Leadership Journal

A few days ago the Starbucks chain closed its stores for three and a half evening hours in order to retrain its staff. This was the result of a growing disaffection across the country by customers who complained of long lines, cluttered menus, and expensive coffees that do not live up to the Starbucks claim of quality.

Add to that a sense that baristas seem unwelcoming and insufficiently excited about the artistic side of making the perfect cup of coffee. And at $2.75, a cup of Starbucks coffee better be close to perfect. (Full disclosure: I am not a Starbucks regular.)

I was out of town on the night of the Starbucks time-out, and I noted that the store across the street from my hotel closed down promptly at 5.30 p.m. Lights out; doors locked; baristas gone. A few doors down, the Dunkin Donuts outlet offered shaky and irritable coffee-seekers a 99-cent (special!) substitute: a genius of a marketing counter-punch.

A small national conversation has swirled about the Starbucks evening-off. Bloggers asked if the store-closing was an admission that the company was reading the tea-leaves of customer dissatisfaction and smelling trouble ahead. A guy in the hotel elevator asked if the people who run Starbucks at the top couldn't have done a better job of alerting its customers that the coffee pots were being cooled down for a while. Someone on the Bloomberg network opined that it is impossible to upgrade product and performance standards that quickly, that simply. Lots of people entered the conversation. (And, you've noticed, I am no exception.)

I asked myself, What might happen if a community of Christ-followers, a church, were to follow the Starbucks example and temporarily close its doors for similar reasons?

A few recent events might justify a Starbucks-like exercise. Samples?

1. The Willow Creek self-study called Reveal. A pace-setting congregation has been humble (and wise) enough to study itself and come to conclusions that it needed to do some spiffing up in its ways of developing mature Christians. If the Willow people are struggling, where does that leave the rest of us?
2. The New York Times recently noted a study that identifies an enormous "fluidity" among church-goers who are moving away from their original faith-traditions and realigning themselves with other traditions. … or no tradition at all. Hello!
3. The (George) Barna group seems to publish a book or a study on a weekly basis which all pretty much say the same thing: that George doesn't really like what's going on in churches and feels rather strongly that our shelf-life as a church movement is probably short-lived. This is our beloved pollster; listen to him!
4. Then there's my opinion. I believe that the evangelical movement—in which I've invested my life—has been pretty much hijacked away from its original identity as Jesus-proclaimers and changed into a political movement. Ask any five people on the street what an evangelical is, and I bet four of them will offer a political (not a faith-based) answer. Remember: we are named by those who are not of us; we do not name ourselves.

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