What Coffee Do You Worship?

Kyle Potter has picked up on the above graphic, which some are using to describe differences in church worship styles. He makes some good points about the problems in describing worship styles in knowingly “post-modern” ways.

To me the problem with the graphic is that it buys uncritically into an attractional understanding of worship. What I mean by that is that it seems to suggest that all we need to do is understand the core “values” of a target-market then tailor the “worship-experience” to meet the target market. Rather surprisngly, Andrew Jones’ comment that the third drink must be “Fair-trade chai made from cruelty-free tea leaves and NOT purchased from Starbucks,” buys into this kind of mindset (it will be interesting to see how the discussion on TallSkinnyKiwi unfolds). Rather than start with target-markets, we should probably start with ecclesiology, or better yet with a theology of culture that ground both the ecclesiology (or missio-ecclesia). This is what I get to be Kyle’s point; people might be part of worship service for reasons far removed from the ways that thing could be used (marketed) to attract newcomers.

Those caveats aside, there is something that I do like in the graphic and I think does tell us something. The first cup is all about home, it gives me a sense of church as tied to home-life to family, to comfort in familarity. The second cup is almost pace and motion, about busyness. It is coffee on the move for the upwardly mobile. The third cup spoke to me about cafe-culture in a positive way (though it may carry negative connotations for others). I spent a great deal of my time in London in cafes as both metting places and thinking spaces and am fascinated with how, through Wi-Fi they have become networking spaces. The cafe may not be an adequate metaphor to describe either church or worship, but placed against the other two images, it is a good way of describing social contexts and maybe even relations between faith and broader culture, as long as we remember they are simply evocative metaphors and as long as we do not conflate consumption with worship.