Heartbeat of Leadership
by Jeff Faull
A newspaper article grabbed my attention while scanning the headlines this week. The caption for the Wall Street Journal read: “Storytelling Makes Hearts Beat As One.” Its subtitle went on to explain, “Research shows that listening to the same narrative leads our heart rates to rise and fall in unison.”
Of course, they were not the only publication to report this.
“Conscious processing of narrative stimuli synchronizes heart rate between individuals”
-Science Direct
“Stories and Music Can Synchronize the Heartbeats of Listeners into a Single Rhythm”
-NeuroScience News
“People synchronize heart rates while listening attentively to stories”
-Science Daily
Turns out that people who listen to a story at the same time start manifest identical heart rhythms. The more they concentrate on the same narrative the more their heartbeats sync.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Psychologist Susan Pinker:
The study found that subjects in the same group produced synchronized heart rate patterns that rose and fell at roughly the same times during the narrative. But if the subjects became distracted from the story by having to count backward, their hearts became desynchronized, and they remembered less of the story.
“It’s the story that drives the heart. There’s an explicit link between people’s heart rates and a narrative” says Lucas Parra, a professor of biomedical engineering at City College of New York and a senior author of the study. He referred to this concept as “ticking collectively.”
What a powerful reminder for elders, staff, and church leaders! With all the chaos and polarization in our culture, our churches, and sometimes even our elder teams, the thing that can pull our hearts together is the Gospel of Jesus and His story!
When the two on the road to Emmaus heard the whole story of Scripture from Jesus and His resurrection their hearts were “burning within” them (Luke 24:32).
The Christians at Colossae had their hearts “knit together in love” (Col. 2:2).
“May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance” (2 Thes. 3:5, NIV).
A continual laser focus on Jesus’ story is the key to the heart of fellowship and leadership.
Jesus is not a partial or one-dimensional story, not a hijacked story to create an agenda-driven narrative by secret cabal meetings; the story of Jesus as it unfolds in the Gospels, is lived out in Acts, and fleshed out in the rest of the New Testament is what will bring our hearts together, unified in Him.
When we are believing and declaring the same story, on the same page spiritually, and of the same mind, our hearts beat together as followers of Jesus and as leaders of His Church.
