An INTP on the Mission Field: INTP Tips for Ministry Part 1

Well I haven't done an INTP-specific update in a while, so this should be fun.

For the next few posts I want to talk about some things I've learned as an INTP on the mission field. The lessons will apply more or less to anyone else too, of course, but if I seem to be really emphasizing things you don't feel are important, or skipping past things that seem vital, that would be why.

I do this partially because I've come to realize that there isn't a lot of material out there directed towards INTPs in ministry. Perhaps it's not a huge demographic; we're very much not people-people. As Quiet author Susan Cain pointed out, in modern churches we are often passed over for church ministry in favor of those with more enthusiastic temperaments.

It must be mentioned, however, that the problem is not necessarily a wave of INTP volunteers being turned down. We are not the most assertive bunch, and are all too likely to analyze the problems we can observe in a system (that system possibly being our local church) without having the social confidence or desire to work through a messy, people-oriented solution, which is typically the only available route to take in a local church context.

So I want to provide some tools or suggestions for INTPs who are interested in ministry, with hopes that a feeling of mental preparation will be conducive to some boldness in volunteering for the exhausting but Christ-mandated task of loving and serving God and people in this world, and even all the unreasonable people in it, which of course includes ourselves as well, if we're honest.

Where I Serve:
With regards to my own experience over the past 18 months, as an INTP doing full-time cross-cultural ministry, I feel very blessed in that Taiwan is not the hardest place to be an INTP.

1.  It's a place you can actually "be" in your field. Yes you will be a lifelong guest, no you will never "fit in," unless you are ethnically Chinese and successfully embrace a local identity, but at least you can actually establish a life here. Some career missionaries choose to retire here, for example, which would be more or less impossible in a lot of missions focus areas. It's not the same as those fields that require living on a compound and taking little trips "into the culture," guided by locals without whom you would be lost, a situation which does not at all allow for an INTP's insatiable curiosity to be appropriately fed by immersion in the new culture/situation.

2. It's a more introvert-friendly culture. I've blogged on this in the past. I didn't immediately realize why Taiwan "clicked" with me as a culture, but over the past couple of years I've realized it may have partially been that I subconsciously recognized the marks of a more introverted culture: attention to detail, appreciation of silence and peace, lots of people reading in public, etc. Sure, you have super extroverts here too, and yes, a hot, noisy, brightly-lit restaurant or night market packed with two hundred people shouting over each other can be a daunting prospect even on a non-socially-exhausted evening, but go around the corner or up the little stairs and you'll find a nearly silent bookshop or cafe full of people reading. (Reading physical books! Interestingly, despite everyone from kids to grandparents carrying high-powered smartphones, ebooks are not popular here)

Maybe it's just me. A lot of spaces here seem to have the "by introverts, for introverts" vibe

3. It's a non-stop learning situation. Taiwan is not so much a "ok, newbie, here's how things work here" culture. In fact rather the opposite; people's attempts to explain to you "how Taiwan is" may leave you scratching your head, because the last person to explain that exact same thing told you very differently. Essentially, it's a steep learning curve that never ends and only begins to taper after years of being here. Overwhelming and off-putting to some, but a gloriously stimulating situation for INTPs. (As long as we can get away and process.)
Due to Taiwan's complicated history with waves of migration, mountainous geography (leading to less homogenization of culture), and being a free and somewhat progressive democracy, there is much less of the "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" phenomenon that one thinks of when generalizing Asian culture. It's true that the culture also does not demand that every student be a special and unique nail that sticks out, and would frown upon the notion, but by the same token, there is the feeling that everyone, at least every family, could have something to contribute, and society would be less rich and less bountiful if that was lost. And that's not even counting the enthusiasm for embracing outside ideas.

This leads to a veritable cornucopia of never-ending detail and variety. It's almost a tease: the desire of INTPs to achieve a comprehensive and predictive mental model of the system is frustrated by the sheer amount of systems stacked on top of each other. I haven't even started to gather enough information to put all the pieces together, and may never be able to.

All that being said, my first tip for INTPs doing ministry is one that contradicts the introspection and contemplation we naturally isolate ourselves to conduct. (It will, however, help in data accumulation):

INTP Tips for Cross-Cultural Ministry - Part 1:
Push Yourself to Find Friends who will Push You

Luxuries that missionaries (believers?) don't have...

An INTP naturally enjoys levels of isolation greater than the average person could handle. Being "alone with one's thoughts" is a fully engaging and stimulating situation for us. (That doesn't even count the existence of the internet, into which I'm convinced many INTPs could happily sink most of their life and not notice that much was missing, another danger to avoid)
Thus, it's easy to gravitate towards a low level of social interaction and stay comfortably there. And while a look at Christ's life reveals there is certainly spiritual value in silence and solitary meditation and prayer, most evangelical ministry inherently requires an amount of social commitment (as Christ's life also did. His balancing of these is our example to follow.). For cross-cultural ministry this is even more true. Culture = people, and to do something cross-culturally requires spending time with those people from another culture. So, put succinctly, a missionary's work is People. An inherently exhausting task, for me at least, but an utterly worthwhile one, since it's for the Kingdom of God.

What this means by extension, however, is that my desire to, perhaps, disappear for a week or so and finish my novel, (which would probably mean many hours of reading and fewer actual hours of writing), is something I'm simply not able to indulge. And if I find that I am able to indulge it, it means I have chosen a path of too much introverted comfort. I'm not pushing myself, and I may need to find some people who will.

This isn't business as usual; people are dying without saving knowledge of Christ. A truth about the gospel that very much meshes with the INTP outlook on life is this: we can't save anyone, or force them to make a decision; only God can open someone's heart, and draw people to Himself. But, something we can do is to make sure people hear the gospel communicated clearly. It is my desire that no one in Taiwan who hears the gospel from me will find it incomprehensible because I communicated it in a way that was culturally opaque, or not in accordance with the reality of their own life, and my hope that along the way I may discover insights which will benefit others trying to do gospel work here as well. So I observe and study Taiwanese culture and try to grasp a local worldview as much as possible, so that when I share the gospel, the stumbling block will be Christ Crucified, not an American way of explaining that makes no sense to people looking at the world from a very different angle. (And, I argue, increasingly less sense to most Americans either.)

The other side to this is that for INTPs, getting out of the house, or apartment, or wherever we consider the bounds of our little residence zone to lie, is a fairly big step. That sounds ridiculous to some people, so here's an analogy:

For INTPs, our entire adult lives are like waking up to a frosty winter morning in a house with a tile floor. The bed -our introverted comfort zone- is warm and comfortable, while the air is cold and the floor is freezing. (Music can be like warm slippers we can put on first, but more on that in a later post)

Yes, we have to leave it every day (typically), but getting out of bed -getting out of our comfort zone to go engage the world and meet people- involves that extra amount of reluctance to overcome, that bracing of effort to put your feet down on the freezing floor and get over that discomfort. When there's no pressing need, like keeping our job, we are just as happy living in the rich inner world inside our own minds.

Now you might be thinking/scoffing "Sheesh, get over yourself and just go do it." That may be valid, and something INTPs need to hear sometimes. But 1) we all have things we are reluctant to do. Maybe you are someone who leaps energetically from bed at the crack of dawn and looks forward to a packed day of social engagements, but I am not convinced there aren't other tasks, perhaps involving silence or isolation, that you won't balk at and delay if possible. And 2) that's precisely what I'm saying in this section. We need to get out there and do more, it's good for us as people, let alone necessary for productive ministry.
Now criticism is not a good way to accomplish this (for an INTP that's an invitation to battle, one we can typically "win" and thus lose), but invitations that are open-ended yet suggest our presence would be missed are a very good way. (Just the suggestion that my presence would be missed can brighten my day more than I like to admit, probably due to the fact that my subconscious is more or less continually telling me this isn't the case)

So, just as the kind of people who are easily influenced by the people around them have a greater need to pick their friends carefully, INTPs have a greater need to find friends who can proactively get them to do things. "Get out of your house, we're going hiking" is actually an invitation I'm quite happy to accept. It's an experience I will enjoy that I'd probably never have begun on my own initiative, or would have taken weeks to finally get around to doing. That's one of the single most frustrating things about the INTP temperament, in my opinion. We often greatly enjoy the things we get invited or even dragged into doing, but we seem to lack some kind of positive energy that would result in us doing them on our own initiative.

The problem is that we have trouble ever leaving this state
without outside intervention. Our default mode is introspection.

In order to balance this weakness, we need those friends who will seek us out, or who are aware of our potential for being too solitary and help us manage it. For missionaries, these friends could be of various kinds: friendships with local people -valuable for cross-cultural missionaries to cultivate for a plethora of reasons- expat friends, or other missionaries, though I think it's obviously best not to confine your socializing to other missionaries if your context doesn't restrict you to that. If you aren't out doing things with people on a regular basis,you are not engaging in the life-to-life interactions that result in Godly edification and chances for the Spirit to work through you in the lives of other people. What I'm describing here is a holistic approach to missions: you are not just employed at task A, you are a believer God has placed in a certain context. There is no clocking in and clocking out on being salt and light. I am convinced this is true of all believers, not just those called to be cross-cultural missionaries. If all your socializing is inside a church context, you're hiding your light under a bushel.

Now, it may be that your ministry doesn't even allow for the possibility of being a hermit; you are constantly immersed in ministry and exhausted by a steady stream of people with no obvious chance of escape. For an INTP, this is a dangerous situation which easily leads to burnout. Yes it's a weakness to be so easily overcome with social exhaustion compared to other people, but so is overconfidence or a tendency to lose one's temper. To some extent we can't help the weaknesses that come with our personalities, and there is certainly no benefit to ignoring them, but we can take steps to mitigate the damage.

I often compare myself to a machine with insufficient cooling mechanisms, like a motherboard with too few heat sinks. My temperature goes up too quickly under a heavy social load, and it takes me longer to cool down. I don't like that it's true, but it is, so I have to do my best to counteract that weakness in order to better serve the cause of Christ. In America I succeeded in building up my "social endurance" quite a bit, now in a new culture and very different context (and speaking a second language often considered one of the hardest to learn in the world, though personally I disagree with that assessment) I must endeavor to do the same. It's not easy, but with Christian brothers and sisters being decapitated in the Middle East as I write this, I would feel ashamed to suggest I've been asked to do anything especially difficult.

A Note on Burnout: If burnout really does seem imminent, there's no point in wasting time in recovery if it could be prevented. Sometimes we need to take five. However, INTPs are not good at expressing their needs and negotiating a solution because we overcommunicate and also seek perfect solutions.  So when stuck in a burnout situation, especially if other team members have more people-oriented personalities and don't understand, it may be wiser to explain the situation to someone empathetic enough to grasp the problem and have them explain it to the relevant people on your behalf.

Part 1 Summary

We have seen that INTPs have a tendency to default to solitude, and being introverts they will have varying but ultimately limited abilities to cope with social time burdens, because regardless of how friendly and cheerful they may be, they are drained by them and need alone time to recover.

We have also seen that one method to avoid this, and therefore a responsibility of INTPs in cross-cultural missions (or really any INTP believers, I'd argue), is to seek out and befriend people who will help keep them engaged and not let them isolate themselves in their preferred thought-cocoon for excessive periods of time. This may not always be an option, but it should be a goal for every INTP ministering in an unfamiliar context (perhaps in familiar contexts too). I am making it my goal is well, having to this point only imperfectly followed my own advice.

Burnout, a danger for introverts forced to the point of social exhaustion for too long, can be mitigated as a risk by effective communication with the rest of your team and balancing your social obligations if possible. One can also seek to improve one's social endurance, training to increase it like any other form of endurance.


NEXT ENTRY (Coming Soon): INTPs and Music

Introverts as Missionaries?

So I've both noticed many and received a few questions about ministry (especially missions) and introversion lately. There seems to be a widespread feeling that missions is something which so heavily involves constant interaction with other people that introverts are ill-suited at best to pursue this kind of ministry.

As an introvert who is going into cross-cultural ministry, I want to specifically engage this issue and perhaps address the concerns of some introverts who are considering going into missions, yet are worried they won't be able to handle the social load.

For starters, let's look at what it means to be an introvert.

The common perception: You're socially underdeveloped/deficient
Introversion is usually not considered a positive trait (or even a neutral one) at least in America, where "putting yourself out there" and fearlessly engaging and thriving in the social scene is considered almost de facto necessary for success.

In the church, a similar way of thinking persists, though under another name. We are called to love and serve other people, so how can you not be a people person? Perhaps you are simply not a mature enough Christian to have developed a strong love for other people. I am only somewhat hyperbolizing, and could tell stories... People-people are sometimes incapable of understanding how you could want to do anything but spend your time in the company of other people. And the introverts twitch a little, feeling their very sanity depends on getting away for a little while to a quiet cup of tea and book that needs finishing.

In Susan Cain's book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (a book which I highly, highly recommend for introverts or extroverts wishing to understand your introverted friends, family, and colleagues), the author discusses at one point how American churches often demand extroversion as a qualification when looking to fill leadership positions:

"A senior priest at another church confesses online that he has advised parishes recruiting a new rector to ask what his or her Myers-Briggs score is. "If the first letter isn't an 'E' [for extrovert]," he tells them, "think twice ... I'm sure our Lord was an [extrovert]." (Cain, Susan; Quiet; p65)

The above example is a Catholic church, but I would argue from experience that this phenomenon is even more common in Evangelical churches. Contrast this to what we know about Christ; He often slipped away from the crowds, spending the night alone in prayer. Whether in His humanity Jesus was an introvert, extrovert, ambivert, or transcending all of these, we should follow His example of spending much time with people, and much time alone with the Father.

Seriously.. introverts (and extroverts) need to read this book.

The reality: You simply relate to people differently
Due partially to books such as the one quoted above and an increase in online materials regarding introversion (Google "myths about introverts" for many insightful articles), there is a growing awareness that introverts are not, in fact, people who necessarily dislike other people or the company of other people.

As it turns out, introverts simply are refreshed and energized by spending time alone, and not with other people. I have often been assumed to be an extrovert because I am friendly, have a very large circle of acquaintances, and am fairly active socially. But people who see these factors and assume extroversion don't see how I often return home from a long day of (profitable and enjoyable) meetings totally drained, and spend hours silently reading and listening to music before I sleep. This has not prevented me from meeting and keeping up with large numbers of people in multiple states and countries; it just means every now and then I need a break from people, and I must take care to make sure I get it. Those alone times can be highly productive as well; my spiritual gift of teaching is much less effective without periodic times of reflection to process the lessons God has been teaching me recently, and obviously any writing I do occurs during those alone times.

A Truth: Global Missions would be impossible without Introverts

This might seem a bold statement to some, but the whole range of spiritual gifts that accompany introversion are extremely important to any mission team. Not all countries and cultures value the super-extroverted American ideal, and some may even find it offensive. The ability to empathize with people and slowly build a small circle of meaningful relationships, something which comes very naturally to many introverts, allows for a more enduring presence in a community and the chance for long-term partnerships to accomplish real change, when the dynamic speakers and event-based outreach ministries have passed on.

This is, of course, not meant to suggest at all that extroverts are not capable of these kinds of relationships or that their ministries do not have long-term focus. But there is a "soft power" of introversion which endures quietly in difficult situations. Transplanted into a new ministry field, they might not shoot out many branches at first, but they may be putting down deep roots which will help them weather the storms that any cross-cultural ministry eventually faces. Introverts may often be better at "leading from behind," being comfortable with letting local leadership-in-training take center stage while continuing to provide support and direction until they are able to fully lead on their own.

Another example might be seen in the way new missionaries learn the language of their host culture:
In the beginning there seems to be a clear advantage to the extroverts, who are quick to "get out there" and try their new language skills in the streets and with the many new friends they've probably already made. The introverts, by contrast, may still be adjusting to the new environment and not have made many friends yet. It may be easy for them to let the extroverts do the talking at first. However wait a few years down the road, and the introverts' typical love of books may have propelled them into higher levels of literacy, and their small circles of close friends will provide many opportunities for socially safe but effective language progress.

In the end, it should be obvious that both extroverts and introverts have skills and abilities which make them effective in ministry, and that they are able to cover each others' weaknesses.

Extroverts should be careful not to judge introverts for not jumping into socializing with them, and introverts should be careful to develop their people skills as much as possible. In my own case, as an introvert I try to develop my "social endurance" just as an athlete develops their physical endurance. I'll never be a natural at it like some of my friends are, but I am much better at it now than I used to be, and have been blessed by the increased chances for meaningful meetings and relationships that have happened as a result.

So the answer to introverts wondering if they are cut out for cross-cultural missions is a resounding: maybe!
The issue is not your intro or extroversion, but whether this is God's will for you. If it is, He who calls will supply everything you need to answer the call. Pray that He will open and close doors as necessary to lead you in His will, and never let introversion be a reason to hesitate. (Remember Joshua 1:9!)

For life on the field itself, simply be self-aware, recognize that you need to set aside rest times (keeping one day a week at least partially free is a good idea, God created the sabbath for a reason), and at the same time don't let your introversion become an excuse for self-isolation or social laziness.
Since the inner life of the mind is such a constant reality for introverts, remember to "take every thought captive" to Christ. As a famous pastor and teacher was fond of saying,  "You are not what you think, but what you think, you are."

Your introversion is a gift that God has given you, that comes with its own benefits and abilities, to serve Him in the ways for which He has created you!