Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation

123 Why We Gather: The Neuroscience Behind Corporate Worship (with Dr. Joshua Cockanye)

• Season 7 • Episode 123

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Is corporate worship just the transfer of information? Or to whip up our emotions into a frenzy? Or does corporate worship do something else?

In this episode, host Geoff Holsclaw engages with Reverend Dr. Joshua Cockayne about corporate worship, joint attention in spiritual formation, and perspectives from developmental psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience. This episode challenges the traditional dichotomy between cognition and affect, proposing a more nuanced understanding of worship as a communal, transformative experience.

Dr Joshua Cockayne is the Director of the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology at Cranmer Hall in Durham, UK, where he also lectures on mission and evangelism. He is the co-author of several books, including Dawn of Sunday: The Trinity and Trauma Safe Churches, and more recently, Why We Gather: Psychology, Theology and Liturgical Practice.


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Introduction to Corporate Worship

Geoff Holsclaw: Is corporate worship, just the transfer of information, or is it to whip up our emotions into a frenzy? Or does corporate worship do something else? Does liturgy together form and shape us in different ways? That's what we're talking about today. How does worship form us? This is the Attaching to God podcast.

Your host is, I'm your host, Geoff Holsclaw, and we're exploring a neuroscience informed spiritual formation, and we are produced by. 

Meet Reverend Dr. Joshua Cockayne

Geoff Holsclaw: Embodied Faith today we have Reverend Dr. Joshua Cockayne. He is the director of the Bead Center for Church Planning Theology at Kramer Hall in Durham uk. So we're getting international here on the podcast.

We, he's also a [00:01:00] lecturer on Mission and Evangelism. He's a co-author of several books recently, the Dawn of Sunday. Looking at the Trinity and trauma safe churches. And later this year, which I'm really excited about, he's coming out with a book called Why We Gather Psychology, theology, and Liturgical Practice.

Joshua, thanks you so much for being on with us today. I.

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Thanks so much, Geoff, for inviting me. It's great to be with you.

Geoff Holsclaw: Absolutely. And for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you over his shoulder, you can see his estimates. And I just wanna draw attention. I always do this is, you're a reverend and you're a doctor. You're ordained as a. Anglican priest, I'm also ordained and for those people who are listening who might not know is that you always have the sacred prefix before the academic prefix.

So you never say Doctor Reverend. It's always Reverend Doctor, so you know, 'cause the spiritual has the priority, the queen of the sciences. But I am glad, especially before we. We jumped on, I was talking about how you and the Anglican tradition, you always have, you've always had a strong connection [00:02:00] between practitioners and theologians, like the reflective practitioners.

I'm low church evangelical, and we usually bifurcate those things, you just have the intellectuals and then you have the practitioners, but they're not the same. So I'm really glad that you are integrating both of those things.

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah.

The Bead Center and Church Planting

Geoff Holsclaw: So how is it that you what is your work there at the bead center and how did you come into that?

I always like setting the context with that. And then we're gonna dive into our question about formation and worship.

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Thank you. So I guess the, I'll talk about the second part of my role first and then we can talk about the bead center. I'm part of a college that's part of the part of Durham University in the uk. Our focus at Rumer Hall is specifically on training people for ministry. So we train a mixture of people training for Anglican ordination, but also lots of free church Pentecostal pastors.

So a whole range of different folk. And really I think that's our heartbeat, what you've just been talking about, of the bring the integration of theology and ministry doing serious academic work for the sake of the church. I think that's really what we're all about here. The centen, the bead center, which is the kind of [00:03:00] part of my role came about a few years ago.

There's been in the uk I'm sure it's the same in the us there's been a kind of rapid shift towards planting new churches, particularly in the last decade. Some of it motivated by. Really steep decline in attendance at church. And you can go and look at the facts and figures yourself. But most major denominations now in the UK have a, some kind of strategy for how they're gonna plant new churches.

Really the center came about because we felt like the conversation. Just was lacking any theological depth. And so we, what we're trying to do at the bead center is to bring church planters and those that are thinking about church planting into dialogue with some of the riches of the Christian tradition to think deeply about what they're doing.

And to ask those kind of critical questions that you might not ask if you're just focused on the pragmatic questions about. How numerically healthy is your church? We want, we think there are more fundamental questions than that, that we can ask to help us think about church planting. So that's what we do.

We're named after Bead, [00:04:00] who you might not have heard of, is a 30th century English Saint who

Geoff Holsclaw: the venerable

Joshua Cockayne: venerable bead,

Geoff Holsclaw: okay. I see the, I don't know who that is. I just know the saying.

Joshua Cockayne: be is the father of history, allegedly inventor of footnote. Bead. The reason that we named ourselves after Bead is that he was a prolific scholar who not only wrote his hi huge amounts of history about the church in Britain, but also did, wrote a lot of translations of scripture, commentaries on scripture.

And really that I think for us, exemplifies what we're trying to do, which is. Serious scholarship for the sake of God's mission. So bead is a kind of like aspirational figure for us. That's what we wanna do for today is do some serious theological thinking to help us plant better churches.

Geoff Holsclaw: Oh, I love that. That could be almost the mission statement of this podcast, and a lot of the work that I'm trying to do is serious reflection for the benefit of the church, and then especially taking the best of [00:05:00] the. The findings of relational neuroscience or attachment theory the sciences that speak of how God has made us and help that inform the spiritual formation process.

So I love it. I love what you're doing. I gotta learn more about what you're doing. Part of the connection, just so people know, is I have a friend. David Clayton that you invited to speak as part of this, and he spoke about like the cultivating the depths of these pioneer leaders. And I heard about that and I was like, you should be on the podcast.

And so that a couple episodes ago for listeners, if you find David Clayton there. So he's part of the UK connection that we're building here. 

Exploring Liturgical Anthropology

Geoff Holsclaw: Let's jump into a little bit of the, this article you wrote an article called liturgical Anthropology. And I'll throw that up on the website in the show notes for those of you who love like scholarly articles.

But first off, how did you make this turn into whatever you might call it, like thinking about spirituality or spiritual formation or liturgical practice with a psychological or a relational neuroscience perspective?

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Thank you. I, [00:06:00] so I I wrote my doctorate on the Danish philosopher, so in Kigo who I think Kigo

Geoff Holsclaw: you know we, our oldest son is named Soren,

Joshua Cockayne: Oh, there you go.

Geoff Holsclaw: Character Guard. Yeah. So we're big fans.

Joshua Cockayne: That's great. Ki I think Kiku was one of KO's primary concerns, at least. This is kind what I'm exploring in my doctorate is the spiritual life re relating to Christ, not just as an object of the world, but as a person to be engaged and to be formed into the likeness of so really my doctoral work really explored that theme of spirituality, spiritual practice.

And I'd dipped my toe into some of the. Psychological work on, particularly on second personal relationships. So there's a whole area within developmental psychology on on imitation. And, the way in which sharing attention with caregivers shapes the way that we understand the world, which for me felt like a really rich set of resources for thinking about spirituality.

Now if you fast forward a little, I went to St. Andrews in Scotland to do a postdoc. And I [00:07:00] ended up meeting Gideon Salter, who I've written quite a lot of things with, including this article that Geoff's talking about. And Gideon was studying for a, a. His PhD in developmental psychology.

And so somebody told him to come and find me and talk about joint attention. 'cause I think I probably wouldn't stop going on about it. Anyway, we we we built a friendship and started thinking about how we might bring together our shared areas of interest and expertise.

I wrote a couple of papers together about prayer. We that was our first paper and then we wrote something on, on acts of remembrance and the Eucharist and the Jewish meal. And then I think we really just this was a kind of fun project. The kind of main things that I was doing for research.

This was the stuff I was doing 'cause it really sparked my interest. And I rea as you've, as you can see, if you look at my list of publications, I like writing with other people. 'cause you learn so much more by doing that. So yeah, we got thinking about this topic of, formation. We've been involved in lots of different projects around the world, [00:08:00] thinking about psychology and theology.

We went, we popped some, a project at Fuller Seminary when it was when Justin Barrett was still there and then a project at Biola on Gratitude. So there've been lots of, lots of projects that have tried to get. Cross-fertilization between theology and the sciences, and that I think has sparked our interest in these topics.

So that's a kind of biographical story of how we got there.

Geoff Holsclaw: I love that. And that's exactly I've been trying to find more people like you who are trying to bring all this stuff to joint attention. I think it's so important I could do a deep dive on Michael Tomicello and all that stuff. So sorry for listeners who sometimes hear this is like very pragmatic.

This, our, this episode. This time might be a little more of a deep dive, but I think that's good. It's important. I'm just so glad to hear that you're pro. I think what you said about joint attention is probably how my wife and I have been with like attachment theory. It's like everybody's oh yeah, they're always talking about it good.

This article, and we don't just have to go through the article, but it asks this question of [00:09:00] what happens in public worship, in corporate worship, in liturgy how different traditions talk about it and there's these two maybe main views, the older kind of cognitive view, and then a newer kind of.

Shift toward the effective view. Could you just explain some of those, and some of our listeners might be pretty familiar with James K. Smith, and so you can talk through some of that and his perspective there.

Joshua Cockayne: yeah, of course. Ja, I think James k Smith's work on literature is I think a lot of people have the same experience when they read it, which is that it he's, he articulates something that's really profound and that our culture really needs to hear. And that was my experience when I picked up his work.

I've, I'm an Anglican, an ordained Anglican but fairly low church for an Anglican. And so a lot of the things that Jamie Smith talks about in his work on liturgy, I immediately recognized from my own context. But actually I think really his, the background of what he's talking about is the evangelical church in North America.

For Smith, I think there's a deep worry that so we, if you're part of a church you gather together [00:10:00] regularly with other people and anybody that's done that will at some point have wondered, why on earth am I doing this? Eve, maybe there's some people that just really love church.

But for most of us, I think at some point we think what am I giving up three hours of my life this often to do? Because I think there, that question emerges why do we, and it's the reason we named our book that's coming out. Why do we gather is ' cause I think that's a pressing, practical question, especially as churches start declining and emptying.

I think people are asking this question quite seriously. And I think Smith, what Smith tries to do is ask is tap into this kind of evangelical approach to thinking about gathering, which is the primary reason we gather to worship is to learn stuff about God.

And I think it's it's widespread in the uk.

I think I'm sure it is in the states as well, that really worship is targeted, target targeted at teaching us things about God. And you can see this by thinking about what do we give most priority to in most evangelical contexts. Preaching is the kind of the [00:11:00] climax of our worship.

Like it's the focal point of what we do, and if we talk to someone after the service. What did you think about the service? Probably they're gonna say, oh, I wasn't the pastor wasn't on their a game this morning with the sermon, I wasn't sure about that. The analogy they gave in the middle.

I think that it's implicit in a lot of the ways we think about worship is that worship is to teach us something.

so I think that's the context this conversation comes a comes about in. And the thing that I think Smith articulates really well is that is a deeply flawed way of thinking about worship.

He ha he has this wonderful story in one of his books that I often tell my students, 'cause I think it's it's. Very revealing about human nature. I'm sure you've, I'm sure you're familiar with it, Geoff, but he talks about in Incre, like increasingly reading about sustainable food and organic diets and getting really compelled that he should think about changing his food habits.

And he's sitting there reading this book and thinking, yeah, I should really start eating more organic food and I'm really convinced it's the right answer. And he looks down at the table and he sees in front of him. [00:12:00] A foot long Costco hotdog. And I think it's such a powerful story 'cause I imagine we've probably all been there in realizing that the things that we believe are nowhere near as influential in what we do as we like to think.

Geoff Holsclaw: Right.

Joshua Cockayne: we have all sorts of beliefs that, that just don't they don't really seem to shape our, the way that we relate to the world. Human beings are inconsistent creatures. And actually I think we believe lots of things that just don't seem to play out in our values and our habits. I believe that getting fit would be really good for me, but that come come six o'clock in the morning when my kids wake me up, the last thing I wanna do is go for a run.

But I, so I think what Smith taps into is this idea that if we think about what human beings are, that's what really anthropology is all about. Then we have to admit that it doesn't make sense to think that belief is this kind of primary drive for human beings. Human beings seem to be just as driven by what they desire, the things they care about and the habits that have formed around their [00:13:00] daily lives as what they believe.

So I think that's the frame that Smith brings to this con conversation. And for what it's worth, I think he's really shaped that con, that discussion in quite important ways.

Geoff Holsclaw: And he makes a shift. There's this idea that going back to Descartes, you're right. I think therefore I am and he's wanting to shift that we're not just cognitive beings, we're not thinkers. We're more like lover lovers. And I think on a global philosophical level, especially since he's doing some cultural theory, coming back from the philosophical traditions of Augustine and updating it through some phenomenology, blah, blah, blah, So he's moving to we're lovers, we're guided by our desires. But you put your finger a little bit on the question of does this really track? With contemporary developmental science, does the idea that liturgy mostly just forms our desires rather than our cognitions, or it's not about our thinking, it's about our wanting.

That maybe he just swings the pendulum too far and it's not really in line with the [00:14:00] science. Is that right? Or could

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: You probably want a nuance. I'm like a blunt instrument usually. So if you want to nuance that go right ahead.

Joshua Cockayne: No, I think that's entirely right. 

Psychological Perspectives on Worship

Joshua Cockayne: I think that and to some extent this was a bit of an experiment for me in reading. Smith alongside a psychological scientist and saying, what do you think about this? And I think I, I think part of the problem that Smith runs into is that he's using some quite overtly psychological terms like cognition and affect.

And they're doing a lot of work for him in how he thinks about liturgy and anthropology. But I think if you. If you sit down with a psychologist and talk about how psychologists think about these terms it's hard to come out with a picture that Smith has, which is that human beings desire first, think second that were primarily shaped by our desires, and then our beliefs follow after.

And I, and there are lots of ways in that, in which that's prob problematic. One of them that we pick up on the article is that there's a distinction [00:15:00] that psychologists make between explicit and implicit cognition. The things that we can bring to mind in in our kind of active mind.

The beliefs that we, that are operate in our day-to-day consciousness. They're not the only ways in which our cognition functions. There are cognitive states that are shaping the way that we approach the world that are much deeper under the surface than that, that we can't bring to mind.

But nonetheless don't really look much like desires or ethics at all. And so we, we need to nuance the picture really, I think what our argument is. The picture is just way more complex and to know where desire starts and belief begins, is something that's, is very difficult. and then the other thing that I think is just worth saying is, I think the other thing that psychology brings to the conversation is this idea that we could somehow separate out affect and cognition. It's really artificial because right from the beginning, earliest stages of development, babies are developing their mind, they're developing their [00:16:00] belief systems, they're developing their desire system.

And so actually to try and. Pull apart these two things as if they weren't deeply entwined is I think really problematic.

Geoff Holsclaw: before we go into that, I love, 'cause I love that point. And for, I think a couple years, the reason why I loved stumbling a across your article is for a couple years that I've been doing like this real deep, work in attachment theory, child infant developments and.

Especially joint attention and like social referencing and all these different things. I had, I think I had James Smith's kind of picture in the background of you are what you desire. And I kept thinking like I'm not sure that's true. I think it's and so I've had this kind of thought, but before we get into that, I think I just wanna situate that kind of shift maybe more broadly. 'cause I think James K. Smith was part of this kind of movement against an overly cognitive culture and it shifted to more of the effective emotional, and there's a lot of, there's a lot [00:17:00] of that in the water if we wanna say.

There's actually a lot of social theorists who are atheists who say we've been too hard on religion. And they've also accepted that the secularization thesis is false. That religion's not going away in some form even if maybe less people go to church. And so a lot of them now say there's an act.

There's a whole book. It's not my bookshelf right behind me. It's called like, why Religion? And this. He basically argues something like cognitively religion is false. Like our frontal cortex knows that religion is bad, but our limbic system, our emotional centers, need to be controlled or regulated, and religion's really good at that.

So we should allow religion to continue to regulate and maybe pacify or calm down some of our, darker angels. And so we have this role for religion to, for our emotions and I, and. Smith isn't engaging any of that literature, but I think that there is this kind of idea that and Jonathan, he also talks about like the elephant that we ride on, which is our emotions, our implicit systems, our bottom up [00:18:00] processes.

And then you have the writer on top who's not really controlling anything. He just thinks he is, and that our thoughts and sometimes the view is that our thoughts and cognitions are after effects, that they're just justifications. For semi-automatic reactions. And there's some literature that says that happens, but I think that's gone too far, is that we're all just emotional creatures and thoughts and reason come afterwards.

I don't think that tracks with the research as well, but I was just wanting to paint that picture that I think it's not just there, there are these kind of tug and pulls between these different views. But back to what you were about to say, I want you to unpack this idea that cognition. Our thoughts and responses, affects and emotions and our action.

They're all developing together and they can't really be separated

Joshua Cockayne: yeah. I think that's, I think that's important. And I think I actually think, to be fair to Smith, that really what he's interested in is the explicit cognitive.

That we're not just shaped by the things that we can verbalize or the things that we can say, but he ma he talks a lot about [00:19:00] the way that habits form the way that we approach the world.

I actually think a lot of what he has to say about the role of affect. It also applies to implicit cognition. but it just gets labeled slightly differently. And I think that's fine because I think what he's trying to do is offer corrective, which is for the purposes of the church that I think is very useful.

But I think what it gets problematic is if we try and draw, put two, two firmer wedge between these two ways of understanding the world because the implicit and the explicit are. Relating to each other. And I'm not a psychologist you can my colleague Gideon is not here to correct me, so this is dangerous waters that are in here right now.

But take the example of learning how to drive a car. I'm an academic. It took me ages to learn to drive a car because I'm terrible at doing anything with my hands. My driving instructor thought it was hilarious that this. Guy with so many degrees, can't, can't turn the steering wheel.

When you learn to drive, there's if you've been driving for a long time then actually you don't really consciously bring to mind what you're doing when you turn the [00:20:00] steering wheel or when you you change gear. If you're driving a proper manual car like we drive in Europe and unlike you

Geoff Holsclaw: I love

Joshua Cockayne: Heathens over in the United

Geoff Holsclaw: yeah, no kidding.

Joshua Cockayne: But when you learn, one of the hardest things about learning to drive a manual car is learning how to use a clutch. And there's a kind of instinct to that. But, and when you're first learn to drive, you are really focusing hard on the kind of propositions, which is I have to lower my foot to a certain level so that I can turn the gear.

But once you've been driving it for a while you hardly ever bring that to mind. But there's still something cognitive going on there, because but it is just under the surface rather than something you can bring explicitly to mind. The, that your implicit cognition is is helping you to navigate the world and to know how the world works and providing information about the world in ways that you don't bring to mind.

‌

Joshua Cockayne: I mean we, we could talk about trauma 'cause I think there's another aspect of. Implicit cognition happening when people are recovering from trauma is they might not actually be able to bring cognitively to mind some of the [00:21:00] traumatic events of their past, but that doesn't mean that cognition's not involved.

I think the reason that it's important to keep them together is the explicit and the implicit have a kind of fuzzy relationship. Like the way in which they interact isn't a kind of straightforward, now I'm thinking explicitly. That's just a really artificial way of trying to understand our human brains and human minds work.

And and I, the same is true of the relationship between the two, between our a effective and cognitive states is. And the two things are interacting throughout our development. And so to be able to say, now we're thinking, and now we're feeling is just to misunderstand the way in which human psychology works.

Geoff Holsclaw: right. 

Thoughts, Emotions, and Shared Attention

Geoff Holsclaw: We, I just interviewed somebody about emotions Kevin Chapman, and, because I think sometimes we get this like one way interaction for thoughts and emotions. It's either my thoughts create my emotions or my emotions control my thoughts. And it's much more complicated than that.

That they're that they're hard to you [00:22:00] say referring to someone else, thoughts and, and emotions as well as like your bodily movements can only be separated as an abstraction, but like in practice, they're all fuzzy and interconnected. So we've been talking about thoughts and emotions or cognitions and affect as well as implicit and explicit.

And I think listeners of this podcast probably are like, oh yeah, I probably heard that for a bit. And I promise we're gonna, for all of you listeners, we're gonna get to the, how does this link up

Joshua Cockayne: we should talk about church, shouldn't we?

Geoff Holsclaw: We're going to, we're going to, but let's get to the thing that you love talking about, which is like shared attention.

Because that's maybe something that people aren't as familiar with. So what, so how does that play a piece in this developmental kind of perspective? And then we'll link that into church practice. I.

Joshua Cockayne: yeah. Thank you. 

The Role of Joint Attention in Development

Joshua Cockayne: So I the important piece for joint attention and this is why I'm working with a developmental psychologist joint attention, there's been a huge literature on this in the past. Particularly in the past 20, 30 years. I think the easiest way to grasp what joint attention is if you've ever been around very young babies.

I have three [00:23:00] kids of my own, so I've seen some of, it's fun to watch these processes firsthand, isn't it? But from a really early age, children are able to share eye contact with their caregivers. it's one of the first ways in which. Infants interact with the world is that they share eye contact.

It's a kind of deeply rooted human instinct to be able to connect to other persons eye contact's, not the only way it happens. There are other ways it happens, but it's very basic. The, at the very basic level of social interaction. There's this process in which I'm aware of you and I'm aware that you are attending to me.

That's the basis of joint attention. So eye context is the most obvious one. 'cause I can see that you're looking at me. And so I'm not just aware of you as an object, but I'm aware of you as a subject. I'm aware that you are attending to me now. Joint attention is really crucial for how psychologists think infants develop and understand the world.

It's why. Parenting is such a it's why it's such, such a scary thing, [00:24:00] right? It's that we're shaping the way in which these young minds think. one of the, one of the things children learn to do after a short amount of time is to be able to triangulate. I don't, we're not just looking at each other anymore, but I can point to something at the other side of the room.

And you can know that, that I'm aware of you being aware of that toy over there on the other side of the room. It's how children learn to navigate the world, to know the kind of safe boundaries within the world. It's deeply rooted to stuff you're interested in, Geoff, around attachment theory and how we form safe

Geoff Holsclaw: I was about to. I was about to link that for all the listeners. We always talk about joy and shared joy and attunement, and that happens through eye contact. And that's foundational. And, but also the social referencing or looking at a third object rather than ida, that's one of the things that some higher.

Primates do that a little bit, but that's a very human activity is to be able to it's when if we're talk, like if we were talking in person and I looked over your shoulder, you would have this almost irresistible [00:25:00] urge to look where I was looking. Like we constantly do that as people like, oh, what was that?

If I turn my head you would also turn your head. So where it's hardwired in. Okay, so continue on. So that's shared

Joshua Cockayne: yeah. And then it, and shared detention. One of the reasons shared attention is so important is it forms the basis of shared action. One of the things that as children develop disability to share attention with people they're then able to coordinate actions with other people.

So if we're doing an action together say we're trying to lift an object from one side of the room to another, or say I'm playing make believe. Food games with my 3-year-old. The basis of that is being able to be aware of what the other person is aware of. That's the reason that we can so instinctively collaborate and do things together is because of this capacity to share attention with others, to know where other people are directing their attention, and to know that they're aware of us.

And so it, it is a really fundamental base building block for how. humans develop socially and then you even, you can build whole layers of theory on top of this to think [00:26:00] about the formation of society and culture. Attention is a really kind of fundamental aspect of developmental work. Now I think what's interesting there, there kind of two directions we might, that we've gone in, in our thinking.

One is the kind of more spiritual, which is. 

Joint Attention in Spiritual Life

Joshua Cockayne: Joint attention seems. One of the things I was most interested in at the start about was it seems like a really fruitful way of explaining what's happening in the spiritual life. This idea that prayer is about attending to God. That has a deep rooted kind of is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition throughout lots of different thinkers.

If you read some of the work of the mystics, people like Brother Lawrence, they talk about washing washing the dish as well, being aware of God's presence. And I think really what they're talking about is attending to God, attending to them. So I spiritually, I think there's something really fruitful there.

And that's the kind of how my interest got peaked in this literature. And it makes sense actually given how [00:27:00] developmentally central that is to human beings as social creatures, to think that's how we also relate to our creator, right? That it's not a crazy idea. And then the second area, which is where Gideon and I have run with this.

Thinking about the affective cognitive formation within liturgy is interesting, but for the reasons we've just talked about, I think it can also be quite unhelpful. And so we thought let's ask a kind of more fundamental question, which is, what do we do when we gather together and worship?

And I think one of the primary things that we do when we gather whatever tradition we come from is that we attend to things with other people. So we gather a group of people to attend to reading of scripture, or we attend to these objects of bread and wine on the table. We attend to the words of others and if all goes well, we're able to attend together to God's presence. And so actually this the work around joint attention, I think has huge potential to think about what we do when we gather and why that might be. Why that might be so fundamental [00:28:00] to the life of the church.

Geoff Holsclaw: and it's not just attending together, it's also the joint action. And so in liturgies we're, we're standing, we're sitting, we have corporate confessions that are together. There's also. Turn taking where some people start and then another, the other person finish. There is corporate, in some traditions, corporate song leading.

And so we're doing the shared action and the shared attending go together. We become better at attending to objects because we're doing an. Action together, and we do those actions better together when we're attending to similar objects. I, and so then can you now we'll make it practical then.

Practical Applications in Worship

Geoff Holsclaw: So how then, and I think you have been of course, but then how do. How then do, should we think more granularly about like corporate worship than as this combination of affect and cognition as well as shared attention? How does that for pastors or worship leaders are just people who are attending church and have that question, why do I come every week?

Could you start giving them that answer a little bit?

Joshua Cockayne: yeah. No I [00:29:00] think we could talk for hours about the answer and my,

Geoff Holsclaw: I know.

Joshua Cockayne: the first answer is you should go buy our book. 'cause we explore this in lots of lots of ways

Geoff Holsclaw: let's not out

Joshua Cockayne: It's not out. When it's out. You can go

Geoff Holsclaw: will I will let listeners and readers know for sure.

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. And we'll come back and talk more about it when you've read it.

But I think there's a few different things I'll say about the kind of practical thing. One of them is, one of the things I found really conceptually helpful about this whole literature on shared attention is that as the literature is nuanced and developed in the last few years, one of the things that has been thought through is that shared attention has a kind of a nested.

It has a kind of graded scale to it. So not all shared attention is the same. We've talked about some really intensive eye contact, sharing attention to objects, but actually there are we can get thicker than that. We can get further out than that. If you are, if you get into the back of a taxi or an Uber you might look, you might share eye contact with a driver as you get in the car.

But for most of the journey. You don't really you might not [00:30:00] really engage with that person, but there's a sense in which the situation and the context provide a sense of sharedness to that situation. There are things that you wouldn't do in an Uber that you might do in the privacy of your bedroom.

But I think part of that is that there's a kind of phenomenology to that, which is this experience is a shared experience. We can get further out than that. i in, in the, in England when the World Cup is on. It's a fair assumption to make that everybody that you speak to has watched the football last night.

I would guess that you get similar phenomenon with the Super Bowl. I. It's why people pay such a, people pay such a premium to advertise in the Super Bowl is 'cause you, we know that like people are paying attention. But what that does is it creates a shared knowledge, a shared world.

It creates a kind of sense of sharedness, which is bigger than just people that you are directly engaging with. Now we think, and we talk about this in the book, this kind of nested. Think about experience and community is really fruitful for thinking about the [00:31:00] church because if we start to think theologically actually, then we can see that there's no act of worship that really worship. We might gather as a congregation or a community on a Sunday morning, but actually there's a sense in which that is part of a much bigger thing, which is Christ's body, the mystical body of Christ. We use a line in the angry ity when we.

When we, in our communion prayers that we join our prayers with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven there's a sense in which like this really small, insignificant act is joined together with a kind of like much broader community. And so I think that

Geoff Holsclaw: cosmically and

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Cosmically. Temp.

Exactly.

Geoff Holsclaw: all the saints that have gone before us.

Joshua Cockayne: And you see this really strongly in the Hebrew scriptures on remembrance. The thing that you read throughout the pages of the Hebrew scriptures is remember that you were slaves in Israel. No, remember that you were slaves in Egypt. Remember, part of the way that we understand remembrance is that we're part of this much [00:32:00] broader.

Social identity. And so attention provides, I think some really fruitful ways of thinking about those concepts that say actually what we do when we gather is significant because it's nested in this much broader concept, this much broader understanding of. Of worship that it's really crucial.

Can I'll just talk about one really more practical thing, if that's

Geoff Holsclaw: All right. I've been taking notes here. So of all these things.

Joshua Cockayne: We can, but there's one, there's a part of the project that I really love that I think is really practically useful. We did this work on gratitude, which was a new area in psychology for both of us. When we were putting the book together and we came across this literature in business psychology, which talks about this phenomenon called social loafing.

Now, in.

Geoff Holsclaw: Loafing

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Loafing with an F. And this literature show is basically trying to explain, trying to think through in businesses how you create shared joint action in which everyone provides, [00:33:00] pulls their weight within the business. What you don't want in a business is freeloaders, right? That kind of, carry on. The coattails of others don't really put in any work, but because they're part of the corporate whole, they go unnoticed. That's the phenomenon that, that business psychologists talk about, social loafing. So it's really about kinda efficiency and bottom line and teamwork. Now we were thinking about this.

Concept as it applies to worship. And we think actually thinking through worship in this lens of community and joint action. Joint attention means that for, from, for churches, what we want is for churches to be places where social loathing can happen. Because when I gather to lead God's people in worship on a Sunday in front of me, I have a couple who've just got engaged.

I've got I've got. A single guy who's suffering from immense depression. I've got someone who's grieving somebody, they've, that's, that they've, that, that has just died. I've got someone who's a survivor of trauma. How could a single act hold together these [00:34:00] people? How could they all participate equally?

And I think actually seeing joint action as something which has. Is really broad and can bring in lots of different perspectives can make sense of this idea that the weakest within our communities can be carried by the prayers of the community. So when you turn up and you can't utter a word of the song that sings about how great God is because you're just, you feel terrible and your faith is at its lowest point.

Just by sitting there and being part of that community, you are participating in the act of praise. the, I think that psychological concept can provide a really like profound insight into, to what it means to participate in the life of worship and as someone that leads worship. I think that's it's a really helpful way to think actually, that we can't make one way of participating in liturgy.

Normative. We can't say that, that this, the person who stands at the front and puts their hands in the air and praises that is the right way to participate and everyone [00:35:00] else is doing it wrong.

Geoff Holsclaw: so that with the idea of shared attention and collaborative action I don't always have to feel the pressure of I believe every single word right now. I also don't have to feel the pressure of, I'm feeling every emotion that everyone else is feeling around me. Because that's not necessarily the primary goal.

The goal is that we're doing this together because we believe this is true and this is good for us and for humanity and the way of receiving salvation and continuing right. And not that the thoughts or the feelings are unimportant, but I think especially, I was writing while you were talking, I was just writing down like this really does strike against kind of our modern individualism, which, you know, we out here in America have definitely perfected and I think a lot of people go to church services with that kind of individualistic do I agree with what they're preaching here?

Or was I stimulated by this idea transfer? And then you also, as I'm part of more of a charismatic tradition. Or you get the kind of oh, did I feel the spirit [00:36:00] at work? Was I like, do I have the positive emotions or experiences to go along with that feeling? And it's very self-referential. And what you're trying to say is, actually we're sharing this we're attending to things together which is bigger than just my evaluation of thoughts or emotions.

It's bigger. And the goals are different. 'Cause it seems if we could incorporate worship. Because there's a crisis, at least in America, of people seeking the common good. People talk about oh, we need to work for the common good, but you don't really see it happening that much even.

And so I. It's because we have this lack of, I think sharing attention, of having collaborative goals, like it starts lower. And I think our corporate worship experiences, maybe they can help train us into that common goal, which is the common good, which is seeking God's kingdom. And that's that's more than just individuals.

Anyways, that's what I was thinking while you were talking

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah.

Geoff Holsclaw: Thank you. So we've gone over a little bit, but that's 'cause this has been so interesting. It's [00:37:00] so exciting. Just again, I've I personally, I've been at our previous church, I was the primary worship, musical worship leader, liturgist.

And so this combination of liturgy and formation has been. Part of my life's work for a long time, but since I've dove into attachment theory and neuroscience and the things we've been talking about, I haven't really had the time to go back and re-engineer this stuff. So I'm so glad that you've done all this work.

So now I don't have to, so I'm, I'll be waiting, I'll be waiting for when this book comes out. You're integrating all the kind of contemporary neuroscience as well as the liturgical practice. I'm super excited. 

Conclusion and Future Work

Geoff Holsclaw: Where can people, I don't know if you're like big online or, but where can people keep track of some of the work you're doing or some of the other things that you're a part of?

Joshua Cockayne: you can if you look at my website there's details of what's going on. I can send you the link, Geoff, to share out. And then if you're interested in the church planting stuff I can also share the link to the bead center and the work that we've been doing there.

The book is coming out with Baylor University Press. We, I don't have a firm date yet, but it should be later this year. Keep a lookout for [00:38:00] that.

Geoff Holsclaw: Excellent. Great. All those links will be in the show notes, but I'm really excited that we can make a connection. I hope we can collaborate and have a joint attention on some of these projects as we move forward.

Joshua Cockayne: Yeah. Yeah. Look forward to.

Geoff Holsclaw: Sure. Thank you.