A Thin Place of Community

I'm sitting at a round, barstool-style table at Panera's Bread on a Friday morning. I'm writing this on my laptop while across from me, putting her laptop to creative use, is my wife Sue. Feels a bit like we are playing "Battleship."

I have long been a student of the coffeshop/cafe' movement. I experience it as a manifestation of the Kingdom of God. People, all sorts of different people, gathered in loose community. There are different agendas of course, but the low buzz is a comforting sound of relationships happening and wanting to happen.

What I wonder, as I observe the movements of life-interaction here, is why the Church struggles so to offer similar sanctuaries of comfort? It feels, at times, that our spaces to house our "religious" activities or way too much of a straight-row, dress-up, quiet-down, don't-enjoy-too-much, Sunday-morning-only, space. As opposed to being a "thin place" where the "veil" between the holy and the ordinary is thinnest.

Mindie Burgoyne writes: "Thin Places are ports in the storm of life, where the pilgrims can move closer to the God they seek, where one leaves that which is familiar and journeys into the Divine Presence. They are stopping places where men and women are given pause to wonder about what lies beyond the mundane rituals, the grief, trials and boredom of our day-to-day life. They probe to the core of the human heart and open the pathway that leads to satisfying the familiar hungers and yearnings common to all people on earth, the hunger to be connected, to be a part of something greater, to be loved, to find peace."

What if we were to marry the concept of the Church with that of the coffee cafe'? What would it look like if there was a thin place to stop for awhile and share in both the hopes and the travails of the journey with others?

Could it be the Church?

Just a thought,

P.C.