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.
About a month ago, we gave the congregation at St Paul’s an update on how The Lab is going, and - for those who didn’t know - introduced them to who we are and what we do.
This is my preach from that service (the text is Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus from Luke 19:1-10), which you might find interesting if you’d like to know a bit more of what we get up to. Sarah - one of our current youth work apprentices - also shares a bit from her perspective having spent a year with us in Alway.
Photos from Hope Newport 2011 which happened last Thursday - Friday. The Alway team cleaned up and repainted some basketball courts in the centre of the Alway estate, and hosted a family fun day and BBQ on the Saturday. A pretty exhausting, slightly dramatic, but altogether great three days.
Around 250 volunteers from about 10 (possibly more) churches took part in Hope 2011, doing projects in 6 different areas of the city, in support with Newport City Council, Newport City Homes, Communities First Teams, local Community Associations, Newport Youth Service and others.
Carol Service!
For this year carol service at St Paul’s, we assembled a creative team from The Lab to plan the service with a bit of an arty, creative edge. They came up with these amazing video readings which we used in the service, with voice overs from St Paul’s members and video shot around Newport.
Thanks to Stef especially, as well as Dan, who put lots of work into filming, recording and editing them. Check them out as a way of walking through and reflecting on the story of the first Christmas.
This is sermon audio from my talk at St Paul’s for Pentecost last Sunday - which is basically an introduction to the Holy Spirit. I quite enjoyed planning and delivering this one - and it’s pretty short at 13 minutes - so I hope you enjoy listening to it.
You can also catch my Lab talk from last Sunday evening (or get it on iTunes).
