Coffee & Church Planting

You may have noticed the new name for our blog. We live in coffee country and love to brew a pot of java in the mornings. Occasionally we will find a good cup of mochaccino. We have recently found a new hobby. At the market we can buy green coffee beans at $1.50 per pound. Bill roasts the beans on the grill, and in less than half an hour we have a fresh medium roast with a superb taste.

Our area director is a coffee connoisseur and wrote this article entitled the "Arabica Principle".

Coffee berries grow on small trees—shrubs, really—and two species dominate the commercial market. Take the coffea arabica variety, for instance, which grows in altitudes of up to 15,000 feet and is usually harvested by hand. We could pick arabica beans (which are the pits inside the berries) from a single plant in Ecuador, say, and plant them in Sumatra, Kenya, Java or Brazil. Then, such things as the climate, altitude, and soil in each place—in addition to the manner in which the plants were cultivated, the beans processed and the coffee prepared—would all contribute distinctive qualities to the steaming brew that ended up in your mug. This is the principle we seek to apply as we plant new churches around the world. Often, missionaries have often taken a different approach. Instead of planting church seeds—the essential elements of a New Testament local church—and then allowing their cultures and environments to shape their development, they have exported “potted plants” and carefully controlled their growing conditions to ensure that the final products are essentially North American churches in new locations. But the beauty of the Church is that it is transcultural. Within biblical parameters, it can assume the many colors, textures and flavors of the "tribes, tongues, peoples and nations" which constitute it. The Church even started out that way in Acts 2, with 3,000 people from sixteen distinct groups being converted on the first day! And the church at Antioch, the first missionary sending church, was a multi-ethnic congregation. We should not be intimidated by the impact of different cultures on the churches we plant. Just as no children are exactly like their parents, we ought not to expect churches planted overseas to be exactly like ours. Transplanting our North American church schedules, worship styles (including things like music and attire), evangelistic methods and approaches to training not only puts undue pressure on our missionaries, but also detracts from the character and effectiveness of new churches. Instead, we propose the Arabica Principle: training national leaders to plant truly indigenous churches that are biblical, vibrant, culturally relevant, autonomous and reproducing. It's like the difference between freeze-dried and freshly roasted.