Lexington’s Oglethorpe Fellowship Church plans to add a coffeehouse near the church in mid-October.
Jonathan House, the church’s pastor, and his wife, Ashley, started this project because they wanted to give the neighborhood a place to gather and provide kids a spot for study groups, prayer and more.
"I think our biggest goal is outreach and just providing our community with something our community doesn't have," Ashley said. "Unless they're going to the library, there's nowhere fun and cool for high schoolers to go, unless they go to Athens to hang out.”
The shop will be called Oglethorpe Fellowship Cafe, and the Houses are planning on having an event for the opening on Oct. 14. While not set in stone, the coffeehouse likely will be open a few days a week and offer drip coffee on Sunday mornings before church.
The coffeehouse plans to be open a couple of nights a week, so kids can stop by after school, but the Houses would like the community to help decide the hours.
“We really want to reach the youth," Ashley said.
Jonathan, who has family in Montana, said coffee shops are scattered throughout that area. This gave Jonathan the idea, and when he pitched it to Tim Harrison, the leadership elder at Oglethorpe Fellowship, Harrison said he had already been thinking about doing it.
They also plan on having prayer throughout the week to provide a safe space to discuss difficult issues.
"We want people to be able to ask the hard questions like, ‘Why do good things happen to bad people, or how is Jesus good if good people are going to hell?,’ ” Ashley said. "Those hard questions that people can't ask during church, we want to be able to provide a place for things like that."
Phoenix Athens, a ministry on West Broad Street in Athens, has a coffeehouse and is helping Oglethorpe Fellowship. Phoenix Athens also will send employees to help Oglethorpe Fellowship start its coffeehouse.
"We are set up to order coffee from Phoenix Roasters Coffee," Jonathan said. "It's a Christian-based coffee roastery, so we are going to have beans you can't normally get. It won't be like Starbucks or Dunkin'. It'll be Phoenix Coffee, which is really good."