The 567 Cafe - An Interview with Keith Watson

In an effort to give our Missional Community group a better understanding of what is going on with our church's cafe, "The 567 Cafe," I am posting the first half of a report I wrote last semester for a class. The aim of the report was to first report on an attempt at cultural engagement, and to follow that up with an analysis of the attempt. So, what follows is the report, which is based largely on an interview I conducted with Pastor Keith. Enjoy!



New City Church downtown (NCCd), of which I am a member, states that “we exist to see the gospel transform everything within our reach… ourselves, our church, our city, and the world.” In April of 2008, the 567 Café became a very public expression of this mission. Located at 567 Cherry St., Macon, Georgia, the café provides a venue for musicians and artists to present their work on Friday and Saturday nights while providing coffee and other refreshments to the patrons.

In an interview on August 1, 2009, Keith Watson, pastor of NCCd said to me the following when asked what the goal of the 567 Café is.

The ultimate goal of the 567 is the same as the mission of our church: to see the gospel transform everything within our reach. The 567 is a tool that, primarily through the relationships we develop there, the gospel can go forward. Our goal primarily is gospel-transformation in people who work, live, or play in downtown Macon.

Another benefit that has been observed by the church in having the 567 Café is that the members can form new relationships with people whom they would not contact otherwise. The setting is an easy place to have conversations that lead to discussing the church, the gospel, and Jesus. Secular artists, musicians, and patrons often ask questions about why a church would provide such a venue in the downtown area. In short, the café serves to help people live missional lives.

New City Church downtown is committed to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. NCCd also holds that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation. The church is a theologically conservative evangelical church which believes in the authority, inerrancy, and infallibility of Scripture. A more complete list of theological beliefs can be found at the church’s website: www.newcitydowntown.org/about_new_city.

Part of the reason NCCd gathers in downtown Macon (and thus the 567 Café is in downtown Macon) is that other churches have left the area, and most of the churches who are still there are not engaging the culture with the gospel. Thus, the 567 Café seeks to be for the good of the city, and the advancement of the kingdom and the gospel.

In addition, downtown Macon has a fairly rich music history and a music scene that seems to be reviving. Keith expounded on how the 567 Café took on its current form.

As a part of the revitalization efforts of downtown, NCCd wanted to involve the visual arts and music. In talking with musicians and others who were downtown, NCCd found that the only places to listen to music were bars. There were no listening rooms. It was just loud bars filled with smoke. We could meet a need in that musicians are looking for a place to play. Macon needed its own residents to see good things happening downtown. The space just fit all of that. It fit our needs and the
needs of the city. That’s contextualizing what we do.

I asked Pastor Keith how he sees the 567 serving to establish a counter-culture rather than a sub-culture. Here is how he answered:

Our hope and goal is to celebrate good things that God has created. God created us to be creative people like he is creative. I believe that’s a part of being created in his image. So we celebrate the creativity of the people in our city. We do so in an environment that is generally clean and safe for family and where we can come with our wife and children. It’s an environment that is good for the musicians as well.

What we do at the 567 is counter-cultural in two ways. It’s counter-cultural in the secular world because we’re a place that celebrates the artists and their creativity. This is very counter-cultural because in the other venues that those artists play, it’s not about the artists or their art; [rather] it’s about them bringing money to the facility. So we’re counter-cultural there in that we truly celebrate them and the gifts that God’s
given to them.

The 567 is also counter-cultural in church culture because we’re not running from our community and our culture. We’re engaging it and celebrating what is good.

When asked to share some of the things that have shown him that God’s hand is really involved in this ministry, Keith shared the following.

Many people have been skeptical of the church being downtown and us doing this cafe thing for music. There have been a number of people who have been sitting back and watching to see whether we were real and genuine. I had a conversation at Bragg Jam last week with a female musician whose lyrics indicates that she’s got Christian background, but you can also hear in her lyrics that something has happened that really hurt her. She walked away from the church several years ago. Well she’s played at the 567 Cafe several times. We have developed a relationship through talking with her about her music and about her playing at the cafe and through serving her while she’s at the Cafe (by helping her get set up and torn down). That developed that relationship so that when we were at Bragg Jam, she and I sat down while one of the musicians was playing and had a thirty minute conversation about religion, church, and the gospel. We’re supposed to meet again for coffee just to talk more. But she was obviously very excited. She said she has not found anyone in the last several years who she felt that she could talk openly and honestly to about her hurts in the church and
religion. So there’s one.

This was I think the tenth year of the Bragg Jam music festival. This was our [the 567’s] second year as a venue and this year we were the only non-alcohol-serving venue at Bragg Jam. We had rave reviews from a lot of the people who played there and who visited there for music. After Bragg Jam, because of the 567 and because our people serve at Bragg Jam, there were some conversations as they were planning for next year’s Bragg Jam. [We talked about NCCd] providing help to them, create a couple
of more venues that were family-friendly, and even having Christian music. One of the ideas was to maybe do some gospel music to bring black and white together-maybe even to bring a couple of the church choirs together as one of the acts. So all of that, to me, is a hint of redemption that is coming through Bragg Jam, which was a pub crawl only two years ago. The only way that that conversation was taking place was because of the 567 and our people serving in the city. So that is a huge success.

City Watch [a Neighborhood Watch for a sixteen block area surrounding the 567 Café] is a result of the 567 because people saw that we were serious about our city and loved our city and wanted to be a part of revitalizing our city. That led to conversations about what we could do about security and other issues downtown. That led to City Watch, which pays a part of Patrick’s monthly income. So that was a big thing directly connected to the 567.

There have been tons of gospel conversations with unbelievers… and on and on.

New City’s efforts have been met with some skepticism from those outside the body. The common misunderstanding was that it would be a “church café” for “church people” with “church bands.” It was thought that the 567 Café would simply be against the things that go on in the city.” The Church in downtown Macon has not generally celebrated with the culture. It has been completely isolated in its own world, following more of Niebuhr’s “Christ Against Culture” model. So, the apprehension was brought about because people expected the 567 Café to be the same.

Contextualizing the Gospel

In his chapter titled "Contextualization: True and False," Lesslie Newbigin discusses the following:

• The need for contextualization


• Historic struggles with contextualization


• Culture is in missionaries and in the Bible


• The church re-contextualizes the gospel in new cultures


• When cultural demands are placed on newly-evangelized cultures by missionaries


• Evidence that the gospel is embraced by a newly evangelized people


• Overcontextualization (false contextualization)


• True contextualization

Here is one of my favorite portions, which is under the "True contextualization" heading as I have outlined the chapter above:

I am saying that authentic Christian thought and action begin not by attending to the aspirations of the people, not by answering the questions they are asking in their terms, not by offering solutions to the problems as the world sees them. It must begin and continue by attending to what God has done in the story of Israel and supremely in the story of Jesus Christ. It must continue by indwelling the story so that it is our story, the way we understand the real story. And then, and this is the vital point to attend with open hearts and minds to the real needs of the people in the way that Jesus attended to them, knowing that the real need is that which can only be satisfied by everything that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). As we share in the life, and worship of the Church, through fellowship, word, and sacrament, we indwell the story and from within that story we seek to be the voice and the hands of Jesus for our time and place. [Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 151].

He continues shortly thereafter on p.152, showing how we might fail.

I am thus again stressing the priority of the gospel as the message, embodied in an actual story of what God has in fact done, is doing, and will do. Christian theology is a form of rational discourse developed within the community which accepts the primacy of this story and seeks actively to live in the world in accordance with the story. It can fail by failing to understand and take seriously the world in which it is set so that the gospel is not heard but remains incomprehensible because the Church has sought security in its own past instead of risking its life in a deep involvement with the world. It can fail, on the other hand, by allowing the world to dictate the issues and the terms of the meeting. The result then is that the world is not challenged at its depth but rather absorbs and domesticates the gospel and uses it to sacralize its own purposes. ... True contextualization accords to the gospel its rightful primacy, its power to penetrate every culture and to speak within each culture, in its own speech and symbol, the word which is both No and Yes, both judgment and grace. And that happens when the word is not a disembodied word, but comes from a community which embodies the true story, God's story, in a style of life which communicates both the grace and the judgment. In order that it may do this, it must be both truly local and truly ecumenical. Truly local in that it embodies God's particular word of grace and judgment for that people. Truly ecumenical in being open to the witness of churches in all other places, and thus saved from absorption into the culture of that place and enabled to represent to that place the universality, the catholicity of God's purpose of grace and judgment for all humanity. [Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 152].