In specific, I bought a Hario Buono kettle which is used to drip hot water over coffee grounds when brewing coffee manually with a dripper brewer like the one pictured.  Essentially, I had an issue with Hario’s use of what is known in business circles as a value-based pricing strategy.  It is a well accepted business strategy and for the sake of transparency, I should state that I use it all the time so my irritation was not at the usage overall, but my perception of the extent of their usage for this particular product (For the record, I do like much of Hario’s product line and have no issues with most of their products or pricing).  As a working definition taken from a British business site cited by Wikipedia, it can be summarized this way: [Value-based Pricing] sets selling prices on the perceived value to the customer, rather than on the actual cost of the product, the market price, competitors prices, or the historical price. I won’t rehash the entire argument over again as I have nothing new to add, but if you are really interested, you can see the original thread over on coffeed.com.  So why bring it up again then?  If you read it, the thread seems to have ended with some sort of conclusion and the horse seems sufficiently beaten and has died.  True, true, but a thought struck me the other morning while I was doing my morning Bible reading and I haven’t been able to shake it.

If you are anything like me, your mind tends to wander sometimes when reading the Bible.  It’s something that I am not proud to admit and I actively work on it.  I know that for myself, if I do anything else like check E-mail or read the news before going straight to the Word, I inherently think about what I read while I’m supposed to be spending time with God.  Well, my friend Nick made a reply to a post that I had made and I happened to read it while I was pouring my morning coffee a few hours later and getting ready for my morning reading.

I have been reading through the Gospel of John again and if you didn’t know, John is written from the perspective of Jesus as God whereas the other Gospels are written from different perspectives¹ and present Jesus differently to give us a whole picture of who Jesus really was.

One comment that was made in this particular post by Nick that summed the whole thread up stuck out and said:

“Value is in the eye of the beholder. Perceived value depends on your value system. If you don’t think it’s worth it, then it’s not worth it to you. If others think it’s worth it to them, then it’s worth it to them. That’s pretty much what it boils down to, isn’t it?”

Nick was spot-on.  Where I was placing various values to this kettle WAS the issue when it was boiled down.  Okay, fair enough.  I had planned to get back to him with a reply of my own after my Bible time even though I kept repeating it to myself.  So I’m reading the Gospel of John and this comment keeps coming into my head as I am reading.  It’s kind of annoying me because I’m trying to stick with the text now in front of me.  Jesus is repeatedly lambasting the elite religious establishment of the day, trying to tell how and why He came and I’m mentally wandering off into placed value systems.  And then the question strikes me: What was the value-based pricing structure of Jesus when he came to pay for the sins of the world?  Talk about a disconnect!  My heart almost stopped!  WOW!  You think about that while I take a different slant at this.

Not everyone who reads this blog is a Christian or has a Christian background, so let me try put this into a different context.  The US Secret Service is assigned to protect the life of the President of the United States and other high profile dignitaries, oftentimes visiting Heads of State.  That mission is their whole reason for existence.  Hypothetically, let’s say that President Obama is giving a speech dedicating a new community center in a high-crime neighborhood.  It would make sense that standing with him would be some kids who were now involved with the community center who used to either be gang-bangers or were statistically expected to follow that course in life, and for whatever reason, they had wisely started making choices that were going to lead them to a more productive life than thug life.  So, President Obama is talking and talking and before anyone knows it, a car slips through Secret Service checkpoints and a drive-by shooting takes place.  However, Obama is not the target.  The target is one of the kids who wanted to get out of gang-banging to make something better of himself who is up on the podium with the President.  Obama somehow makes a read of what is really going on and heroically ditches the Secret Service and places himself in front of the kid being targeted.  He takes two to the chest and later dies in a hospital.  Before being removed from the podium however, he tells the boy “I know that I’m not going to make it.  You better make something of yourself, son!”  Years later, the boy becomes a doctor who discovers the cure for all forms of cancer and millions of lives are saved around the world.  Now it could reasonably be argued that while yes, the initial price was very high, in the bigger picture, the price paid with Obama’s own blood was more than worth it.

Now apply that to a value based pricing scenario.  You had one person (President Obama) who society would say was a high-value individual.  This high-value person was replaced with someone who later became another high-value person.  The price Obama paid would be compounded upward by who he was when he made the sacrifice (A U.S. President) vs. who he saved was (an unproven kid with an uncertain destiny).  Effectively, the high initial cost of Obama’s life was maintained with the value that was later realized in the benefit to the entire human race.  Culturally, this value placement assignment works for us and while the event would always be considered tragic, as a society that loves happy endings, this would qualify as such and everyone in general would be better off for it according to the value system of many people.

But what if the opposite had happened?  What if those same years later, it is discovered out that the targeted kid was so frightened by those who committed the shooting that he returned to the neighborhood gang and ended up dying in prison for crimes he committed while with this gang?  True, all life is considered precious and no one life is worth more than another when you boil it down, but as a society with our value system in general, I would argue this would not be found to be acceptable.  The initial price would be considered far too high considering the value or benefit that was returned to the country (never mind the world) that lost a President.  To even suggest a scenario with the latter ending is almost shocking to our sense of value.

How then, are we not even MORE shocked that the Bible clearly teaches that the Creator of the universe, before time began as we measure it, decided that it was an acceptable scenario that He Himself (highest value) would come to pay the price with His own blood to atone for us (low value, relatively speaking) and our sin?  Psalm 144 asks “LORD, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him!”  Indeed!  There’s a reason that question is asked with an exclamation point instead of a question mark!  I can assure you that this event was a far, FAR bigger deal than some made-up Barack Obama hypothetical.

To compare it directly to my kettle, it is an item that has high value both aesthetically (great kettle design / man being made in the image of God²), and in potential function (highly controlled water dripping / the goal of glorifying God and enjoying Him forever³), yet is made of low value materials (low grade stainless steel and other metals / human flesh in which resides no good thing⁴) that will ultimately fail (this kettle won’t last as long as it physically could / man will physically die as recompense for sin) and return to dust?.

I don’t know about you, but thinking about that comparison messed me UP!  How did God Himself look at this as a value-based pricing scenario and decide that coming to earth in the person of Jesus Christ was worth it, paying the price with HIS own blood?  Don’t get me wrong, I am beyond grateful that He did, but how does that work for Him in how we assign value?  In what cost-benefit analysis would anyone agree that this is a good deal for the One of the highest value to do this?  And how do we respond?  Many times, the significance of this sacrifice is billed as some cosmic fairy tale and dismissed.  Worse, it is accepted by others and still dismissed on many levels, failing to have an impact on how we live daily life.  Failing to have an impact?  REALLY?!?

I had another friend, Jay, who I spoke with on this kettle issue via Facebook.  In his conclusion, he stated that regarding the price of this particular kettle

“Definitely the cost v. revenue is a major factor in my thinking the price isn’t too bad. It’s a necessary tool to accomplish our mission. Truth is, if I had to spend $125 on the Buono, I would – because it fulfills our mission.”

Jay makes the case that the price of this Hario Buono kettle, in his value assigning system, is not only reasonable, but that he would pay an even higher price than I did (I paid about $45 for mine) because if fulfills his mission of “mak[ing] some of the best coffees available and making a profit off of them.” That is his mission and one that he succeeds in quite admirably in.

So what is God’s mission?  Where does He make His “profit”?  What’s in it for Him?  Why would an all-powerful being bother to step into the history of flawed humans the way He did?  What is the benefit considering the cost?  On what planet does it make sense for Him to assign such value to us when He knows full well that we will fail Him?  How is His mission fulfilled through us?

These are monster questions.  Do they deserve to be answered?  Yes.  Are there answers?  Yes.  Is this post already too long?  Probably.  So you’re just going to leave me hanging?  No.  For the sake of space however, I will post this video that happens to be the start of a new series that one of my pastors just started this past Sunday (06.06.10) that deals with many of these questions directly.  Coincidentally, it is called “The Mission: God’s desire to restore His own image in lost man by means of salvation”.  The video below deals with “WHY the Mission?”  Most people believe that Jesus was at least a real man who lived 2000 years ago.  That point is rarely seriously disputed.  I will say this though: If Jesus Christ was not who He said He was, then what He did in life or in death doesn’t matter worth a darn.  I implore you to think about your system of assigning value to your own life on a larger scale than coffee kettles or some other frivolity.  What matters to you and why?  Where’s the benefit to your cost of time and/or money?  If, after reading this post and whether you watched this video or not, you want to talk about placed value systems on a larger scale, there is a big white “Call me” button at the top of every page.  Click it and Google Voice will connect you with my cell phone.  I’d love to talk with you more about it.  Heck, I’ll even use my fancy kettle to drip pour you a cup of great coffee at my house!  Maybe that will even out my perceived value based pricing gap a bit.

¹ The Gospel of Matthew is written from the perspective of Jesus as King, Mark presents Jesus as a servant and Luke shows the humanity of Jesus, or, Jesus as a man.  Try reading through the Gospels again with this in mind, it will change some things for you!

² Genesis 1:26-27 – “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

³ Thesis of John Piper’s book “Desiring God”

⁴ Romans 7:18 – “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.”

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.

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.