Introverts in the Church of Jesus Christ | An Interview with Adam McHugh

Leading Saints Podcast

Leading Saints

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.9 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally ran in March 2018.

Adam McHugh is an author, former hospice chaplain, spiritual director, and minister, and now a wine tour guide and sommelier. The author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture, he is an ordained Presbyterian minister, having earned a Masters of Divinity and Masters of Theology in Greek New Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also the author of The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction. Since this interview was recorded he has written a memoir, Blood from a Stone. Adam lives in California's Santa Ynez Valley, and may be the only person published in both Psychology Today and Wine Enthusiast.

Links

Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction
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Read the transcript of this podcast
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Highlights
4:30 Becoming an ordained minister

7:30 What led to writing Introverts in the Church

10:50 Explanation of introversion and extroversion

16:00 Problems that introverts experience at church

19:00 Understanding the discomfort of personal vulnerability and sharing beliefs as an expression of faith

22:00 Introverts generally prefer depth over breadth

24:00 The power of listening: experience at a hospital

30:00 Introverts and small talk

34:00 How introverts approach dealing with conflict and decisions

40:00 Silence, reverence, and the internal experience compared to active social environments

45:20 Cultural clash of introvert and extrovert leaders: overcoming stereotypes and encouraging introverts to be leaders

48:50 Reaching out to invite introverts to participate

The award-winning Leading Saints Podcast is one of the top independent Latter-day Saints podcasts as part of nonprofit Leading Saints' mission to help Latter-day Saints be better prepared to lead. Learn more and listen to any of the past episodes for free at LeadingSaints.org.
Past guests include Emily Belle Freeman, David Butler, Hank Smith, John Bytheway, Reyna and Elena Aburto, Liz Wiseman, Stephen M. R. Covey,

Transcript

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0:31.6	staying on task, dealing with conflict in meetings, and a ton more.
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0:41.9	You can do this by visiting leadingsaints.org slash 14.
0:45.5	That's leadingsaints.org slash one for.
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0:54.2	It's really good stuff. So visit LeadingSaints.org slash 14 or click the link in the show notes.
1:00.5	The following episode is a throwback episode, one that was published previously and was
1:05.1	extremely popular.
1:06.3	To see the details of when this was originally published, see the show notes.
1:10.2	Enjoy this throwback episode.
1:24.9	As a young ironic priesthood holder, I was of course assigned a home teaching companion and went out
1:30.5	and home taught with Ken Christopher, who was a fantastic mentor in my early life that really showed me
1:35.8	how to home teach. And I remember sitting in these home teaching appointments just petrified to say
1:40.3	anything. I didn't want to talk. I was embarrassed. I was quiet. I just couldn't wait for it to be
1:44.1	over, so I'd go home and return to my life. And now, obviously, I matured, and part of that was just
1:49.3	being a young teenager, didn't know how to, you know, articulate myself and those types of things. But,
1:54.5	you know, as I got older, I got easier at communicating with people. But in general, over the years, I've noticed that I definitely have,
2:00.9	I definitely lean towards the introvert side of things. When I'm in groups of people, I can,
	...

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