Coffee:Christians:: Kiddush:Jews

There’s a really funny and interesting piece up over at SOMA about how important coffee is to Christian church-goers. The piece is called Praise the Lord and Pass the Caffeine. Here’s a nice little excerpt:
Coffee: is pretty Holy

My surreptitious life “in the closet” as a non-coffee drinker became more difficult to maintain in adulthood, however, when I discovered that my aversion to the holy bean was putting my spiritual life in jeopardy. The big question was not so much how can one live the Christian life as how can one live the Christian life without a cup of Joe each morning during devotions?

Yes, coffee hour is that sacred time when believers come together in fellowship and Folgers. More than once I was forced to drink a cup of non-dairy creamer so I would be accepted by my Christian friends. When it came to the integration of faith and caffeine, I was failing miserably.

Things got worse about five years ago when my family and I began attending the local mega-church, which has become our present church home. Each week as we move through the lobby and head for the sanctuary, I notice a crowd of people milling, cups in hand, under a large sign that says “Coffee Central.” As they sip their gourmet delights, my old feeling of social inadequacy returns. These are the cool people in the church. They are the members who control the house groups and the adult Sunday school classes.

The SOMA article links to a fascinating and bizarre Beliefnet piece also about the role of coffee in Churches.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of coffee to American church life. Pulled apart by their views about salvation, biblical interpretation and social issues, nearly all Christians share a common dedication to the beany brew. In most mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, parishioners gather immediately after services in the parish hall or church basement for kaffeeklatsches that often bear modest names like "fellowship hour" or "community hour," (though an old Lutheran joke calls coffee hour the "third sacrament," after baptism and communion). Young evangelical Christians have taken coffee spirituality offsite. In the past decade, hundreds of coffeehouses have popped up across the country with names like "The Jesus Shack," "Holy Grounds," One Way Café," "Cup O' Joy," and "The Revelation Room."

So essential is coffee to churchgoing that when someone added arsenic to the coffee urn at Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, Maine this spring, killing the 78-year-old head usher and hospitalizing 15 others, parishioners drank coffee for the TV cameras the following Sunday to demonstrate that the hallowed tradition would persevere. Bishop Margaret Payne even showed up to take the symbolic first sip. "I just wanted to make it clear that this isn't a place where you have to be afraid of drinking coffee," she said on CBS News.

Full story
The Kiddush At My Shul: looks nothing like this.
As far as I can tell, in synagogues and temples it’s not so much coffee as it is Kiddush, where all the action takes place. If you don’t want to stay for kichel and shnapps, you don’t get to make friends, discuss the rabbi’s sermon, or chat up the cute new guy. I’m not usually a big fan of Kiddush food (institutional tuna creeps me out) but I’ve noticed that if I leave, I won’t ever get dinner or lunch invites, so I stay and pick at a brownie.

I’ve never thought of Kiddush as spiritual, but both articles point out that community bonding is a big and important part of spiritual life. Cool, and kind of weird.