted to add a quick update. On of the areas where I think there is a need for a follow up book or a book by someone else is to work through spiritual practices in light of neuroscience. I think this is part of what is going on with Trauma in the Pews where Janyne McConnaughey riffs off of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and talks about how traditional spiritual disciplines are impacted by developmental trauma. But I think there is a need for a more general book. The Other Half of the Church talks briefly about how spiritual practices are part of developing character but does not go into any details. One of the problems is that this book is written for Evangelicals, and many Evangelicals do not have a connection to the history of spiritual disciplines outside of those that may have been connected to Richard Foster or Renovaré. Part of what I think should be avoided in a book on spiritual disciplines and neuroscience is to think that we are rediscovering ancient practices as if the church hadn’t been doing them all along, or that it evaluates them solely on modern science. For instance, I think that The Prayer of Examen is a personal exercise that fits in with the understanding of corporate character development presented in The Other Half of the Church. When done in the traditional we invite God to help us, we reflect on our actions. This will include time to “metabolize shame,” as discussed here, and then we pray for grace to move forward as a new person. My experience is that Catholic presentations of the Prayer of Examen are much more oriented toward grace and less oriented toward “do better” framings than Evangelical presentations of the Prayer of Examen that I have seen. Mindfulness and contemplative prayer, as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing, are also examples of Christian spiritual disciplines which long predate modern understandings of neuroscience but which are doing things that neuroscience confirms as being helpful to maturity in Christ.
The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation by Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook