Addison Road

When I grow up, I want to be like David Abbott.

Dave is a guy at our church who is about my age. Dave has the best, most carefully constructed theology of community I’ve ever seen. It goes something like this:

Dave thinks that people who come to church should feel like they belong there, whether they do or not. Because they do, even the ones who are brand new, even the ones who come because their kids need to be baptized somewhere, even the ones who come with fear and trepidation because their last experience at a church ground them down to a pulp, even the ones who wander up the street from the hotels, and are looking more for a few bucks to make rent, and not so much for a worship service. They all belong here, and Dave things that if you belong someplace, then you probably ought to feel like you belong there.

So Dave decided that he was going to make sure that people felt like the patio of our church was their patio, or their living room, or their breakfast nook. He went out and got some outdoor patio furniture, some shade coverings, some lounge chairs, and some tables. Every Sunday, he brings in a couple pounds of freshly roasted coffee, and brews up some good stuff (and anybody who doesn’t think I know good coffee is obviously new around here). He puts it in those same vacuum pumps that you see down at the coffee shop, and labels it. He buys several copies of the Sunday morning paper, and puts them out on the tables, near the chairs and under the shades. In a few weeks, he’s going to come to church with a few guys and build a gazebo to house the coffee stuff.

The thing I love about Dave is this: nobody came to him and asked him to start a coffee ministry (in fact, he probably stepped on a few toes belonging to the people who made the big urns of army coffee before he got rolling). Nobody sat around in a team and brainstormed about how to make people feel welcomed. Nobody marked out a line on a budget and said, “This is our hosting budget to make people feel like they belong.” None of those are bad things. But Dave didn’t wait for any of that to happen.

Dave thinks that people who come to church should feel like they belong there, so he pulled out his wallet, bought the things he needed, and made our church feel like a living room on Sunday morning. When I grow up, I want to be like Dave.