Every Sunday at about 11:15, after the last hymn has been sung and the blessing said, something happens in our parish hall that I have come to believe is as holy as anything that happens in the pews. We call it coffee hour, which undersells it considerably. If worship is where we learn what God thinks of us, coffee hour is where we practice believing it about one another.
The coffee, I will tell you honestly, is not good. It comes out of a percolator older than most of our vestry, the parish’s elected lay leadership, who would agree with me. The cookies are another matter entirely, because somebody in this parish always makes sure of it. In late February, when the lake has gone gray as wool and the walk in from the car requires conviction, that room smells like coffee grounds and sugar and wet wool. It smells, in other words, like belonging.
Here is some of what I have watched happen over a paper cup. Someone learns a name, and I mean really learns it, the kind of learning where next Sunday you ask how the surgery went. A newcomer who has hovered near the door for three weeks gets waved over to a table and stops, in that exact moment, being new. A retired teacher and a seventh grader discover they both think the organ gets carried away on “All Creatures of Our God and King,” and become, improbably, friends. A man who has eaten alone most nights gets talked into Men’s Breakfast, which meets on Thursdays at an hour I can only describe as heroic.
None of this looks like ministry, and that is the disguise. In the Eucharist, the meal of bread and wine at the center of our Sunday worship, we practice being fed by God. At coffee hour, we practice being fed by one another, one small kindness at a time. I preach about mustard seeds more often than is strictly fashionable, and this is why: the kingdom keeps insisting on starting small.
We are in Lent now, the forty quiet days the church keeps before Easter, when many of us try to travel a little lighter. Someone asked me last week whether the cookies would be suspended for the season. They will not. Lent invites us to set down whatever keeps us from love, and I have never once seen a cookie do that.
A word for the introverts
If the phrase “fellowship hour” makes your shoulders climb toward your ears, hear me: you do not have to work the room. It is entirely fine to stand near the cookies and simply be there. I consider standing near the cookies a recognized liturgical posture. Nobody will hand you a clipboard. Nobody will make you wear a name tag, though there is a basket of them by the door if you want one. If someone says hello, they mean hello, not a commitment. And if some weeks you need to slip out after the final hymn instead, no one is keeping a ledger. Grace covers coffee hour, too.
So come. Holy Eucharist, our Sunday service, begins at 10:00; the bell in the tower rings beforehand, and coffee hour follows in the hall. Look for the red doors out front, repainted with a great deal of love, and know that they open easily. The wind off the lake is honest this time of year, but the room behind those doors is warm, and there is a cup of perfectly mediocre coffee waiting with your name on it.
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