The coffee shop is my 'Church for the Nones'

Finding community isn't easy.

A few days ago, a Christian friend of mine sent along a link to the latest Perry Bacon Jr. column at the Washington Post. It was funny — this friend has never evangelized me or condescendingly promised to pray for me, but she has listened to some of my troubled feelings about not being in the church (like Huck Finn, I find myself unable to pray a lie) while also permitting me to recognize that I miss some of the things that church used to bring to my life. And she has, graciously and wisely I think, let me sit with those contradictions instead of trying to argue me out of them.

It’s also fair to say she saw me in Bacon’s longing in a “Church for the Nones.”

Like me, Bacon grew up in the church. Like me, he stepped away because he was unable to square his personal values with that of the broader institution. And like me, he sees there are some things missing now that he wishes he could recoup without going to church exactly.

He writes:

My upbringing makes me particularly inclined to see a church-sized hole in American life. But as a middle-aged American in the middle of the country, I don’t think that hole is just in my imagination. Kids need places to learn values like forgiveness, while schools focus on math and reading. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents and some free babysitting on weekends. Retirees need places to build new relationships, as their friends and spouses pass away.

Our society needs places that integrate people across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places to get practical, weekly advice about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values that they committed to during the Trump years. The anti-Trump majority in the United States needs institutions that are separate from the official Democratic Party, which is unsurprisingly more focused on winning elections than in creating a sense of community for left-leaning people.

What he wants, then, is a church for the church-less — a place where people can get the community that a church provides, and maybe even some push to offer service to each other, and maybe even a little of the messiness that has gone missing from our lives as we sort ourselves into educationally and politically homogeneous communities.

It’s not the sort of thing that happens quite as easily or organically outside of church.

And yeah, Bacon’s lament is often my own.

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At the end of 2020, just a few months before I was vaccinated, I reflected briefly on my church-lessness and admitted I needed to get something back.

Even before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer who worked from home and who attended church once or twice a year. It didn't feel great! I could go days without leaving the house, even, unless I made a real effort. Oh, I have a few friends I see now and again, and sitting outside the coffee shop with a socially distanced group of men has saved my sanity over the last few months, but the truth is it has been awhile since I was enmeshed in the networks he describes here. I feel their absence.

To be sure, I'm not sure how to reclaim those networks for myself. But I've come to realize I need to try, somehow.

At the time, I thought I might try to give church another try. It hasn’t happened.

It’s not a lack of desire. About a year ago, I spent an afternoon sitting with a friend who was in hospice, reading aloud to him from his memoirs — he was an exceptional writer who wanted to hear his own written words one last time before he passed. And as it happened, the portion of his memoir that I read to him was precisely the part of my life where we met — when I moved to a Kansas college town and started attending a progressive Mennonite congregation.

This was a bit more than 20 years ago. And it was a messy time. We wrestled collectively with whether to become an “open and affirming” congregation that would accept LGBT people into membership. That was a difficult process, our members torn between their broadly loving and accepting inclinations, long-standing church traditions and doctrine, and the threat of discipline from the broader denomination. We eventually chose to take the step. But there were tears along the way.

Don’t be mistaken: We didn’t only wrestle with each other. We spent time together. We celebrated together. We mourned together. We sometimes sat, emotionally uncomfortable, together. We made music and meals together. We sat around campfires together. Some of us dated, and then didn’t. We drank beer together.

I learned how to be the kind of adult I wanted to be from those folks. I didn’t really know before that. It was in some ways the richest community I have ever experienced. Reading it in that hospice room brought it all flooding back to me.

Time passes though. I’ll never get that experience back.

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Again, I didn’t go back to church. But I have gone back to the coffee shop. Just about every day.

Is it weird to say the coffee shop is my richest source of community these days? Maybe. All I know is that it suffices for me.

With the exception of the eight years we spent in Philadelphia, I have been a regular at my Lawrence coffee shop for more than 20 years. Some of the people I met back then are still meaningful friends to me — the grad student who has long since moved on to a professorship in California; the young woman who read Dan Brown novels who is now a mom and business owner in Oakland; the recently divorced father who is now an executive.

But it’s more than that.

I’m not sure how much my fellow regulars recognize themselves as a community, but they surely are. We enjoy each other’s pets and children, who are just as surely part of the community. We call to check in on each other when somebody hasn’t showed up for awhile. We celebrate together. We mourn together. The best of us take each other to doctor’s appointments. We wrestle with each other and joke about politics together, and we annoy the hell out of each other, and we gossip together, and we all know the guy who can fix our minor mechanical troubles if need be.

And it is wonderful.

My coffee shop is not church. It cannot be. We are not orienting ourselves toward the divine amidst the iced teas and lattes. There is no worship, and certainly no repentance of sin. (There might even be some glorying in sin.) There is no music, no four-part harmony to lift your heart up to the skies.

Instead, we are simply — the regulars, the somewhat-regulars, the not-so-regulars and the rest — are together in our none-ness. Maybe it’s the best I can get absent some Omniscient Being compelling us to be there together.

It’s not bad. It’s pretty good. It will have to do.