The Master and His Emissary: What the Divided Brain Can Teach the Church

Dr Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, offers a compelling view of how the brain’s two hemispheres shape the world we inhabit. Not in the pop-psychology sense of “left is logical, right is creative,” but in how each hemisphere attends to reality.

The left brain narrows its focus. It breaks things down, analyses, categorises, and seeks control. It revels in clarity, certainty, systems, and measurable outcomes. That’s not bad—it's essential. We need it to count, plan, and execute.

The right brain, however, opens up. It perceives context, metaphor, beauty, and meaning. It’s relational and attentive to the whole. It sees connections rather than compartments. Crucially, it is the first and more primary mode of attention—grounding our understanding in lived, embodied experience before abstracting it.

McGilchrist warns that when left-brain thinking dominates, societies become technocratic, procedural, and disenchanted. We lose a sense of mystery, moral imagination, and even the sacred. Everything becomes a problem to solve, not a relationship to steward. When this happens to a culture (or church), this is a cause for concern.

A left-brain church focuses on metrics, models, governance, and theological precision. In the process, it can become brittle, defensive, arrogant, disconnected or dry. Right-brain attentiveness, by contrast, brings back humility, wonder, conversation and worship. It recovers the poetry of Scripture, the embodiment of the image-bearing, and the power of narrative and symbol. It reminds us that faith isn’t merely a system to believe but a person to trust.

We need both hemispheres—or as Paul suggests, we need all parts of the body. Strategy matters, but so does presence. Doctrine matters, but so does awe.

So perhaps we ask: are we managing ministry or cultivating it? Are we reading Scripture like an exam, or entering its drama? Are we shaping churches for control or for communion?

We need the left brain to build. But we need the right brain to know why it matters. McGilchrist reminds us, the right hemisphere is more suited to being “the master”. The left is designed to serve, not rule. It is the emissary.

At times we get this out of balance. Perhaps this is what Jesus observes when he notes that the Sabbath is made for mankind, not mankind for the Sabbath.