Here’s a simple thought experiment: what if there were as many churches in your area as there are cafés?

Next time you’re walking, driving, or scrolling through Google Maps, pay attention to how many cafés pop up. You don’t have to be a coffee drinker to know—there are a lot. Some are chains. Some are local heroes. Some serve terrible coffee. Some are niche, hipster, high-end, or just plain weird. Some do food. But every café is wrestling with the same question: How can we serve more people better?

I once spoke with a guy who owned a major coffee roasting business and a bunch of cafés. He was obsessed with one metric: how many kilos of coffee do we need to sell each day to break even? (Answer: about 5kg per staff member per day, if you’re curious.)

His core question?
“How do I get more coffee into more hands?”

Now imagine if we started thinking that way about the gospel. Not just, how many people are in our area? But, how many people need to hear the gospel today?

One denomination I know is aiming for one church per 30,000 people. But there are far more cafés than that. What if churches were just as common—and just as creatively diverse?

We’d need all kinds:

• Big churches.
• Little churches.
• Niche churches.
• Multiplying churches.
• Churches that meet at odd times, in odd places, for odd people.

If we were serious about saturating our cities with gospel presence, maybe we’d dream of a future where every time someone stumbles upon a café, there’s also a church nearby—serving grace instead of coffee, and hope instead of heat.

So go ahead—look around your neighbourhood and ask yourself:
What would it take for there to be as many churches as cafés?

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