I was hunched over my laptop and quadruple espresso when I heard the barista behind me muse to her colleague: “If you think about it, the wheat is crushed, water is added, and then it is heated to be turned into bread. Grapes, on the other hand, are crushed, and juice is extracted, and left to ferment to be turned into wine. Coffee has the cherry removed, and then is fermented [to remove the mucilage]. Then it is roasted, and then you add water to turn it into coffee. It’s like both bread and wine in the cup!” I could not help myself. I turned and said, “You sound like a priest in the making!” Both young baristas flushed and quickly demurred. The women said that they were Christians who “go to” the local evangelical Baptist church, and they only had male pastors.
I knew both women to be serial entrepreneurs who started and manage the coffeehouse that we were in. They decorated the space with all manner of Christian word-art [Micah 6:8 “Act Justly, Love Mercy, & Walk Humbly”; Joshua 24:15 “As for me and my house…”]. They created a space to intentionally welcome Bible studies and prayer groups, and to revitalize the main square of a small town in southeastern Indiana.
In conversations that turned into semi-formal ethnographic interviews, the women told me, separately, that they both felt called to create a space where people could assemble to study and pray, to “break bread and fill cups,” and to bring life to their community (see Bachrach on commercial sites as religious space in Barcelona). When I suggested to them that they sounded like my friends who are pastors and priests, they both offered – again, in separate interviews – that they “celebrate the sacrament of the people” i.e., coffee. They have created a coffee shop as a realization of their discerned callings, and not specifically as a ministry of their church. They expressed that careful sourcing, closely-monitored small batch roasting, and rigorous training of baristas to pull excellent shots every time is their way to love both God and neighbor.
Coffee has a long history of being closely tied to religious traditions and practices viewed askance by majority practitioners. Ethiopian Christian women prepare Buna coffee ceremonies where the participant is invited to drink three cups, with the baraka [blessing] of the last vessel being realized in the stomach of the participant when the three cups return to a unity [Trinity] (Palmer, 2010). Sufi Muslim scholars enjoyed the benefits of increased energy and focus from coffee, even as other Muslim scholars expressed concern for intoxication (Topik, 2009). In Europe, coffeehouses were greeted with suspicion and concern by both clergy and magistrates who viewed the “bitter effervescence” and free thought that emerged from them as a rising danger (Schenck, 2019). This paper will analyze the ways in which coffee continues to fuel religious change as it becomes a popular sacrament through the offering and reception of evangelical Christians.
For evangelical Christian businesswomen, opening and leading what is essentially a parallel structure to their formal church allows them to perform Christian religious leadership that is not problematic for their evangelical Christian notions of religion and gender (Ingersoll, 2003; Du Mez, 2021; Barr, 2020). The baristas/owners deeply theologize their coffee business as “feeding the Body [of Christ]” (Grem, 2016; Lofton, 2017). By offering the fruit of the coffee tree that has been plucked, tortured, burnt and yet, has had life-giving vapor passed through it to make it become a source of life and energy, the baristas identify the coffee bean and grounds with the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. They offer, in effect, Christ in their cups, even as they eschew both real-presence sacramentality as well as institutional female religious leadership (relatedly, Payne, 2016).
An ethnographic approach to studying the lived religion in coffeehouses seeks to draw out the women’s popular sacramental leadership and religious space creation by interviewing female owners and baristas at midwestern Christian coffeehouses. This work contributes to at least three threads of the study of religion. First, celebrating indigenous theory, I want to theorize with the baristas as they frame their preparation and presentation of food and drink as a celebrating a physical manifestation of God’s grace in the “sacrament of the people.”
Second, I will analyze the creation of the coffeehouse as a parallel church structure with female evangelical quasi-“clergy.” All of the female evangelical Christian baristas that I have interviewed so far have said that they wanted to go into some kind of religious leadership, and many considered or attended some sort of seminary. But ultimately, they concluded that religious leadership in their evangelical church was men’s work. However, the female baristas create intentionally religious space; encourage and sometimes lead Bible studies and prayer groups; and serve coffee that, again, they view as a physical manifestation as God’s grace. How do women create religious spaces, foster religious activities, act as priests serving the “sacrament of the people,” and not see themselves in the role of clergy (see Ward, 2025, esp p63)? And what does that mean for formations of evangelical Christianity if these traditional sacerdotal activities are divorced from the role of pastor?
Third, and this may be cut for time, the particular coffee shops that I have visited include Hebrew language artwork, include Hebrew words in the coffeehouse names, post mezuzot on the doors, and have pictures of the founders and other baristas in Jerusalem, along with pictures of the menorah in front of the Israeli Knesset. At one coffeehouse, during Christmas time, many of the baristas’ stocking hung on a back wall had their names written in Hebrew. Building on previous work (Ariel 2013), I will examine the “unusual relationship” between Evangelical Christian coffeehouse owners and Judaica.
Examining the other-than-formal sacramental leadership of evangelical Christian female coffeehouse entrepreneurs and baristas sheds light on the foodways and sacred spaces of North American Christian culture, and deepens the ethnographic witness of Evangelical Christianity.
Small towns and big cities alike witness the phenomenon of the independent café that is either supported by a local church or was created to meet many of the functions of a parish church – a place for meeting, study and prayer. But, increasingly, some evangelical Christian women – who eschew formal leadership roles for women in their congregations and micro-denominations – theorize themselves as celebrating the “sacrament of the people” through their coffee service. This paper marshals years of ethnographic research to analyze why and how female coffeehouse owners and baristas construct alternative sacred sites and popular priesthoods that are tolerated within their own gender schemas. Coffee becomes a central mediator of gendered authority for evangelical Christian women.