Smelling the Coffee

‘I don’t think it’s worth it’, was Margaret’s conclusion from our discussion about restarting the coffee mornings we used to run at the church every couple of months before the pandemic. The trouble is that in the meantime we’ve let the church hall to a dance academy on Saturday mornings, and they run for a couple of hours from 9am to 11am. Give them (optimistically) 15 minutes to clear out, and that’s the core of any Saturday coffee morning gone, so running one probably isn’t realistic.

Every church I have ever been connected with has found itself grappling with the conflict between making money from its facilities and having them available for church use. At my old church in High Wycombe, like many churches, we let the hall all week to a nursery; now and again a member of the congregation would express resentment at this, to be told firmly by the vicar that they were welcome to find £15,000 a year (as it was then) so that we wouldn’t need to rent the building out. There is no escaping the absolute necessity to pay our way.

The church coffee mornings might be seen as providing a particularly useful service when Swanvale Halt didn’t have a nice café of its own, but even in those days we barely ever had any trade from people using the Co-Op or meeting friends, and now they prefer to have expensive coffee and cake from the café – or even the coffee stand at the railway station – than come to the church for a cut-price versions served by Margaret and company. Our consumers were people we knew, congregation members or their friends, users of the Day Centre which is usually closed at weekends, and the like. That meant it was really doing something different: providing an occasion for fellowship and interaction in a way that bigger churches mediate by means of home groups. Perhaps this means that the default time of Saturday morning isn’t really important, and we could think in a different direction.