Trouble Brewing?

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?

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?
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!
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!
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.

So would it be useful to follow the Starbucks model and shut the doors for an in-house chat among those who believe Christ-following is a serious matter?

What would we talk about, you ask? Well … if I controlled the discussion:

Perhaps we could use the time to discover if we really believe in an eternal destiny where one is “perfected,” welcomed into a never-ending series of discoveries of the glory of God.

We could go over the matter of what it really means to live in pursuit of the Christlike character, a topic that was a favorite of St. Paul’s.

While the doors are closed, we might ask if the present way of doing church life really works. Does the generally accepted institutional system generate courage, wisdom, and solidarity in such a way that its people really do learn how to carry the servant-spirit of Jesus into schools, businesses, and neighborhoods?

Perhaps a door-closed session might provide an opportunity for us to ask ourselves if we are really caring about (and speaking into) the most important things that challenge our world and, close-in, our own society. I for one don’t think so. Is it possible (to borrow a word-picture once ascribed to D.L. Moody) that we are too often haggling amongst ourselves about where to hang pictures while all around us the building we are in is burning.

This is just the start of the conversations that might be possible if we ever closed the doors and asked what we need to change about ourselves before we try to change the world.

Once the doors were opened again, maybe we would re-enact the story Donald Miller told in his book Blue Like Jazz of college students who erected a confessional booth on their campus. Not so that the “outside world” come could and confess its sins to them but so that the people who had been “inside” the church could confess theirs to others. Some parts of Miller’s book confused me, but I understood the point of that story straight-on.

Oh—a postscript to the Starbucks standdown. The next morning at 5.00am I ran my miles in the fitness room at the Denver hotel and then rewarded myself by crossing the street to acquire a black coffee grande (no latte, no flavorings).

“How was your meeting last night,” I asked the barista at the place-your-order position.

“We didn’t do one,” she said. “We just took the night off.” With that she handed me my coffee. As I left the store, I noted that it was less than hot and that it had that rancid taste that suggests that someone needs to clean the pot.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership journal.

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