Christchurch has always been a church with community at its heart. We are fortunate enough to have our own building and community centre used every day of the week to serve the community. We have many thriving groups; Parent and toddlers, youth work, Alpha, senior citizens and our own cafe which runs twice a week. We want to be a body of God’s people active and engaged with our community, demonstrating God’s love in all that we do.

But increasingly we recognise that for many of those we want to reach, our friends, family and contacts, our church building can act as a barrier. For many in our society today the church building on the high street is seen as a symbol of ‘religion’ and the meeting place of ‘religious people’, old fashioned, out dated and without relevance. Whatever is going on in there they are not going to come in to find out!

Of course, thankfully many Christians understand that our buildings are actually here to help us bear witness to a God who is far from religious. They are here to help us draw others to His Son, Jesus, a man for the people, going to every place that people were, eating, drinking, laughing, crying. Jesus ate meals, drank wine, chatted, visited with his friends and talked about everyday issues that affected people, sharing with them God’s heart and love. A great word for Jesus from the Bible is Emmanuel. It means ‘God with us’ and in Jesus He is! At school, at home, at work, in the pub, in prison, in church, in the street God is with us, the people He made and loves, the people He longs to have a real relationship with.

So we started to think about the places where we did meet our friends, where they did feel comfortable. The meeting places. We started to ask ourselves if Jesus was here today in our town where might He sit with people, talking and listening. And it seemed that one of those places might be a coffee shop. We happened to choose Costa. The idea developed naturally from that really. Costa seemed to be a great place to have a group of Christians meet up, either bringing friends that they knew, or just being there for people who felt comfortable to come in and have a coffee.