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.

How Bad Can I Possibly Be?

“I meant no harm. I most truly did not.

But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.

I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.

I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads

Of the Thneeds I shipped out. I was shipping them forth

To the South! To the East! To the West! To the North!

I went right on biggering, selling more Thneeds.

And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.”

Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971)

 

The book was better. The book was always better.

The 2012 animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss classic poetical picture-book The Lorax was, in my view, a mistake. The Lorax is simply not of such a genre as to be successfully adaptable into a feature-length film: it’s too short for its events to constitute the entire plotline, but too downright good to be anything but worsened by their augmentation and expansion. Part of the brilliance of the book The Lorax is the very ambiguity of where it takes place and who these characters are: at no point, for instance, does the reader see the face of the Once-ler, despite the fact that he’s arguably the main character, nor are we given any real details about the identity of the boy whose trip to see the Once-ler represents the story’s framing device. These people could be anyone, anywhere, and that lends the ecological moral of the tale a great sense of universal applicability: if the characters are simply too anonymous to act as scapegoats onto which the blame for environmental problems might be shoved, then oneself, as the reader, is forced to acknowledge one’s own responsibility in this sphere. The film, by contrast, gives both these key characters, as well as a host of others, pretty specific identities and backstories. That whole element of inescapable accountability beyond the world of the story that made the book so effective is thus lost.

There is one part of the film, however, that I like very much indeed, namely the song ‘How Bad Can I Be?’, which is sung by the Once-ler during a montage of the growth of his Thneed business and the accompanying destruction of the Truffula forests (and their inhabitants) needed for Thneed manufacture, a section of the plot roughly equivalent to the few lines of the book I included in my opening quotation.¹ This is the song’s chorus:

How bad can I be?

I’m just doing what comes naturally.

How bad can I be?

I’m just following my destiny.

How bad can I be?

I’m just doing what comes naturally.

How bad can I be?

How bad can I possibly be?

The first verse consists of the Once-ler attempting to justify his wanton felling of countless Truffula trees using the biological principle of ‘survival of the fittest’, the second of him attempting to justify it using the economic principle of ‘money makes the world go round’. He then resumes the chorus in a variant form:

How bad can I be?

I’m just building the economy.

How bad can I be?

Just look at me petting this puppy.

How bad can I be?

A portion of proceeds goes to charity.

How bad can I be?

How bad can I possibly be?

This song is, I think, the point at which the film comes closest to its book counterpart in demanding moral self-scrutiny of its readers. The Once-ler is probably the protagonist and definitely a character with which the viewer is encouraged to empathise, yet at this point in the story, he firmly takes on a role as its villain – and so those lyrics are perhaps the best articulation of the human propensity for denial of our sinfulness that I have ever come across in a secular motion picture. It is so painfully obvious to the viewer that what the Once-ler is doing is horribly avaricious and self-seeking and uncompassionate and, in a word, wrong, but the Once-ler himself just throws out excuse after flimsy excuse for why his actions are perfectly acceptable, acknowledges no need for change, and goes on doing what he’s doing.

Surely all of us have tried the same trick before God. I think we often try a lot of the same excuses, actually.

How bad can I be? I’m just doing what comes naturally. That is to say, a proclivity to a particular sin exists in my fallen heart, and it’s easier to vindicate that as an element of my God-given personality than to seriously wage war against the sin in question.² I’ll give a personal example, just so this isn’t all in the abstract: I have very little natural talent for offering emotional support (of a kind that isn’t just trying to fix the problem at hand) to the distressed, and am far from comfortable doing so, a fact which I am often tempted to employ as a convenient get-out clause from the Bible’s exhortation to weep with those who weep and so forth.³

How bad can I be? I’m just following my destiny. That is to say, an opportunity has arisen for me to do something I want to do, and it’s easier to assume that God is ‘opening a door’ for me than to acknowledge that pursuing said opportunity entails sinning. Personal example: I have, as yet, never done very badly on any piece of assessed work at university level. The circumstances are practically begging me to ground at least some corner of my identity and security in academic success instead of in Christ and, far too often, that’s exactly what I do.

How bad can I be? I’m just building the economy. That is to say, my indulging in a particular sin would appear ostensibly to be having beneficial effects on others, and it’s easier to pretend that the ends justify the means than to give up the sin and the benefit together. Personal example: I have, after more than one church service, been complimented on my singing voice, or told that hearing me sing has been encouraging in some measure, affording me a handy pretext for concentrating more on how I sound when I’m singing a worship song than the one I’m actually supposed to be worshipping. The edification of my fellow-believers is the ostensible benefit, my loathsome pride and self-obsession the sin it conceals.

How bad can I be? A portion of proceeds goes to charity. That is to say, I would seem to be doing pretty well at living for Jesus in other areas of my life, and it’s easier to kid myself that it’s possible to use godliness in some areas to offset sinfulness in others than to commit my whole self to becoming more holy. Personal example: by the grace of God, I’ve got a lot better of late at steering my mind clear of wilful sexual fantasy, but that means I’ll often compensate myself by indulging in other kinds of fantasies that, though they might seem more innocuous, are actually just as rooted in sin. Mainly they involve me being really impressive and other people being really impressed – pride again.

And if I thought the Once-ler was unconvincing when he came up with this stuff, how much more so am I! How bad can I be? Immeasurably. And I think-

Um, excuse me, could I say something?

Sorry, who are you?

Oh, sorry, I thought you’d recognise me; I’m the Imaginary Interlocutor. I live in the bit of your head where we manufacture counterarguments against and criticisms of everything you write. I’ve been in quite a few of your blog posts, actually.

Really? I’m terribly sorry, I don’t remember.

Well, thinking about it, I suppose you wouldn’t. I’m not normally very ostentatious, you know; I’m quite content to leave no more trace than an outline of a foil for your argument, a hypothetical question, perhaps an objection placed in the mouth of your reader. I don’t like to make a habit of speaking directly. It can be a tad confusing, and gives off the unfortunate impression that you spend most of your time refuting imaginary theological arguments in your head.

Well, I do spend quite a lot of time refuting imaginary theological arguments in my head.

Granted.

What was it you wanted to say?

Well, it’s just that … you’re talking about sin again. I mean, again. You do realise you talk about sin an awful lot on this blog? I mean, I get that it’s important and all, but the constant, unrelenting repetition of the whole ‘identify-and-express-suitable-shame-over-particular-sin-then-make-some-overwhelmingly-inadequate-statement-about-the-brilliance-of-the-cross’ thing-

The whole ‘repent-and-believe’ thing, you mean?

Whatever, you say tomato. The point is, it’s getting a bit dull. Would it kill you to change the record?

Um, yes, quite possibly it actually would.

I don’t follow.

Can we go back to the Once-ler and ‘How Bad Can I Be?’?

*Sigh.* If we must.

Thank you kindly. Here’s the thing: we’ve established that the Once-ler is totally unconvincing when he tries to pass himself off as a decent enough chap. To the viewer, it’s obvious that he’s basically a total scumbag. But the Once-ler himself is completely blind to the fact: how bad can I possibly be? And it’s the fact that he’s persuaded himself that he’s not that bad that removes any obstacle there might have been to him getting worse and worse and worse. It’s the fact that he won’t acknowledge any problem that prevents him from accepting any solution.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1 John 1:8-9⁴

The reason I can’t let myself shut up about my sin is because if I do, I’ll start to deceive myself. I’ll drift into forgetting that it’s a problem – the biggest problem, in fact, in all existence – and that I need a solution of similarly titanic proportions. Slowly, I’ll forget that I need Jesus’ sacrifice on my behalf, that I need it desperately, more than I need the blood in my veins and the oxygen in my lungs. Without the righteousness given me in Christ, I can have no place in God’s kingdom, no place in the immortal order. And that, my dear Imaginary Interlocutor, is what real death is. So yes, it might very well kill me to change the record.

But, magnificently, if I acknowledge my sin before God, he is faithful and just to recognise it as already paid for by my Lord and Saviour’s death in my place. That’s a promise, that he will never lay any of my wrongdoing to my charge, provided I acknowledge that only in Christ – and not possibly by any activity of my own, since my natural self exists in helpless slavery to sin – is it atoned for.

That means not alleging pathetic excuses for my sin – just doing what comes naturally, just following my destiny and so forth. It means calling my sin what it is and knowing that I stand no chance of dealing with it by myself, but that, mercifully, Jesus has already dealt with it all. It means remembering that every day, lest I end up like the Once-ler, oblivious to my own wrongdoing even as I stand surrounded by the smouldering ruins of beautiful things that are its result.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

But,

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. – Psalm 32:1-2 (emphasis mine, obviously)⁵

Does that satisfy you, my dear Imaginary Interlocutor?

Of course not. You must remember that I pretty much exist for nothing other than to provide counterarguments against everything you have to say.

That is a pity. Ah well, it was worth a try.

In conclusion: how bad can I be? Immeasurably. Grossly. You don’t even want to know. But never to such an extent that the most mind-boggling act of unmerited mercy in the whole of history, my Saviour’s death on my behalf, can’t handle it.

So does that mean-

Shush. This post has gone on long enough as things are.

But does it mean-

No. Romans 6. Can we please take this argument back into my head and stop bothering my charming readers with it?

Footnotes

¹ Do take the opportunity to familiarise yourself with the song before reading further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYmrPn1CnzY. First off, it’ll probably be quite useful for understanding what the heck I’m on about, and second, it’s a really fun song.

² On this point, you might also like to check out my post ‘Myers-Briggs and Morality’, under ‘July’ in the box on the right.

³ See Romans 12:15 for that particular exhortation.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+1&version=ESVUK. Go on, it’s only short.

⁵ I’d probably call this one a favourite: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+32&version=ESVUK.