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January 29th, 2008

Cafe Church

baptists in costaWhilst I’m on a ‘Fresh Expressions’ sort of theme here’s something else that has popped up in the comments. The Baptists in Welwyn Garden City have started to ‘cross frontiers and break new ground’ by having church meetings in their local Costa coffee shop (see image: right) and have chatted with Costa who have said that can other churches can hold their meetings in Costa coffee shops too. There is news about this on the Fresh Expressions site.

As an aside, it pleased me that the minister’s name is ‘Cid Latty’. Latty… Latte… Never mind.

An organisation has been formed to administer this network of Cafe Churches and the associated website. This weekend there is a training day. Once you have set up an organisation it is always important to have a training day. If I ever set up an organisation running a training day will be one of my priorities. You can sign up now if you like, though I must warn you that I haven’t decided what the organisation will be yet.

Of course a lot of other people have been running Cafe Churches over the last few years. The Australians in particular do a lot of this sort of thing – see this group and this group for example. Andrew the Tall Skinny Kiwi was running Cafe Churches back in 1989 when you and I were still in short trousers. There are many examples of Cafe Churches in Britain that can be discovered by using a search engine on the internet.

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This is a single post on the Cartoon Blog by Dave posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 4:24 pm. Click here to read all of the latest posts. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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13 Responses to “Cafe Church”


  1. Tractor Girl says:

    Interesting that now fresh expressions are beginning to turn into some what established expressions that many less cutting edge churches are now bringing the concepts in (rather than taking them out) and using them to adapt what they currently provide within their own church settings.

    That said I don’t think this is necessarily a problem if by bringing in and adapting these ideas previously cutting edge ideas they are revitalising their provision and worship.

    January 29th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
  2. truthsign says:

    I’ll have you know that in 1989 I had just got married, and definitely not in short trousers (hot pants never suited me).

    January 29th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
  3. Dave says:

    If the truth be known I was actually at university. The short trousers bit was just when we had a few hot days in the summer.

    By the way – apologies for some technical problems in the last 20 minutes with pages not loading in Firefox and sometimes not in Explorer – I’ve disabled the ‘latest comments’ which has fixed the problem, but now there are no ‘latest comments’.

    January 29th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
  4. Prof Scrub says:

    Dear Cafe Church minister,

    Will you be serving crumpets with your coffee at mass?

    Prof Scrub

    January 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
  5. jody says:

    2 things

    in 1989, I was 14, and was wearing short denim trousers because I had the legs for it then, don’t now.

    also, sign me up for the training day. I’m hoping the organisation has something to do with mushrooms.

    January 29th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
  6. jody says:

    by the way, I made a ‘bit of a fuss’ about the ‘comments’ thing when you first changed to the ‘new’ way.

    I then discovered that the ‘new way’ was ‘sheer brilliance’.

    ahem…sorry for making aforementioned ‘bit of a fuss’. (and sorry they are now not working and for my overuse of ” in this comment)

    January 29th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
  7. Jack Danger Canty says:

    Over here in Seattle there’s a fantastic little church that started AS a coffee shop. They bought a warehouse, made it into a cafe, and then used the space for a few hours on Sundays to hold worship services.

    The best part is that there are no Christian symbols anywhere on the walls. The church has forced itself to engage it’s community through relationships. Pretty neat stuff (and GREAT coffee).

    http://www.qcafe.org/

    Thanks for all you do Dave :-)

    January 29th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
  8. Aaron says:

    Perhaps you could start an organization with the sole purpose of holding training days…

    January 29th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
  9. Dave says:

    I was thinking that the purpose could be to run training days training people to run training days on how to run a training day.

    January 29th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
  10. Chris Clark says:

    I think the whole things has been done far too expresso with too much americano influence. I’m going round to Maxwell’s House to see what he is up to.

    Kenco for now

    January 30th, 2008 at 8:30 am
  11. Bob Gould says:

    Like a large part of today’s Church, I had CHILDREN at University in 1989 – and they certainly weren’t in short trousers! It’s great to know that there are also many in the Church who aren’t quite so old…

    January 30th, 2008 at 10:50 am
  12. ED says:

    We needs a training day. Preferably in a nice hotel near Hastings…

    January 30th, 2008 at 11:00 am
  13. Philip of Samaria says:

    HASTINGS?

    February 1st, 2008 at 7:15 am