The lightbulb went off for me the first time I visited Adam McHugh’s blog Introverted Church. I’d never seen those words side-by-side before, and all I could think was of course. I’d never seen anyone discuss the contemporary church from this perspective, which is surprising, given my MBTI fascination! I’ve been following McHugh’s blog ever since that first serendipitous discovery, and I’ve just finished his excellent book Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture, in which he explores the subject in more detail.

McHugh discusses how many of our churches today–especially mainstream evangelical ones–have an extroverted bias, highly valuing attention-getting extroverted traits such as sociability, passion, and openness in sharing personal stories. This bias flavors the tone of church gatherings as well, which are often talkative and informal. I’d never pondered the personality of my church before, but McHugh’s description rang true.  This shouldn’t be surprising, because I attend an evangelical megachurch.

I’m an introvert, and I nodded and laughed in recognition as I read McHugh’s descriptions of introvert behavior. I recognized the coping strategies I’ve been honing for years, like never entering the sanctuary more than 3 minutes before the service starts so I miss the loud buzz of pre-service chatter, or sitting in one particular section so that my attention won’t stray to what’s happening on the periphery.

There’s another problem with a church that adopts the extroverted bias of the culture: it tends to hold up extroverted qualities as the spiritual ideal. The mature Christian is portrayed as one whose faithfulness is evidenced by sharing the deep dark secrets of their heart in front of 9,000 people on the weekends, and sharing the gospel with their bank teller on weekdays.

These are wonderful things, but this is an incomplete version of the Christian life. God made extroverts and introverts, and the church needs both to be complete. McHugh explains what introverts bring to the table (like for starters, we’re really good listeners), and why the church needs their presence to be whole.

I enthusiastically recommend Introverts in the Church to all personality types: to the introverts, who may feel inferior or misunderstood in a culture that values extroversion, and to the extroverts, who will benefit from learning more about life on the other side of the personality divide.

As a parent, I do wish McHugh had tackled the subject of introverted children in the church. I have 4 children under age 9. Several are introverted; I believe one to be an orchid child. So what does a parent of introverted children do when faced with an extroverted children’s ministry?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I do have some thoughts, which I’ll share later this week. (In the meantime, go check out introverted parenting week over at Introverted Church.)

What are your thoughts? Does this concept ring true to you? Do you think your church has a personality bias? 

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When my baby got ahold of my  Kindle Touch and managed to purchase Jen Hatmaker’s new book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess for me, I decided to take it as a divine nudge instead of a $9 mistake.

It was a good call.

7 is Hatmaker’s story of trying to break free from our collective me-first mindset by fasting from the things in our culture–and in her own life–that she saw as being “too much.” She identified 7 areas of blatant excess–food, clothes, possessions, media, waste, spending, stress–and she set about intentionally fasting from these things, devoting one month to each:

Seven months, seven areas, reduced to seven simple choices. I’m embarking on a journey of less. It’s time to purge the junk and pare down to what is necessary. Seven will be an exercise in simplicity with one goal: to create space for the Kingdom of God to break through.

I think I live a pretty simple life: I’m not that into material things, I’m not too stressed out, I only own 10 pairs of shoes. We have 4 kids and we’re still in our little starter house. We have one bathroom. Our life is not “excessive”–not by suburban American standards. And that’s Hatmaker’s point: we’ve become accustomed to the excess.

Hatmaker says she wrote this book like a diary, or a blog. She recorded each month of her experiment in real time, as she lived it. “To discover what matters to you,” she says, “take it away and see where the chips actually fall.” In 7, we’re watching those chips fall in real time. Many observations made me laugh out loud; some made me wince. Like this one:

We are far from Jesus’ original vision; the whole enterprise would be unrecognizable to our early church fathers. The earth is groaning, and we’re putting coffee bars in our thirty-five-million-dollar sanctuaries. Just because we can have it doesn’t mean we should. I marvel at how out of place simple, humble Jesus would be in today’s American churches.

Ouch.

Now might be a good time to mention that for the past 5 years, my husband has worked for our city’s largest megachurch. He runs the network of coffee shops at the main campus and its satellite locations.

Sooooo…you can see why there was plenty in this book to make me uncomfortable, right? But it’s a good kind of discomfort, I think.

Hatmaker says a key reason she embarked on her 7 project was to prepare for her future. She’s 35, her kids are still young and moldable, the bulk of her ministry is before her. She wants to be ready.

This. is. me.

I’ve told you how 2011 felt like a year of preparation, a year of clearing the runway.  I am expectantly looking towards the future, and I want to be ready for what’s in store. I’ve been scanning the horizon of my life to see what’s holding me back, to see how I’m still holding myself back with misplaced priorities and wasted energy. And when Jen Hatmaker says she’s breaking free of the excess in her life to prepare for a fruitful future, I am paying attention.

7 is a book about repentance, but it’s also enormously hopeful. Hatmaker says that “we’re so conditioned to being the problem that we’ve forgotten that we are actually the answer,” and that there is hope for us yet:

A stirring is happening within the Bride. God is awakening the church from her slumber, initiating a profound advancement of the kingdom. Please, don’t miss it because the American Dream seems a reasonable substitute.

Reading 7 was a little uncomfortable, a little chastening. But watching somebody else shake lose of their stuff is inspiring. It makes me want to keep going, searching out the things in my own life that are holding me back and dealing with them. It makes me expectant. It helps me loosen my grip a little more on my own stuff, so I can be the blessing to another.

I’m hopeful for my family, and I remain hopeful for the church.

Hatmaker concludes by saying, “We know something new is coming; we recognize the winds of change…”

Yeah, you and me both, sister.

Have you read 7, or anything else by Jen Hatmaker? Share your thoughts in comments.

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This post is a follow-up to My Kids Don’t Interfere With My Real Life; Motherhood Is My Real Life.  If you missed that post, you can read it here.

Back when my cranky firstborn was little, I was overwhelmed by the non-stop tasks of mothering. I hardly had a moment to spare, between nursing him for endless hours, walking for miles with him nestled in the baby sling, and pacing the floor patting his back during what was supposed to be nap time.

Little changed that first year.  Our baby grew older, but he was persistently cranky and sleep-deprived. We finally put together a team of therapists to tackle the issue (which turned out to be sensory processing disorder), including a family therapist.

I unleashed on our therapist one afternoon at our dining room table. I was frustrated, putting all my ambitions aside so that I could calm a crying baby for 16 hours a day and nurse him the other 8.  My old self had loved to dream and scheme and hope and plan about the Big Ideas–usually about faith, God and the church–and instead I was walking miles and miles with the baby sling, reading in the rocking chair, and playing Thomas trains on the floor all day.

“Would you rather be doing that now?”

“No, I want to be my baby’s mother.  But I hate the feeling that I’ve given all that up forever.” 

“Are you saying you feel like you’ll never be able to pursue those dreams? Because babies don’t stay babies for long.  You’ll have time to follow those dreams, if you want to.”

And he patiently explained to me that yes, I’d become a mother–and I’d always be one–and that was a good thing.  And yet I was still the same person I’d always been, with my own interests and ideas and ideals and it was important to not give that up because I had a baby. He encouraged me to stay engaged in the topics that fired me up, and to leave the door open to pursuing these things more fully one day in the future.

Those words were a gift. 

They gave me the desire to be fully present in each stage of my parenting journey, knowing that babies grow and women do, too, and that nothing stays the same for long.

They gave me the freedom to pursue God with all of my being, and not just the parts that nurse tinies and change diapers, read bedtime stories and play Thomas trains on the floor.

They kept me from looking to my kids as my only source of “career” fulfillment, which is a recipe for disaster.

I am so thankful to be a mother, and its an important part of who I am.  But motherhood isn’t my whole life.

And that’s the way it should be. 

photo credit

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Nine years ago I had a baby–my first.  I was young and clueless, had precious little experience with newborns, and barely knew what to do with this newly arrived 7-pound-bundle of love, who was breathtaking and beautiful and who cried all the time.

Nothing I had heard or read about motherhood had prepared me for the utter helplessness I felt when I couldn’t make my own child happy.  He would nurse, or cry–those were the two options.  Some sleep would have been a welcome addition to the mix, but those restful times were rare, and short-lived.

Slowly, my baby and I found our way.  I didn’t know anyone who’d had a cranky baby, so I read everything I could get my hands on about high-needs babies.  I found myself a baby sling and mastered the art of swaying my son through 3 planes of motion.  We headed outside and walked for miles, leaving the stroller at home.  I didn’t have a “happy baby” but we started enjoying more and more happy moments.

I loved the happy moments, but I felt like I’d lost control over my life.  I had things I needed to get done, and my cranky baby was constantly getting in the way.  My temper would flare whenever my plans for the day were thwarted by my baby, which was pretty much all the time.

The turning point came when I realized that was no way to view my baby–as an obstacle to my Real Life.  Mothering was now my real life. 

My temper is much slower to flare now than it was all those years ago (thanks to practice, practice, practice), but I still find myself getting snippy when my kids’ needs are interfering with my to-do list.   If I’m having a perceptive day, I can recognize my mistake for what it is:  I’ve made my agenda more important than my kids.  I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking my children are interfering with my Real Life.

But it’s not true.  Mothering is my Real Life.  And it’s a much better life, for all of us, when I embrace it.   

I’m sharing this post at Sarah Bessey’s Practices of Parenting Carnival.  Head on over to read more!

photo credit: peasap

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I love a good conversion story.  My neighbor told me hers one chilly October afternoon, while we huddled on her front porch and watched our kids scoop the dirt with miniature shovels.

I’m slow to recognize patterns, but I’d realized that routines had shifted at her house; her husband’s truck hadn’t been parked in the drive in ages.  But I hadn’t heard anything straight from the source yet.

That October day she told me how late one night–just a few months before–she’d rushed her daughter off to bed and fled to the kitchen–the furthest room in the small house from where her little girl slept.  It had only just dawned on her that her husband was cheating on her, but he didn’t yet know she knew.  So she put on her favorite Sara Groves album–a gift from a friend–and sat down on the cold tile and cried.

The album was Past the Wishing, and the 7th track is Awakening:

…I’ve known for quite a while that I am not whole
I’ve remembered the body and the mind, but dissected the soul
Now something inside is awakening
Like a dream I once had and forgot
And it’s something I’m scared of and something I don’t want to stop…

And as Sara Groves sang, she felt Jesus come into the kitchen and sit down beside her on the kitchen floor and she just knew.  Her marriage sucked and her life was a mess but God loved her and he was asking her to follow him.

My neighbor was afraid I’d think she was crazy.  Of course I didn’t.  I’d been there, too.

I listened to her sadly joyful story and thought this is what it’s all about–God entering the wrecks of our broken lives and meeting us there on the cold kitchen floor–and instantly felt embarrassed about the faith questions I had been wrestling with of late:  helping my introverted kids cope with children’s ministry, finding my place in the church as a woman of God, staying focused on Jesus throughout the day and not just at 6:00 a.m.  These struggles seemed so small compared to my neighbor’s finding God on the kitchen floor.

Later that night, after I’d put my own kids to bed, I turned on Awakening in honor of my neighbor.

The divorce wasn’t final; she was still fighting it, but she’d probably lose.  I wondered what she was going to do next.

Next.

And it hit me:  there is a time for crying on the kitchen floor, waiting for God to come sit with us on the cold tile. But there is a time when we have to get up off the floor, and move on out of the kitchen, and figure out where to go next.

Those questions I’d been wrestling with–the ones that seemed so insignificant a few hours before–I knew they had to be explored.  I’ve done my time on the kitchen floor, but now I’m moving forward–expectantly–to figure out where to go from here.

This is my space to do it.

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photo credit: magro_kr