Ray Oldenburg coined the term Third Place, not Starbucks.

Ray notes that there is an element that is good for society for people to do community in the Third Place, not home, not job, a third place, like Cheers.  Cafes are hubs of local activity in Northeast Seattle, the Top Pot, Starbucks, Zoka; these are the places people congregate.  The third place is the answer to the deep and eternal gap in the hearts of us all.  We don’t walk in community with God as we were intended.  A third place is a must for many of us, because we live in a disjointed, fallen world where we don’t do community effortlessly or with our Creator at all. Something powerful and recreative can be realized in living out our faith in public space for community.

Coffee is never just coffee.  Our life as Christ followers is all about word pictures, meeting with Christian friends, even over hazelnut drip coffee and a shot-in-the-dark is a word picture, a foreshadow of redeemed creation together in Heaven with Jesus, eating the wedding supper of The Lamb.  We get together as a family during corporate worship and eat a meal of bread and wine, a word picture of Christ on the Cross-for His Church.

Just yesterday I was at the Grateful Bread with one of our pastors and a couple of Mars Hill folk came up to us just to introduces themselves and say hello.  We had never had the pleasure of meeting them before but as Christian family it was a treat to even get to chat with them for a moment.  In The City of God within the City of Man an introduction is a reminder that the Church invisible is around and in little ways the Kingdom is breaking through as we live; the Seattle within Seattle.  And coffee shops that charge $5 for a cup of coffee have afforded us a venue to live our faith to a dying world.

Our response to expensive coffee is not to brew coffee at home, by ourselves, to save a buck.  Our response is to eat, drink, and tip well.  To imagine the ways that we can be a pilot community as a display of what Jesus has done in us, and just as He has invited us into His community, we need to go so that we can invite others into ours.