It's a Saturday morning in November, just waking up around 8ish, and finding it's a little cold outside with the sun shining in a vibrant, blue sky. Breezy and crisp. Did not think today was gonna be like this, man, I am not staying in the house today. Not even gonna eat breakfast or drink coffee, I just want to put on my sweater that's been waiting in the back of the closet on the last hanger, get in my car, and drive with the windows down and my arm out. I dont even care where I drive to, i just want to enjoy this. This humidity has been sucking..
Doesn't take too long before realizing, kind of want something more than just driving around aimlessly, by myself...coffee will do :)
Stop by the coffee shop I always go to, right next to downtown. Just the whole feel of seeing the entire town outside because of this weather--either walking their dogs, or running, or reading on the bench facing the skyline, or just sitting on the grass on a blanket with their "signifact other"--it's just..me. I love it. Its ideal because it's so lively.
Wish it was like this always.
So, walking in through the patio where all the chairs and tables are after parking the car and of course everyone is there, no seats left. Even have people sitting on the knee-high wall next to their friends' table. While walking into the coffee shop, notice someone I know, a close friend of mine, drinking their latte in a "for-here" mug, not a paper "to-go" cup, but a legit house mug, I guess trying to make the whole ambience even more so. Walk up to her, of course we're both excited that we're both here, for the same reason, and she tells me that two of our other friends Chris and Dustin just got here and are inside getting their drinks and coffee and she's saving their seat and will save mine while I order. So, now this morning just went from "ah, this is nice" to heaven.
We're all sitting down with drinks of choice, some with breakfast, me with just a bagel and we're all talking about the week..one had a great week because he got recognized for an idea that helped a project, another had a bad week because of co-workers that hate them..then after a while we started talking about things we've been having a hard time with. But after a few minutes I zoned out. Not because what they were saying was boring or not important, but my attention got sucked into the rest of the coffee house. I noticed certain tables and how they were all with big groups being super animated. But there was this one table that was still, had this girl by herself, no one sitting with her, headphones on, taking notes and being very attentive to what she reading in her bible. Just caught my eye, because of the contrast between her and her backdrop.
Then I looked inside through the window and noticed this couple talking, but the lady was crying with an almost sad face, not sobbing, just subtle tears running down, not a huge scene. And she was saying to the guy "Thank you..thank you." You could read her lips. And I started thinking what would cause someone to cry with a frown, but say thank you, in a coffee house. He had to tell her something she needed to hear, but didn't want to hear, but glad she did. It was just interesting to think about. Those three different types of tables got me thinking: the groups of friends having fun, the ones just having some alone time, and the tables where something important in life was happening. I look at other tables and feel a slap on my back and noticed our pastor with his wife..of course why wouldn't they randomly show up too.
We pull up some more chairs and the tables dynamic just changed, 180. We were one of the quieter tables, but with him everyone gets loud and jokey. So we're all hanging out there, I'm now on my second cup, and Dustin is making fun of the pastor for trying out this new prop idea last week when he was speaking, and I felt kind of bad, because I told him to try it. So he goes back at Dustin and makes a joke about how he to talk to girls. So Dustin wants to get him back, but we hear, "excuse me." I turn around and there's a young guy, probably in college, "I don't mean to come into your convo, just heard you guys calling him a pastor, and I've been kind of looking for a place to start going." We all kind of have little smirks, because Christians love it when this happens. "I've lived in Orlando all my life and know there's a lot of churches, but I just recently started believing in God and don't really know where to start." So our pastor offers him his chair and goes to share a seat with his wife and tells him, "here's a good place to start." So we all do the introduction thing, but of course we want to hear about him so he starts saying how he's "really excited that I believe now. Everything's been different. It's like I can breathe now, but I'm really lost and confused with all of this stuff still. Where do you guys go?"
And this is where we really smile, because this means we're about to add to our church. So Chris says, "here." And were all laughing a little, because it's not an answer he was expecting, no one would have. "Here??"
"Ya, here. We meet 'officially' at this coffee shop on Sunday, the owners are the pastors, or the pastors are the owners, however you want to look at it, and so that's how the staff is paid and since the church pretty much owns the coffee shop we're able to close it on Sunday and we have our small groups, some acoustic music, if one of our pastors want to teach then that too."
He kind of looked at us with this hesitant face,"That's..different." I said, "we're not a cult. We just wanted to have our meeting place somewhere we can actually go to. You can't go to a locked church building and hang out, not to mention, you don't want to go hang out at a church building anyways..the seats are all facing the same way..
"But here, you don't need a key to get in or permission or wait for a certain hour in the week when everyone will be there. With a coffee-house-church, it's always open, after work, before class, on the weekends, when everyone is at work, day, night, etc. And because this is our community spot, I'm always seeing people I want to hangout with before I thought about asking them to come. Look at that loud table over there, they play in our band. And that girl by herself is studying for a lesson she's going to teach later on in the week. And those two people inside, the one where the lady's eyes look red, our other pastor is counseling her.
And there's another beautiful thing about having this place be where we meet, people who don't believe just walked into a Christian community without having any guards up, because we aren't a 'church building.' Which gives us the opportunity to meet new people, without having the 'weird stranger' vibe you'd get if you were on a street, which would be creeper no matter what.
I mean truthfully this lets us be that church you'll read about in those Letters.
"This setup also let's us use our tithes plus additional revenue from the coffee shop to help invest in this area; either in the schools, help with expensive medicine, neighborhood watch programs, fun community events, support missionaries, start other churches, help start other businesses with this model, and definitely help each other out."
Then the next morning, I woke up, got dressed, got ready to go to church and wished everything I wrote was true.
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