This past Monday, I accepted my first coffee related position not related to Coffee With A. Duck and I have to tell you, I’m pretty geeked about it! Kansas City Baptist Temple (my home church) will be opening a new children’s building as an addition to the existing building. It is going to be huge! After all of the children vacate the current building, it will open up more room for more adult classes and new ministry fellowships. Within that expansion will be a state of the art espresso bar. Up to this point, I have had quite a bit of involvement in the planning of this café, but only from a consultant’s standpoint. After the café was operational, the assumption was that a manager would be hired and that my job would be largely over. Not anymore. My real work will be just beginning.
One of my biggest pet peeves, particularly in business, is when people slap the “Christian” tag on their concept, service or product and then just expect the Christian or even the larger faith community to support them just for hanging their shingle out. Unfortunately for these places, many times you can expect some of the worst product or service quality on the market. With exceedingly rare exception, “Christian coffeehouses” are at the top of my list in terms be being repeat offenders. Some of the worst coffee swill I have ever had has come from Christian coffeehouses. If they don’t go out of business right away, they tend to cling to life forever because a couple of churches would rather meet there than open a coffee bar in their own place. Probably a good move for the churches, but it prolongs the inevitable death the café with the shoddy quality, simultaneously dragging both the name of God and the name of Specialty Coffee through the mud. For reference, check out the text in this pic I found from some lame quiz thing someone invited me to take on Facebook called “Which coffee-brewing thingamajiggy are you?” Lame quiz, I don’t recommend it, but this part caught my eye. Note the reference to crap coffee and church ladies at the end. Thanks to the basis for my pet peeve, we collectively earned that one and yes, coffee at church is usually the worst of the worst of the worst! Blech!
I bill myself officially as a consultant / barista trainer but over the past couple of years, I have not concentrated on this business with nearly the same vigor as I had my previous coffee positions as either a café owner or operations executive. Hence, things have been a little slow; after all, you get out what you put in. I don’t apologize for this change of focus, we either follow the Lord’s direction and promptings or we don’t. In the Christian faith, you either mold your life around the Bible and allow the Big Man to make his internal changes to your life and your heart or, as is far more popular today, you mold your Bible around your life and make it say what YOU think it ought to say so that no real internal change is required. Only one of those things get to be the constant and the other moves all the time. In changing my overall focus, I got to go on a sabbatical from coffee. Oh, I poked my head in here and there but pretty much, I was off the list. Thus, Coffee With A. Duck has always been in a state of inconstant flux in terms of a solid direction. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it but I was pretty sure that God did not grant me the successes and exposure that he had for no reason. So what am I doing here? You train people you say? What like at your house? Sounds pretty professional…not.
Let’s merge these two paragraphs together and start getting to the good stuff. This café (named Pórtico, which is Spanish for “Porch”) will only be open initially a couple of weeknights and obviously on Sunday during service times. Effectively, it will just be sitting there during the workweek doing nothing unless the church is having one of their large events which is maybe three weeks out of the year like the upcoming 2010 Summit in March. Now I’m not going to start leaking what equipment Pórtico will have, but in the spirit of having a Christian coffeehouse that doesn’t suck and given my background and a sufficient budget to work with, you know it’s going to be cutting edge, that’s all I’m saying. Better yet, once we know that the café is either profitable or at least strongly trending that way, the church has graciously agreed to allow me to occasionally rent this facility from them to hold training classes there. AWESOME! I get to build my business, the church gets a little extra jack, everyone is happy. Win-wins are everyone’s favorite.
If you didn’t know, since the week after my sabbatical started, I have been in a kind of in-house Bible institute that is very, very good. The initial goal 25 years or so ago was to give the local church body a way to really train up their men and ground them in the Bible and equip them to serve in whatever ministry God called them into. Today, the specifics of the school have changed, but the overall goal is the same. One of the major themes of the Bible is the overall mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ. You can’t get away from it. If you can only think of a few constantly recurring mega-themes, making disciples is definitely on the short list. My idea then, to sum everything together, is to follow a type of Business as Missions model and have a business that offers basic and advanced coffee training and is set up in such a way that promotes the Gospel. Uhhh…but they aren’t hiring you to teach them the Bible or about Jesus, they’re hiring you to teach them coffee! Right you are. The coffee stuff will cost you, but the Gospel is always free.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last say, 5 years, you have probably at least heard of Dave Ramsey who has taught millions of people (my wife and I included) how to not only get out of debt to begin with, but more importantly, alter your behavior and buying habits to STAY out of debt. Fabulous stuff, I 100% recommend it. Well, if you go through his material, it drips with biblical truth, BUT the people who either A) have never heard of or read the Bible and B) go to church and do all the external stuff but don’t actually pick their copy up and read it once in awhile, don’t have hardly any idea! For sure, there are a few times that he drops something overt like citing Proverbs 22:7 (The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.) and labels it for what it is, but by and large, the truth is just woven into his material and presented so well that unless you know…you don’t know! I think Dave Ramsey is great, but I have to tell you, he’s not that creative! He took a cash envelope system from 100 years ago and another book from even longer ago that told him how to live and drew up a business plan on a coffee table using nothing but other people’s materials! I’m not mad at the guy, I’m jealous! How great is that? I don’t need to be the next Dave Ramsey in terms of success, but I do plan to submit myself to the same idea that he does of having the ultimate goal of as a Christian, using your business to change lives. Mmmkay, but how do you weave truth into a coffee class? It’s going to take some time for sure, but not as much as you might think. Here’s a peek at one parallel that I’m working on now.
Coffee Truth – Your drinks can have Triple Rosettas on them with some extra etching bling, but no one will care if when they close their eyes and take a sip, they start to gag. Biblical truth – No one cares how religious or spiritual you appear externally if internally you’re a mess [Matthew 23:25-26, Mark 7:1-13]
The mechanics of how exactly to bring that truth in is still to be determined, but the process has begun to be drafted. That part HAS to start, and I have reason to believe that I am not the only high profile person in the industry to think so. For a long time, the Gospel has not been readily able to be observed within the coffee industry but suddenly there seems to be almost an air of urgency to at least address the issue. I could go on, but I’ll end it here. I will come back pretty quick and address this issue of an urgency to inject the Gospel into the coffee industry and how it affects us as individuals, but also as players in something bigger. It’s so much more important than the lip service that we give it and the last two days, I have gotten huge reminders about it and can’t get it out of my head without writing it out, so I will.
So, this morning I was finishing wrapping the neighbor kid’s Christmas present with a whole roll of duct tape, you know, the standard male fare (blog post with pictures forthcoming) when Jacob climbed up on my lap and asked “Daddy, how does Jesus get into my heart?” Wow. One minute it’s Bakugans, and the next it’s soteriology. I suspect that this was on his mind at all because while we have him expecting to get hooked up by Santa, Crystal and I have been very diligent to remind him that the reason that we are all getting presents is because we are helping Jesus celebrate his birthday. I explained that Jesus enters our hearts when we ask him to and that afterwards, he lives inside of us forever no matter what. Okay, he got that as much as he could without charting metrics and logistics. “Why is he able to do that?” Not “how”, but “why” and if you want to split hairs, those are different answers.
Now, I come from a school where answers are given as a cross between answering a direct question with a direct answer and the thought that if the child is old enough to ask the question, they are old enough to hear the real answer as best the person being asked can explain it. That said, there is no reason to over complicate simple questions with overly complex answers or deliberately trying to talk over someone else’s head, particularly an earnest intentioned child. I posted on Facebook a quick bit about this conversation with Jacob taking place and a friend of mine replied with “The Gospel is simple. Men make it difficult.” So true; so very true. In the last year or so, I have taken quite an interest in apologetics and polemics and have been struggling with how much to tell the children directly and how much to save for later as conversations like this present themselves. I want to make sure that my children are biblically grounded, but don’t want to overly tax their minds with the arguments and defenses of adults. Those will come far soon enough; my job is to prepare them for when they do.
I don’t buy into the thought that parents should not be influencing our children’s religious views. To the contrary, I feel that parents have a great responsibility to address these larger issues and need to be prepared with an answer when asked the reasons for future hope held by the parents. The Bible clearly teaches this in 1 Peter 3:15. In my opinion, “every man” would include the one that is being raised to become a man (or woman in the broader context of the word). I have no issue with the fact that some day he will question everything that Crystal and I have taught him about Jesus and the Bible and honestly, I hope he does question it! It’s the very important step of taking what Mom and Dad said and proving it to one’s self. It’s where the faith becomes deeply personal and is very necessary to one’s faith journey.
It’s kind of funny that this came up just now. I am reading a book called “Boys Should Be Boys: 7 Secrets to Raising Healthy Sons” by Dr. Meg Meeker and this very issue of the needs young boys and “The God Factor” was just addressed in a recent chapter that I read. I know that not everyone who reads this blog is a Christian, but before you dismiss this book as all Jesus-related propaganda, I will tell you that the following excerpt is found deep in the 10th chapter and thus far, this is the first time in this book that the author has written anything more than a fleeting reference to a faith system of any kind and that she has yet to reveal her own beliefs, relying much more on her experience as a seasoned practitioner of pediatric and adolescent medicine, than one trying to push her own flavor of religion. She uses the term “God” generically because “God” can mean different things to different people and I have yet to see her drop a J-bomb, so read the book! Really, I highly recommend it.
Dr. Meeker says that: “God makes sense to boys. Boys find it easy to imagine that God exists in an invisible state without definitive form, that he possesses both male and female qualities (God is as authoritative as a father and as loving as a mother), and that he can see everything in the universe all at once.
One reason young boys find this so easy is that they connect their inner thoughts and feelings to the exterior world. In other words, their external behaviors mirror their inner feelings. Boys feel less inhibited and less socially guarded, and are uninhibited about sharing their natural belief in God. It is not until they reach later elementary school years that they begin to force their inner selves to go “underground.” When classmates become cruel, parents divorce, or failing grades come their way, boys learn to push their interior world into a private place.”
I can’t speak for everyone, but in my situation, I feel that these statements are right on the money. In terms of seeing God in both a paternal and maternal light, Jacob has stated that he wants God’s powers so that he can stop time and shoot lightning at people (Atta boy!), but has also told me that he loves me as much as when God sent his Son to earth *tear*. As far as I can tell, he has no reservations about seeing his realities though what I’ll call a “God filter”. He knows John 1:3 by heart and concludes that since God made everything, he can control it. Call it sheltered if you want, but the people that he comes into contact with who do not share in the Christian faith are not about to start trying to correct someone else’s child (mainly because he hasn’t entered public school yet, but that’s a whole other topic). Effectively, everyone that he talks to says pretty much the same things that he does and he is not treated like a weirdo when he says something about God in public…yet.
Jacob and I spent the bulk of this morning’s session talking about sin and how it separates us from God and how Jesus died to reconcile us back to God since we can’t do it ourselves any other way than simply believing that this was the case (the answer to why he can enter our hearts). Fundamentally, I was trying to plant seeds that will one day bloom, hopefully in the form of convicting him in terms of knowing that he needs to accept that this price was paid by Jesus for him individually, not just for all of mankind corporately. As we were wrapping up, I told him that some day Jesus would probably live inside him too and because he already knows that Jesus was God, he declared “See! So I WILL have God’s powers!” and ran off to electrocute something.
As adults, I know that as my friend pointed out, we over complicate the simple, simple message of the Gospel and try to almost bury it under the added-on traditions of under the guise of “religion.” I can only speak first hand about evangelical Christianity, but so very much of what gets argued about so vehemently today in church, politics, etc. has almost nothing to do with biblical truth and yet these are where the deepest fractures within the church occur! It’s no wonder that people who don’t know Jesus personally reject the gospel; look at what we do with it!
At any rate, it was very refreshing to talk to Jacob this morning and I look forward to the next time we do it. His innocence and lack of capacity to fully understand what I was talking about forced me to strip all of my preferences and cultural proclivities away and just give him straight up what the Bible says. In the end, that’s all that really matters anyway.
I’m not even sure what to say about this. My mind is still trying to digest what I just saw and the article that I just read after spotting a retweet from a friend in Wisconsin.
I’m not going to go off the deep end and turn into crazy apocalyptic Bible guy, but I have said to Crystal for quite some time that whatever Satan’s famed mark of the beast spoken of at the end of Revelation 13 will be something slick. Something so technologically awesome that will make unlocked 3G iPhones look like primitive versions of mancala. The mark won’t be your fingerprints and will likely not be a barcode, but according to Scripture, it WILL be something prominent either on your right hand or your forehead. So what could it be? Endless speculations exist and the truth is that no one knows. What is known is that there will be severe penalties for refusing the mark and great rewards for getting it. It’s going to make life so much easier. Why wouldn’t you want this?
Mmmmkay. Welcome to the future! I’m a little short on details, but check this video out that was posted by our friends at wired.com. You can read the whole article about what they’re calling an “LED Tattoo”. It’s pretty trippy! If you’re really feeling frisky, check out the links at the bottom to other articles on the same thing.
Silicon on silk: This clear silk film, about one centimeter squared, has six silicon transistors on its surface. These flexible devices can be implanted in mice like the one in this image without causing any harm, and the silk degrades over time. The orange liquid on the hair is a disinfectant used during the surgery. Credit: Rogers/Omenetto
Did you see that? It’s like something out of the “Alien” trilogy! Did you see it moving around and stuff? Ewwww! All that I’m sayin’…is that I’m sayin’! And the sound it makes? In the movies, I’m cool with it. In real life it would give me the heebie jeebies. The whole thing is sick! Sick as in kind of awesome and sick as I might start puking all over from being grossed out! My “Is this a good thing or a bad thing?” discernment muscle is a little confused right now.
The fact that Philips is involved means that A) this idea has serious merit (at least in theory) and B) it now has cash behind it and legions of R & D scientists. So, okay, back to quasi-reality. Is this LED tattoo thing going to be the long awaited mark of the beast? I’m going to file it under “possible but unlikely.”
But I bet they’re somehow related.
So just remember that when your great-grandkids come home and want to show you how they can watch movies in the palm of their hand with no external media and can open doors, pay bills, start their cars and take online classes with their new 5th Gen LED Tattoos or something crazy like that.
So, my final assessment after raising tons of questions and offering zero answers as is so typical rampant in the blogosphere?
One of the major themes of the Bible is the overall mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ. You can’t get away from it. If you can only think of a few constantly recurring mega-themes, making disciples is definitely on the short list. My idea then, to sum everything together, is to follow a type of Business as Missions model and have a business that offers basic and advanced coffee training and is set up in such a way that promotes the Gospel. Uhhh…but they aren’t hiring you to teach them the Bible or about Jesus, they’re hiring you to teach them coffee! Right you are. The coffee stuff will cost you, but the Gospel is always free.
