Introverts In An Orthodox Parish
Introversion was a gift created by God; Orthodoxy honours that gift.
Sometimes I reflect on my Evangelical childhood. There was one Nondenominational church I attended from ages 9 to 15, and another one I attended from ages 15 to 18. Both of them followed a worship pattern of one part music, one part Bible sermon, with prayer. For the first three or so years, I was in elementary school. The worship leader then was simply one guy, a loud, enthusiastic, outgoing guy, singing what could be called “worship karaoke” while we his audience sang along, probably rather unsure of what we were supposed to be doing.
In middle school, we were a little older and a little edgier, or so we thought, and the worship karaoke was replaced by four or five people in a full-on rock band: guitars, bass and drums, playing music in the style of then-popular contemporary Christian bands like Third Day or Switchfoot. This style continued in high school. I remember it was quite loud, and we the laity (a word that these churches, with their contempt for religious tradition, wouldn’t ever use) were encouraged, possibly even expected, to visibly respond to the music, to get excited and emotional, to shout cheers, sing along to the lyrics, put our hands up in reverence, or even to jump up and down. We didn’t start a mosh pit, although given the “anything goes, as long as I want it” mentality of Protestantism, we easily could have. Regardless, it would have seemed quite out of place if someone’s visible reaction to the worship band was to merely observe them while remaining silent and still, and I can easily imagine the church’s leaders looking at that person and wondering if they were feeling okay, or if something was wrong with them.
God created me as a quiet bookworm who loved ideas, but I never felt encouraged to bring this aspect of myself into the Evangelical churches of my high school days. Unless my peers had approached me outside of church, they’d never know that I’d been studying Christian apologetics, or that I was fascinated by Thoreau’s Walden and Three Kingdoms-era China. Later, I also came to disavow the Church’s attempts at wooing us children with so much entertainment, especially entertainment that was squarely second-rate compared with what could be found in the secular world.
By the time I entered university, I’d stopped attending church altogether. I simply didn’t love the Evangelical way enough to continue, though I was still trying out different fellowships every once in a while. It was at university that a street preacher stopped me in public and asked me if I believed in God, and if I did, why. Bold move. Boldness is God’s gift to the Extrovert.
At the time, I’d been into Thomas Aquinas and his logic, so I’d started explaining aspects of the Quinque Viae, to him, the Five Proofs of God’s Existence. At a certain point, I remember he cut me off and blurted out: “I’m not talking about intellectual reasons, I’m asking if you’ve surrendered your heart to the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Somewhere in time, my lack of fondness for Evangelicalism started transforming into a frank desire to depart from the movement altogether. If I could pinpoint the moment where that happened, this was the most likely candidate. If Mr. Street Preacher wasn’t going to consider the intellectual ways of knowing God to be valid, then what good would attending his idea of “church” do for me? I’d started wondering why the path of the scholar, which God seemed to give me some aptitude for, was emphasized so little in our high school youth groups. Now I had at least one indicator that some of this absence was because of church members who opposed that path.
A quieter church
I’d started reading about Orthodoxy at university, and I liked what I read enough to attend an Orthodox parish. When I entered the church building for the first time, something small but profound inside me was telling me that this was where I should have been all along, from infancy onward. It was where I should have grown up.
The mood of the parish was not one of shallow entertainment, but of reverence and repentance. The priest would recite the prayers of the Divine Liturgy Of Saint John Chrysostom, and the choir would respond to the priest’s prayers, or with their own hymns. The laity, though they lit candles, venerated icons and made the Sign Of The Cross, mostly listened attentively to the praying, some of them singing the responses in tandem with the choir. The volume of the parish was mostly on the quiet side, punctuated with louder crescendos when appropriate.
Two aspects to comment further on: first, superior listening ability, which this new Orthodox laity demonstrated, is well-known to be a characteristic of Introverts generally. Second, a study published in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology in the 1980s found that there was a 17-decibel gap in the noise levels preferred by Introverts and Extroverts (Introverts at 55 decibels, Extroverts at 72), and the closer the noise level was to their ideal, the quicker each group managed to learn the rules of a game.1 The worship rock band when we were in high school I’d estimate in the 80 to 90 decibel range. If being in an environment that’s too loud can hinder an Introvert’s ability to succeed at a game, could it also hinder one’s spiritual growth, or even one’s willingness to try? It certainly hurt my willingness, and yet I’d found the answer.
The first parish I attended was under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Of Russia (ROCOR) and many parishioners were Slavic nationals who’d immigrated to America. Compared with my current Orthodox Church Of America parish, where almost all members are American born, the ROCOR parish seemed Introvert-dominant, while the OCA parish is Ambiverted: still far friendlier to Introverts than some of the Evangelical churches I’d been to, but adopting some of Extroverted America’s better aspects to make the Faith more accessible to the New World without betraying it.
[As an aside: There is also no part of the Eastern Orthodox Liturgy where the priest tells the laity to “meet and shake hands with the person next to them”, a move common in Evangelical churches that many Introverts find awkward and uncomfortable.]
A style of leadership
I remember numerous Evangelical pastors from childhood. I would describe most of them as having a knack for salesmanship, gifted as public speakers, energized by the spotlight, knowledgeable about how to appeal to their audience’s emotions, lively and prone to playing the clown so you’d like them better. Most were Sanguines, in the Four Classical Temperaments. There was one boy, a year younger than me, who I perceived as someone the church would groom or cultivate to be a leader. I wasn’t even slightly surprised when he told me that he’d tested as 100% Extroverted on a Myers-Briggs Test.
These pastors were not generally intellectuals. They were not the sort of people who’d read Saint Ireneaus’ Against Heresies or people who compiled Extra-Scriptural proofs that the Exodus was a real event, a la Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision. There was one Evangelical pastor I knew in college who had the Introverted Intellectual temperament, with a philosophical and evidential style of ministering, but he spoke to small, intimate groups of about two dozen people on average. 2 Exceptions do not disprove rules.
Adam McHugh, an Evangelical who served as a hospital chaplain, authored the book Introverts In The Church (2009). He points out two additional aspects of how the Evangelical pastorship puts Introverts at a disadvantage: the rise of the Megachurches, where leadership depends on standing in front of thousands of people without losing one’s nerve or becoming overstimulated, and the length of a sermon. Sermons in Orthodox parishes are rarely longer than 10 minutes, I’ve noticed, because so much of the Divine Liturgy is composed of the prayers of the congregation. Sermons in Evangelical parishes can be 4 times as long, and at this great length, the need to be a performer becomes more important, as is the need to rely less on purely written texts.
McHugh had a friend who served on his Evangelical church’s pastoral nominating committee, whose motto might as well have been: “If your personality starts with I, you need not apply.” 3
The priesthood in Orthodox parishes, I’ve noticed, leans Introverted, but is far more hospitable to Extroverts than Evangelical leadership is to Introverts. (My own parish priest, a man I’m most fond of, leans Extroverted) It is debatable to what extent the requirement of a Masters in Divinity degree has resulted in a somewhat Introverted clergy, but the clergy I’ve known certainly harken back to the earlier centuries when the churchman was the most knowledgeable man in town.
Aside from the less Extroverted liturgical style, Orthodoxy never abandoned the Sacrament Of Confession in the manner that Protestants did. When a parishioner confesses their sins in an Orthodox Church, it’s usually conducted in the manner of a one-on-one conversation, in the periphery of the Church, where the priest has to listen very carefully to what sins his parishioner is confessing. The priest must then be knowledgeable enough to know precisely which spiritual medicine to prescribe for the parishioner for the healing of their soul and body. Showmanship and salesmanship counts for precisely nothing in this particular Sacrament, but the gifts of the Introvert definitely count.
The Jesus Prayer and the value of silence
In America, there’s a lot of advice given to Introverts about “how to be more Extroverted”. Some of it is genuinely of benefit. However, given the United States’ biases towards Extroversion, there’s a distinct lack of advice given to Extroverts about how to be more Introverted, or how this could make someone a better person. The Orthodox Church can help in this regard. The Church has kept a well-defined tradition declaring that silence, the domain of the Introvert, has a holy, sacred aspect to it that must be used in our journey towards union with our Creator.
The website Orthodox Christianity 101 describes Silence “not merely an empty space but a profound medium through which [we] can listen to God’s whisper.” Silence is “a vessel for spiritual encounters that couldn’t possibly happen amid the noise of daily living…My experience affirms that when I mute the world’s clamor, I can better hear the subtle tones of God’s voice. It’s not an audible voice, but an inner knowing that permeates my being, offering guidance and comfort.”4 So how do we access this silence?
In Chapter 18 of Luke’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus Christ speaks about the Prayer of the Publican: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” The Orthodox Church knows this as the Jesus Prayer, and encourages its faithful to keep this prayer in their heart at all times, and to recite it daily in a quiet place where we won’t be disturbed. The guide says: “The repetitive nature of this prayer is meant to quiet the mind and heart, allowing for a profound communion with God that transcends words…At the very core, silence allows me to confront my own inner chaos and to quiet it, making room for God to enter.”5
Becoming Orthodox allows Introverts to use their style and preference to know God, and to share this technique with the more Extroverted, leading them out of the clutter of this world, and into something transcendent. This silence need not be practiced in solitude either; the guide notes we shouldn’t overlook “communal aspect of silence in Orthodoxy…when I join others in silence during corporate worship or contemplative retreats, there’s a palpable sense of unity. This shared silence binds us, not only to each other but to the divine. It is as if we are collectively embracing a sacred space where the Holy Spirit moves freely among us.”6
Playing On Friendly Turf
American Christianity has a personality problem, and many people are aware of it. We see this awareness in the subtitles of various Evangelical books: Adam McHugh subtitled his book: “Finding Our Way In An Extroverted Culture”. There’s also Mark Tanner’s The Introvert Charismatic: The Gift Of Introversion In A Noisy Church. Marti Olsen Laney’s The Introvert Advantage followed the same pattern when she subtitled it: How To Thrive In An Extrovert World. All these books suffer from the misconception that Introverts won’t ever have a home field advantage, that we’ll always need to play on the Extrovert’s turf. The personality problem isn’t that Introverts, Intellectuals, etc. need to “find a place for themselves” in the Evangelical movement. The personality problem, as the previous article: “The Evangelical Mind And Its Discontents” demonstrates, is that the Evangelical movement’s builders and administrators have a specific style of Christianity in mind that they want to foster and perpetuate, a style built with the preferences of Low-Church, Emotionally Enthusiastic, Non-Intellectual Extroverts in mind, a style that is often, by admission, fueled by wounded pride towards the talents of the Introvert, and a conscious desire to exclude them.
This could theoretically be overcome if Introverts rose to the leadership of Evangelicalism and changed their movement’s methods directly and forcefully, but most Evangelicals, I’d assume, are happy with the faith life they currently have, don’t really see a need for radical change, and would be at the very least confused by the abrupt changes happening all at once. And when you have, as Adam McHugh documented, instances of American congregations making a person’s Extroversion a pre-requisite for his appointment as pastor, the path to the top for the Introvert becomes so steep as to be untraversable.
Holy Orthodoxy is not “an Extrovert’s World”, “an Extroverted Culture”, or “a Noisy Church”. It is precisely what’d you expect to find if we take seriously the notion that our Introversion and our Extroversion are both gifts from God, given to us for our salvation and theosis, and for His Kingdom, and sought a Church that incorporated this Truth. Introverts don’t need to “find their way” in Orthodoxy or “struggle with their personality” because God has given them the way. Nowhere in the Church’s life, whether past or present, were things arranged so that Introversion would ever be seen as a liability or inferiority. For the Introvert, conversion to Orthodoxy is the path of least resistance, temperamentally speaking.
Comparing Introverts With Males
It’s fitting here to mention another marginalized group:
Two authors, Leon Podles in The Church Impotent (1999) and David Murrow in Why Men Hate Going To Church (2005) both pointed out that the laity in many modern Western churches is disproportionately female. Given that the human population is essentially 50% female and 50% male, a well-built church should see the sexes arrive at church in equal numbers. As of the 1990s, Dr. Podles found: Men still run most churches, but in the pews women outnumber men in all countries of Western civilization, in Europe, in the Americas, in Australia. Nor is the absence of males of recent origin. Cotton Mather puzzled over the absence of men from New England churches, and medieval preachers claimed women practiced their religion far more than men did.7
Podles makes sure to mention that this phenomenon does not exist in the Orthodox world: A friend of mine stayed for several weeks in an Italian town, and he and his wife attended daily [Roman Catholic] mass. He was the only man in the church apart from the priest, and his presence was so unusual…after he crossed the Aegean to Greece, he was startled by the difference in the Orthodox churches. If anything, there were more men than women; the men also led the singing and filled the churches with the deep resonance of their voices. The only time Americans will hear anything like this is if they attend a concert by a touring Russian Orthodox choir.8
Podles’ comment would inspire Presbytera Frederica Mathewes-Green to email about 100 Orthodox men, most of them converts, to ask them what they loved about the Church: “Challenging”, “Goal Oriented”, “not emotionally manipulative”, “gives duties to perform", “possibly dangerous” were some of the things listed; their complete answers can be read here. I highlight the case of men firstly because it illustrates firstly, how a problem that seems so widespread in one area of the world (“The Male Problem”/“The Introvert Problem”) might not exist at all in another part, and how in the case of the Male Problem, the issues went away as the men learned about and adjusted to life in the Orthodox Church. The Monadnock Review’s belief is that the problem of Introverts in the Church will be solved in the same manner.
A potential sequel to this article will discuss Monasticism in the Orthodox Church, a topic too vast to include here, requiring special attention and an article or two all to itself.
Russell G. Geen, “Preferred Stimulation Levels In Introverts And Extroverts: Effects On Arousal And Performance.”. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology. 46, No. 6 (1984), 1303-1312.
This pastor today is an Orthodox layperson. His final act as the pastor of a Church Of Christ was to tell everyone he was becoming Orthodox.
McHugh, Adam. (2009). Introverts In The Church: Finding Our Way In An Extroverted Culture. Lisle, Illinois. InterVarsity Press. Pages 26 to 28.
Orthodox Christianity 101. “Embracing Silence In Orthodoxy: The Soul’s Deep Connection.” March 31, 2024. (https://www.orthodoxchristianity101.com/post/embracing-silence-in-orthodoxy-the-souls-deep-connection). Retrieved August 23, 2024.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Podles, Leon. (1999). The Church Impotent: The Feminization Of Christianity. Dallas, Texas. Spence Publishing Company. Page 12.
Ibid, Pages 15-16.
I appreciate your summary of your experiences and the literature about this. Good stuff! I look forward to the next installment!
Coming from you Steve, that means alot. Glad you liked it.