Coffee Shop Discipleship

Here is a beautiful article by an American pastor who works one night a week as a barista at an independent coffee shop. It’s set him thinking about fellowship and mission: the coffee shop is a place where an eclectic group of people have space to relate. The article details his experiment in a Sunday night meeting based on these values.

It touched a raw nerve for me in thinking about one of my three churches. At two there is coffee every week after the morning service, but at my largest church it’s only once a month and then requires negotiation in order to fit with when we can sell Traidcraft goods. Every other morning people dutifully file out within a few minutes of the blessing – except for church officers and some people who rely on lifts from them.

Midweek it has a ‘Wesley Guild’ which attracts about twenty people. Originally in the 1890s Guilds were devised to attract and retain young Methodists. Not so now. It’s very much a programme-driven meeting, with the usual Guild format of four different types of evening: devotional, social, educational and cultural. I guess all sorts of reasons are given for the Wesley Guild movement: because it is not all overtly religious it is supposed to have evangelistic potential. That is fine to a point but it seems to be based on an assumption of ‘come to us’ evangelism, which is increasingly inappropriate in our culture. Our missionary philosophy needs to be incarnational and based on the word ‘go’, not ‘come’. Wouldn’t it be great if Christians got their cultural and educational input by joining local evening classes (even running some) and being salt and light there? As to the devotional aspect, one week in four does not do that much for today’s huge biblical illiteracy in the church. My guess is that Wesley Guilds work best as places of friendship where little else exists, but they do not work so well these days as places of spiritual formation and mission in our culture.

What else do we have? We now have two small groups. One is a Bible study that I lead, the other is a Covenant Discipleship Group where the members hold one another to account for their working out of the two great commandments to love God and love neighbour. Both these groups have the potential for spiritual formation. It’s interesting that both groups chose to meet on church premises, though. As a church we’re not so clued into sharing life together that we do so in homes.

So the American pastor’s article about coffee shop discipleship has become a reality check for me: how are we doing in mission, spiritual formation and life together? Because these are essential indicators of a church’s health.

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