Christ and the Coffee Cup

Is not the heart of American life the coffee cup? When most of us wake up in the morning, we rather feel the day more promising after a cupful of aromatic breakfast coffee. And the way many employees in business tell time, of course, is not so much by the clock on the wall as by the morning or afternoon coffee break. Even executives frequently make important transactions over a cup of coffee. And it is not uncommon to see one lover gaze into the eyes of another while unsipped coffee cools. Students would flunk out of school without coffee, and the Navy would sink without coffee!

But what does the coffee cup possibly have to do with Christ? Much indeed. For one thing, it is over coffee that so many people come together, quietly relax and talk of the doings of the day. It is there they deepen their friendships. Coffee and conversation just go together. When people in our rushed and impersonal America become desperately lonely, as they often do, they hunger to meet with someone in the deeper dimensions of life. They are tired of the breezy, shallow and superficial ways so well-known to all of us. And it is the simple, common coffee cup that can often provide just the setting in which one may open and share his inner life with a friend. Coffee means communion.

Coffee Cup Evangelism

But again you ask, what has this to do with Jesus Christ? One of the deepest needs of the modern American is the need for friendship and inter-personal communion. He has lost individual identity by becoming a unit in the “lonely crowd.” He has found himself an automation within the machinery of mass culture, and often it is over so small a thing as a coffee cup that he seeks to recapture his identity. To put it simply, he is open to friendship and responds appreciatively when someone will treat him as though he were important—just because he is. It is in this context that a Christian can be a friend. And it is in this friendship that Jesus Christ can be winsomely presented as Saviour and Friend. We might well call this “coffee cup evangelism.”

Mass meetings, special preaching missions, Sunday evening evangelistic services, all have their place, and God has used them. But too often we count on them as the sole means of presenting the Good News. We have become convinced that only a few chosen ones can adequately tell of the love of Christ; only those who are professional evangelists, those who have seminary education, and those who are in “full-time” Christian work can persuade the nonbeliever to entrust himself to the Saviour! We have quite forgotten that most of us everyday five-and-ten-cent-store Christians are appointed by God as ministers of reconciliation. There are indeed those who have special gifts and ministries, such as teaching, pastoring, and evangelizing. But this does not cancel the commission God has given each of us to be an agent of reconciliation.

A Point Of Contact

How then may we fulfill this special trust from God? First of all, by the earnest exercise of prayer. Then, by means of the coffee cup. Why not? Many of our non-Christian acquaintances (and I use the word advisedly) never attend church. They would politely shun our attempts to get them to an evangelistic service. But they do drink coffee, and they hunger for friendship. Yet because they are not Christian we have not been friends to them, only acquaintances. We have looked upon them somewhat as impersonal “souls to be saved.” And we have not seen them as human beings with joys and sorrows and tensions and defeats and successes of which we share our common humanity. Too often the Christian has failed to join the human race!

Let us see the coffee cup, then, as a symbol of sincere, outgoing friendship to a non-Christian. Friendship may indeed be established and deepened over just a simple cup of coffee. A neighbor invited in mid-morning, a schoolmate with another at a stop between classes, a business acquaintance and you at the coffee shop—these present unequaled opportunities for extending friendship and in God’s time for sharing quietly Jesus Christ. Sincere friendship is an almost certain way to gain the occasion of speaking about spiritual values in life and sharing the Lord’s Good News.

Of course, there are other means to this: playing golf with a non-Christian friend; inviting him to dinner; out of thoughtfulness taking a forgotten trash can to the curb, or bringing in the wash of an absent neighbor before it rains; just a walk together or the sharing of a mutual interest. The list is endless.

But a word of warning is necessary. People are not insensitive to inter-personal feelings, and they know almost intuitively whether the friendship offered is sincere and genuine, or whether it is calculated as a means to an end. Our love and friendship ought to be freely and uncalculatingly given, not a friendship-with-a-price-tag—the tag being conversion. That is using people, treating them as things, and not loving them just because they are and because God loves them. The friendship of calculation is hypocrisy; the friendship of love and respect is a reflection of the love of God and may well be the wedge that God uses to open a friend’s heart to Christ.

Cordiality And Grace

We may not have the gift of teaching, nor of evangelism (in the sense of prominent public evangelism), nor of pastoral administration. But we all do have the peerless gift of God’s love shed abroad in our hearts. This is a spiritual gift that surpasses all others. And this kind of love, expressed in a pure and cordial friendship, is our most effective way of being an agent of reconciliation. All of us can be friends for Christ’s sake. The lonesome face mirrored in the half-filled cup may be the symbol of a soul without another companion to lift life above a monologue.

Christ and the coffee cup. Why not bring our Saviour into the very center of everyday American life as we drink coffee—and make friends—to the glory of the living God.

Warner A. Hutchinson holds the B.A. degree from University of California at Los Angeles, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and the B.D. degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. He has served as chaplain with the United States Navy and in the Spring assisted the Billy Graham Crusade in San Francisco.

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