How I learned to love church coffee
“The coffee is much better now that we attend a Lutheran church,” I told my husband, wailing.
One Sunday, about ten months into my first pastorate, as my congregation gathered around the coffeepot, I wondered, “Why are these people here?” Sunday morning conversations revolved around the previous day’s Texas Christian University football team’s fate and who’d been kicked off Survivor that week. People were gathered ten and 15 deep around the coffee urn and the donuts. They could have coffee and donuts at home, I thought to myself. Why come to church for mediocre coffee and cold donuts and stand around chewing the fat about yesterday’s football game? Can’t we talk about God? Ecclesiology? Inclusive language? Justice? Liturgy? Anything that matters?
The confounded equation of coffee + donuts = Christianity had long bothered me. It had even driven me to divinity school, where, in the first minute of the first day of Introduction to Ministry, the professor had asked each of us what we hoped to accomplish in our ministries. “I’m hoping,” I awkwardly began, “to help rescue the mainline church. From irrelevancy. I hope to make worship as attractive as football, donuts, and TV.”
“That’s quite a trinity,” the professor quipped. Gathering steam, I quickly clarified that I was “pretty certain the revitalization of worship has something to do with deconstructing the ubiquitous church coffeepot.”
