The Gospel According to Starbucks

It shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me that I would read a book titled this. It only fuels my passion for the black drink. I just finished this book by Leonard Sweet who I think is a bigger fan than I am. Basically the book is about what Christ followers can learn from the success of Starbucks...and it is a lot more than just serving great coffee. Here's some hightlights:

• It is known that coffee delivers more health-giving antioxidants to our diet than fruit, vegetables, and nuts. At six cups a day and under, coffee reduces yoru chance of getting Parkinson's disease, liver and colon cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, Type 2 diabetes, and, if you are a fast metabolizer, heart disease. As a bonus, coffee improves male fertility. Caffeine can also protect you against skin cancer - but you'd have to smear it on yoru body for it to work (3).
  
• Life is meant to be lived with passion, and that passion is found and practiced through experiences, connection, symbols and images, and the full participation of every part of being (4).
• God has set up shop where you live. The doors are open and the coffee is brewing. God is serving the refreshing antidote to the conventional, unsatisfying, arms-length spiritual life - and God invites you in. God won't make you stand in line (9).
• In the early 1990's Starbucks was bunning for two thousand stores by 2000. By 2006 there were six thousand stores in USAmerica and four thousand overseas and in Canada (11).
• T.S. Eliot, one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, liked to tell of a sign outside a baker's shop advertising bread for one dollar a loaf. You go into the shop, he said, hungry for bread and imagining the fresh smell of bread right out of the oven, only to find that inside the shop all that is for sale are copies of the sign advertising bread. Eliot suggested that the church was too much like that shop (50). I fortunately am a part of a church that is not that way, but I have seen that in other churches. Promise of hope and Grace but really only a shadow of it.
• When the swiss biologist Adof Portmann went ten miles down into the ocean depths, he found in the virgin darkness useless beauty - fish and other oceanic creatures festooned with complex designs and brilliant colors that no one could see or appreciate. No one except a God whose eyes hunger for beauty (57).
• The church has more than enough mission statements and not nearly enough mission relationships and mission movements (61).

Overall, this was a great read. The first half was better than the last. I am still chewing on some parts of it. One part I was really interested in was his highlighting Starbuck's desire to be a "third place." This is a place other than work and home where people gather. The application for the church is huge. If we could be that third place, then we get a natural environment for the Gospel to take root. Here are the necessities:

• It is neutral ground.
• It is inclusive and promotes social equality.
• Conversation is the central activity.
• It is frequented by regulars who welcome newcomers.
• It is typically in a nonpretentious, homey place.
• It fosters a playful mood (132).

How can the church be this third place? How can Suncrest more of this? Is it better to think that our church be that third place or that we create that third place somewhere else? Can our homes that are used for community groups be that? Some of the questions I am wrestling with.