Even Introverts Have A Harvest Field
by C. Lee
Photo by Megan Bucknall on Unsplash
There was a couple in my cell group who described themselves as highly introverted — and when we started talking about reaching the lost, they kind of went quiet. It felt like a topic that brought trepidation rather than excitement.
They loved the Lord. They'd been faithful members for years. But the idea of approaching a stranger, of crossing that invisible line into someone else's world uninvited — to them, that felt impossible.
They wouldn't even want to talk to anybody unless they were already familiar with them. And so every time the conversation turned toward engagement with people outside our Christian circle, I could see them holding something back. It was really not their cup of tea.
I'd be lying if I said I knew exactly what to do with that. This was something difficult for me to relate to as I identified as an extrovert and had no issues approaching strangers.
Two Introverts And A Wall
The barrier wasn't shyness exactly — it was more like a wall they'd built so gradually they'd stopped noticing it was there. Something really needed to shift within their hearts.
I didn't try to argue them past it. I didn't have a technique for it. What I can say, looking back, is that it wasn't really stuff that I said or did specifically — it was just us as a team journeying together, looking at Scripture, sharing our own stories, and them slowly feeling comfortable enough to take the next small step.
The Lord does this kind of work quietly. You don't always see it happening until something shifts.
And something did shift — just not the way I expected.
What the Focus Module Revealed
I ran a training module with the team. “Focus”, as it was called, (https://urbanwheatsingapore.org/info-focus) walks you through the life of Joseph, looking for themes and patterns across the whole span of his story.
The idea is that you do the same thing with your own life. You look back over the years — the experiences the Lord brought you through, the things that kept showing up, the places where you felt most alive or most drawn.
For this couple, that process became something much more than a Bible study. The husband realized that a lot of his life had been about helping people — that he was the kind of person who learned something thoroughly, and then got genuinely excited to share it with others and help them with it. That pattern was everywhere in his story once he could see it. And seeing it gave him a focus for how he might engage with people around him.
His wife's story was different. She'd come from quite a dysfunctional family, and over the years she'd developed a deep heart for the family unit — marriages, parent-child relationships, youth and children.
She'd always cared about this.
She just hadn't connected it to her harvest field yet.
What the Focus module did was show them that the Lord had already been shaping them for this — that the passion they needed was something He had been building in them for years.
Passion Does What Personality Can't
This is the thing I keep coming back to: once they found their passion and their focus, it didn't really matter anymore whether they were introverts or extroverts or great talkers.
Because they were passionate about it, they could talk about it. That's just how passion works.
I don't think you can find a person who's genuinely excited about something and not be able to communicate that excitement — the quietest person will find words for what they love.
The wife took her first small step at the kindergarten playground. She'd been going there for ages, always seeing the same other mothers, always staying in her own corner because approaching someone felt too hard. She decided to just say hi — because she and these women already had something in common, their kids were from the same school, and she thought, “I can start there.”
She found that people were more than happy to talk. They had things in common, challenges they wanted to share. And you could see her get excited — which then opened into more, and then more.
What moved her was finding something she already cared about — and a small enough step to try.
Your Story Is Not Their Template
They found their style: not platforms or crowds or approaching strangers on the street, but homes, meals, play dates, meeting in the park. Hospitable, personal, one-to-one.
That was how they were wired, and once they knew it, they leaned into it.
This taught me something as a leader too.
I'd been sharing my own outreach stories with the team — things the Lord was doing through me — and I started hearing a response I wasn't expecting. “Oh, but I can't do that. That's not me.”
And I had to stop and say, “Me sharing my stories is not so that you will copy what I do. These are stories of inspiration and encouragement. You need to find your own way, your own style, how you would engage with the harvest.”
There's an inadvertent trap in church culture — I think we all fall into it — where the stories told from the pulpit become the template.
You hear a guest speaker describe how they shared the gospel on a plane, or knocked on a stranger's door, or started a conversation with someone in a queue, and you think: that's what this is supposed to look like. But if that isn't you, if that's not how the Lord has wired you, then trying to copy it is like fighting a current. It won't feel natural because it isn't — for you.
God has shaped each of us uniquely. There are so many different kinds of people out there who need to be engaged differently — and we need all different kinds of people doing it in all different kinds of ways.
The couple who couldn't approach a stranger? They now have people in their home.
Getting practical
As you think about God's vision for your city and/or affinity group:
Read Romans 12:4–8. Paul describes different gifts given to different people for different functions — and assumes all of them are active. What might it mean for harvest engagement to look as varied as the gifts in this passage?
What are the themes, passions, or life experiences that the Lord has woven through your own story? How might those be an entry point for the harvest field you're already near?
Whose story have you been unconsciously using as the template for what outreach should look like — and what would it mean to put that template down?
C Lee is happily married with three sons. She leads a cell group based in a church setting and volunteers in a school community with a focus to support parents of children with educational needs. Her heart is for making disciples to reach the lost and broken.
© 2026 C Lee. All rights reserved.
One article a week
For anyone who carries a hunger for the lost and broken in their city.
