Three Things Introverts Can Bring To The Church

Darren:                 So, let’s get straight to it: what do you think you could bring to this job?

Miranda:              Bring to it? Ooh, um, I think I could bring … some tea and cakes to it? Would it like that?

Miranda S1 E3, ‘Job’ (2009)

A very full church. You can bet some of these people are introverts.

A few months ago, I wrote a post called ‘Myers-Briggs and Morality’, in which I argued that the best use of a knowledge of one’s personality type is to enable one to act consciously in opposition to it when such action is called for by one’s commitment to obedience to God, and used the personal example of staying after a Sunday service for beverages and conversations despite the fact that my natural introversion baulks at the idea.¹ Indeed, there are plenty of situations in which introverts do well to lay aside our conversational preferences in order to be of help and encouragement to our fellow-believers, to such an extent that it sometimes seems as if our only option is to pretend to be extroverts as often as we can stand to.² I’m in the process of learning how to take on a more extroverted conversational role than I’m used to, in situations where it’s useful for me to do so, and I can’t deny it’s an incredibly useful skill to have – but I still firmly believe that introverts shouldn’t just do our best to phase ourselves out. Introversion and extroversion both have their pros and cons, and there are a few specific ways in which I think introverts are particularly well positioned to benefit the Church (that is to say, the whole body of believers in Christ, not any particular denominative branch of it, but probably more specifically the members of it we encounter on a regular basis).

Small disclaimer before we start: I’m not saying that extroverts are incapable of the following things, or that what extroverts have to offer is in any way inferior. Rather, this is intended as an encouragement to introverts that we do have things we can bring to the Church that don’t involve us behaving as much like extroverts as we possibly can.

1) We hate small talk.³

It’s the end of the church service. The last note of the last hymn has faded away, the presider has delivered the final blessing, and a gentle hubbub of conversation is germinating amongst the congregation as they gradually start to trickle towards wherever there are beverages and biscuits to be had. I sit quietly for a moment. That sermon blew my mind. Perhaps I’m fizzing with excitement, perhaps I’m on the verge of tears, but either way, that was some momentous truth that was just deposited in the depths of my soul. God is great. Christ is Lord. All else is just breath on a mirror and dust in the breeze.

And so I turn to whoever’s sitting next to me and we start talking about the weather.

I’m aware I’m painting the situation in very stark colours, but I don’t think it’s entirely unfair of me. Why do we throw away post-service conversations with our brothers and sisters in Christ on discussing the exact same mundanities we could discuss with anyone? Why do we waste the opportunity to collaboratively chew over what we just learned about our Creator and Redeemer while it’s fresh in our minds?

My dear fellow introverts, we hate small talk in any setting. It’s not that we don’t like talking – get us on a subject we care about and you’ll struggle to get us to shut up – but we always want to go deeper, more specific, more authentic. That can be of enormous value to our fellow-believers if we’re willing to make use of it. We can be the ones to take the conversational plunge – to ask the questions that matter, to be strikingly genuine with one another, to refuse to keep the utterly captivating topic that is our God out of the conversation. We were always more comfortable in the depths of discussing weighty matters than in the shallows of small talk anyway; why don’t we make the most of the fact?

2) We know ourselves well.

Introversion comes with the free gift of a remarkable ability to retreat totally into one’s own brain and tune out the world altogether. I have often unintentionally blanked people because I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to realise they were trying to catch my attention; on one memorable occasion, my schoolfriends stood at the other end of the library to where I sat reading, with the intention simply of collectively staring at me until I noticed them. In the end, I didn’t; someone else caught my attention from closer by (I think she poked me or something) and asked why that bunch of people over there had been staring at me for the past several minutes.

 

I used to spend a lot of time at school reading in the library. Our chairs were not as comfy as this one, though.

Introverts certainly aren’t all as dizzyingly oblivious as I have been known to be, but we do spend a lot of time in our own heads, because it’s primarily there that we process all the information with which the world, day in, day out, bombards us. This, just like any other personality trait, has its dangers: I count self-obsession and a lack of concern for others among the most pervasive of my habitual sins. But it also contains certain advantages. Introverts become very familiar with the workings of our own hearts and minds. Self-analysis comes easily to us. In short, we know what we’re like.

Now, that’s not to say we’re spared natural spiritual blindness and a total inability to discern our need for God without his Spirit’s work in our hearts: that’s something all humanity has in common.⁴ It does, however, mean that, once we have the Spirit’s help, we can be extraordinarily perceptive of our own sins, struggles, and spiritual victories. That has a couple of key implications for our fellow-believers. First, if we share what’s going on in our hearts with others, we might well help them to see their own hearts better too. And second, if we take what we see in ourselves seriously, and set about the process of killing our sin and putting on our new selves with due earnestness and determination, we’ll become better people, better disciples, better brothers and sisters to the rest of the Church. So let’s do it.

3) We have big hobbies.

‘Hobbies’ perhaps isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, actually, but bear with me and I’ll try to explain what I do mean. The point is, introverts can only stand to spend so much of our time around other people; we need regular periods of solitude to replenish our social energy or we just burn out. Now, I’m not advocating that we use that as an excuse for refusing others our time when they would benefit from it: we should be prepared to forgo our own maximum possible comfort for the sake of others, and I’m sure I could personally be making many more sacrifices on this front than I do currently. But equally, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that forcing ourselves to spend all our time in social situations even when we really don’t have the energy for it is really doing us or our acquaintances any good.

So we have our alone time. And we use it. Solitude lends itself to all kinds of learning and creativity, and introverts can pursue a project for hours on end. We read, we draw, we learn music, or we bake⁵ or we garden or we organise our stuff or we post on online forums or we sew things or we write. We invest a lot of ourselves in this kind of thing; that’s why ‘hobbies’ seemed rather too small a word. I’ll substitute ‘solitude projects’ for the rest of the post: it’s not an ideal term either, but at least you know what I mean.

Some careful direction of a solitude project is all that’s needed for it to be of benefit to one’s fellow-believers. Of course, some projects lend themselves to this purpose more palpably than others. Someone standing at the front of the church building leading the music group, or providing exciting edibles of some kind for a post-service lunch, is employing a solitude project in service of the Church in a very obvious way. Nevertheless, I’d suggest that almost any solitude project can be employed in the same way (unless the way you spend your time is in constructing elaborate schemes for murdering people or something). It doesn’t have to be that every single instance of engaging in that project leads to a tangible spiritual amelioration in someone else. For instance, it might be that, by spending time practising and improving a particular skill now, one can make better use of it later; or that an interest in a particular subject will later prove a good launchpad for a significant friendship with someone who shares that interest. I’m wary of listing too many examples in case you get the impression that I’m attempting to give something close to an exhaustive list: God can use our solitude projects in hundreds more ways than we could ever have conceived of ourselves.

And in the end, that’s the key thing. It’s not because introverts are introverts that we have something valuable to offer the Church, but because we’re children of God, disciples of Christ, dwelling-places of the Holy Spirit, and spiritual siblings to everyone else for whom the same is true. God can powerfully use each of us, with our own unique set of traits, skills, and experiences, to do wonderful things among his people. I’ve tried to outline some broad ways in which introverts might be particularly well enabled to edify our fellow-believers, but the first priority for all of us who want to do that has to be to value God more highly, to attune ourselves more closely to his will and ways, and so to become more like Christ and more able to behave as Christ towards our brothers and sisters in him – because that’s not exclusive either to extroverts or introverts, but is the opportunity and indeed the calling of all of us who seek to follow him.

Footnotes

¹ In the box on the right under ‘July’, should you feel at all inclined to read it. I’m pretty proud of that one, actually.

² Blimey Cow have produced some supremely accurate and relatable portraits of the perils of being an introvert in the modern world, including ‘Five Things Introverts Are Secretly Paranoid About’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlvHWx8LlLs, and ‘Four Things Introverts Think (But Never Say)’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwudkKF7I20.

³ I actually also wrote a post about how much I hate small talk, if that strikes your fancy at all; it’s under ‘2015’, then ‘November’ in the box on the right.

⁴ I would consider Mark 8 the classic passage on spiritual blindness: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+8&version=ESVUK. Focus especially on the second half and consider why the author has placed these stories together. I won’t give you anything more than that.

⁵ I myself am partial to a spot of baking, and if you are too then I’ll take this opportunity to recommend to you the following highly useful kitchen gadget: https://www.talacooking.com/search?searchterm=cooks%2Bmeasures&quicksearch-id-428=428&quicksearch-slug-428=%2Fcatalogue%2Fkitchen%2Fcakedecorating%2Ficing_accessories%2Ftala_dinosaur_cake_topper.htm&quicksearch-id-430=430&quicksearch-slug-430=%2Fcatalogue. Dear me, what a lengthy hyperlink.