James Henley

The Community Coffeehouse in Cincinnati

Leadership Magazine in the US has a great article which profiles a church in Cincinnati which runs a cafe for its local community in a challenging area:

We said, “Let’s be a welcoming place, a place where people experience love and grace, whether they’re wealthy or homeless, educated or street people.” A look at the books in the café—mostly dealing with justice issues—shows it’s a Christian place, but not one with a narrow agenda. We have singer-songwriters, comedians, and other events; the independent newspaper listed us as one of the best places to listen to jazz in the city.

The Rohs Street Cafe has been running since 2003. Here’s two ways they’ve managed to develop the Cafe’s influence and prophetic presence in the local community:

They’ve successfully managed to involve and include local community groups, encouraging them to use the Church building: eg. ‘council subcommittees, the Clifton Heights Improvement Association, the Citizens on Patrol, and an AA group.’
For the last 3 years, they’ve been developing a co-operative with a community of Coffee growers in Guatemala who they’ve developed a relationship with.

For them, as with our little cafe at St Paul’s, their biggest challenge has been making their finances work.

And I love this story:

Recently, a stand-up comedian performed at the café, and his routines slammed evangelical Christians and slammed gays. Our manager was aghast: sitting there that night was a leader in Cincinnati’s gay community. So he went over to apologize. But the other person spoke first: “Can you believe what that comedian said about Christians? That is outrageous! You are not like that. I’m going to tell him how offensive that was to me.”

You can read the whole article here.