Is Your Church Extroverted?

Children at a Gospel presentation
Children at a Gospel presentation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was alerted to this blog containing an infographic on The Extroverted Church (reproduced below with permission). It’s an interesting piece and worth pondering about. It connects with a chat I had recently with a student who voiced her discomfort at sharing her faith. And what she means by sharing her faith is the “going up to strangers and telling them about Jesus type” of sharing. It was not quite her comfort zone. I reminded her that there are more than one way to evangelize, so to speak, and that every one needs to break out of their comfort zones in one form or another. For extroverts who naturally enjoys talking to people, even strangers, and for whom the gift of the gab might come easily for them, this form of evangelism might actually be their comfort zone, and requires little effort. Maybe they need to be challenged to more introspective activities?

This infographic suggests that North American evangelicalism tends to be dominated by an extroverted ethos, which makes introverts a little uncomfortable. I suspect it used to be the reverse in ages past, in the days of the stoic and rigid worship styles of most mainline churches. The sentence that jumps out at me is this: “The evangelical culture ties together faithfulness with extroversion.” This is another example of why I hate the cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all approach to Christian spirituality. I have written about that before here.

But take a look for yourself and let me know what you think: is your church extroverted? Are you an extrovert yourself? Or are you an introvert? Do you see this as a problem? Or are we making too much out of nothing?

The Extroverted Church
Source: Christian Degrees

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