By John Cole

Other people aren't like you or me..

Church people are very good at blaming people for not coming to church as regularly as they do themselves. "We enjoy what goes on in church; we give everyone who comes a warm welcome; the door is always open if they want to come.." But the other people don't come!

One of the positive lessons we have learned from creating a consumer society is that people have a choice. Different people prefer different things.

This is not as superficial or self-evident as it may sound. In fact, it seems that each one of us copes with life on the basis of quite a small number of deep-seated and possibly innate preferences. Circumstances and schooling can override them to some extent but, when we are truly ourselves, they are as instinctive and spontaneous as the hand we choose when we pick up a pen.

It was the psychologist, Carl Jung, who first described these preferences and they have been popularised (and sometimes badly misrepresented) as a result of the use people have made of a fascinating self-report questionnaire, the Myers Briggs Typology Indicator®.

We only do two things in our conscious mind, suggests Jung, as we relate to the world around us: We take in data about it ("Perception") and we decide what we are going to do about it ("Judgement"). Although life itself forces us to do both, Jung suggests that we actually prefer one rather than the other. We also cannot do both at the same time.

Similarly for both the data-gathering and the decision-taking, there are two mutually exclusive and instinctive ways in which we do it - and again Jung and many people's experience both suggest that we prefer one rather than the other.

In our perceiving, we are likely to focus first of all either on the detail ("Sensing") or on the big picture and its meaning ("Intuition"). Life again forces us to do both, but we naturally and more easily do one rather than the other.

As we make decisions and plan how we respond to what we have experienced, we again reveal a natural preference for being either more detached and objective ("Thinking") or more engaged and personally involved ("Feeling"). We'll be very ill-balanced personalities if we fail to do both, but our instinctive first preference will lie with one rather than the other. Few if any people are completely ambidextrous.

Finally Jung observed that our conscious life is played out both in the outer ‘real’ world and in the inner world of ideas, the world we inhabit in our conscious minds. Again Jung suggests that we seem instinctively to prefer one rather than the other. As with all the preferences, however, life forces us to do both - so that if we only lived in the outer world ("Extraversion") we would be hopelessly superficial and insensitive, and if we only lived in our inner world ("Introversion") we would be hopelessly withdrawn and incapable of taking part in daily life.

Those eight key Jungian words (highlighted in italics) are the source of a lot of misunderstanding because of the technical meaning he gives them. But behind them lies a great deal of insight. These personality preferences do not represent the sum total of what makes us unique as individuals, but they do serve as clues to a lot of human behaviour (like the patterns that can be seen in fingerprints - click on the picture to see an enlargement) - including possibly people's attitude to church-going!

These ideas from Carl Jung allow us to see how some people are more comfortable with discipline, others with spontaneity. Some thrive on being part of the crowd, while others yearn for privacy and space in which to dream. Some people are most at ease when in their familiar surroundings and following a well-rehearsed routine; others thrive on responding to a crisis or by finding novel ways of solving problems.

In making moral choices some will start with the effect on people and then (if they are wise!) work their way back to matters of principle; others will start from the principles and then (if they too are wise!) will not make a judgement until they have weighed its effect on people.

Tensions between people are only to be expected when we realise that they have such different starting points in their outlook on life. But the result should be creativity, not conflict. This picture of human diversity should be a warning to us never to fall into the trap of thinking "I'm right; you're wrong".

Click here to see how personalities can divide a local church!