Betty's Secret Ingredient - Christianity Today

On a dark and dismal day a while back, my wife and I went for coffee at a place we like. We each ordered a latté and chose a pastry to split. The clerk, noting the other pastry we almost chose, put it in a separate bag and said, “Here, I think you’d really like this one too.”

No doubt we would, I thought, nearly objecting. Then I saw in his eyes that he was giving us a gift. That was just the start.

One of this bakery’s specialties is their chicken pot-pie, and that sounded like perfect comfort food on such a day. So as we came to the cash register, we told our clerk we wanted to buy one of those as well. He placed a full, delicious looking pot-pie in our bag, and then stepped to another part of bakery. When he returned he had a scrumptious, whole apple pie that he gently laid in our bag as well, saying, “You will love this. It goes great with the chicken pot pie.” It was a gift, simply and unmistakably.

Welcome to Bake Sale Betty’s, an unmarked bakery on an unattractive corner in Oakland. Over the years, their building has been the site of many failed businesses, mostly the check-cashing ilk. Betty’s is not failing. In fact, Betty’s rules and it has for several years.

Betty herself wears a shiny electric-blue synthetic wig, sells fried chicken sandwiches by the hundreds, serves unusual and delicious pastries, bakes a chicken pot-pie that makes all others incidental. The long lines out the door, wending alongside uncovered ironing boards and stools that are Betty’s outside seating, tells you it’s a popular place.

But the most important ingredient isn’t one you can see: magnanimity.

I am not a frequent, known, or favored customer at Betty’s. I don’t believe I looked especially desperate the morning my wife and I showed up for coffee. I think I looked like I could buy what they were selling if I needed or wanted to do so. And Betty’s is clearly a business that sells outstanding food. But Betty and her husband have chosen to do business magnanimously.

It would be easy to imagine that in the cynical atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area all this could be sneered at as customer manipulation, cheap advertising, or worse, economic stupidity! What people of every color, stripe, and class do instead is just get in line and smile, whether you end up paying for all you take away or not. Betty’s doesn’t add any hooks like punched coupon cards, or fliers to pass along to friends, or cute one-liners about future purchases or obligations.

Some places I go for coffee have small tasting plates of cookie crumbs or pastry fragments to tempt the customer. Not Betty’s. The place is heaped up with piles of their delectable goods and what they give away is the whole thing or nothing. It’s unexpected. It’s shocking. It’s joyful. It’s magnanimous. It’s tastes like grace.

For a pastor, Betty’s begs lots of questions: Is such magnanimity the spirit and reputation of my church or of yours? Is heaped-up, open-handed goodness without strings the love we share with people who come to our doors, whether they’re regulars or not? Why do so many of us who claim to be ambassadors for abundant grace live lives of stingy scarcity?

At Betty’s I was given something really good and the giving of it was so free, so unself-conscious, and so personal. Is this how people leave after a visit to our church?

In the late afternoon of that same day, I unexpectedly found myself back at Betty’s to meet a friend. Again, a cup of coffee was all I had in mind, though I admit I was looking forward to the pot pie and apple pie later than night. As we stood in line, a clerk came along handing to each person a delicious, warm cookie, presumably to make up for our wait in line. When we got to the front, I ordered a coffee and my friend ordered a coffee and a fried chicken sandwich. I asked our clerk out of curiosity how much an apple pie cost. He told me, wondering if I wanted one.

“No, I am set,” I said, smiling. As he finished gathering our order together, the clerk stuck in a large piece of apple pie, and two forks and said, “you will really enjoy this.”

And we did. And we’ll be back: magnanimity is in short supply and Betty’s is the place. Is the church too?

Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California