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| At the Cafe (Painting by Edouard Manet) |
Next thing you know, folks will be toasting Jesus before gulping down a cold one. After all, wasn't it Jesus who turned that water into an alcoholic beverage?
Although wine has certainly been used within church life for centuries, beer has been mostly featured within pubs (Trappist monasteries notwithstanding).
Therefore, if you can't bring the beer to the church, then why not bring the church to the pub?
John Burnett of NPR
reports on exactly that latter concept. He describes
a weekly Sunday-evening church service that is held at a brewpub in Fort Worth, Texas.
Called Church-in-a-Pub (for obvious reasons), this service attracts a different type of congregant than you would typically pass the peace with on a Sunday morning.
If you're thinking that this pub service must be sponsored by some "new-age" group, think again. It is instead considered
to be "an official – if edgy – Lutheran mission."
The "mission" part of these services occurs when, say, a patron nursing a beer by his lonesome happens to overhear a nearby Gospel reading. Curiosity
may have killed the cat, but in this case it may have saved the patron from (pardon the proverb) crying into his beer.
In fact, it may have even saved him from a lot more than that…
Resources
http://wwrn.org/articles/41093/?&place=north-america
Copyright November 12, 2013 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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