Below is a an excerpt from a recent CNN article:  this article is yet another reason why Churches Need Bars & Bartenders……

As part of his research for the book,“Everything but the Coffee”, Professor Bryant Simon of Temple University visited hundreds of Starbucks coffee houses, presumably drinking a lot of coffee but also watching his fellow customers, and here’s something he discovered: very few of them talk to each other.

We drink our coffee, we type on our laptop computers, we may read our books. If we came in with friends or business associates, we talk to them, of course. But Professor Simon writes that he saw very few spontaneous discussions among strangers.

He’s disappointed about that because, “Talk and ideas are crucial to the making of community.”

In “Bowling Alone”,  Harvard University sociologist Robert Putnam wrote about membership declines in everything from bowling leagues to churches to the PTA, and linked those declines to a breakdown in civic participation.

Once upon a time, big ideas were discussed in coffee houses. In 17th Century Britain, people sometimes called them “penny universities.” Coffee house discussions in colonial America helped set the stage for the American Revolution, and the New York Stock Exchange started at a coffee house in 1792.

These days, we have other places to share our ideas: we can blog, we can tweet, we can call radio talk shows. But based on Professor Simon’s observations at Starbucks, we may need a little more help communicating face-to face. Perhaps we’re all just too busy with our laptops, but maybe the solution could be something as simple as changing the furniture: I was in an independent coffee house outside Pittsburgh recently. Customers there sat around a semi-circular counter, and the conversation flowed as freely as the coffee.

Church Bartender Tip: it’s time to move beyond self-serve coffee that has been placed against a wall and create ways to facilitate conversation; changing the shape of our facilities can shape and cultivate our lives in such a way that conversation face to face is a normal part of community.

(exert from Drinking Alone by CNN writer Jim Dexter)