A Very Short History of Cafechurch

The community which re-founded Northcote Uniting Church in 2019 was known as Cafechurch. This is a very short summary of their history.

Foundation Myth

Our foundation myth is this.

Once upon a time in the late nineties, Steve, the youth pastor of a large church in the leafy Eastern suburbs of Melbourne gathered together a few of the slightly disconnected young people associated with his church and approached the church eldership.

He said to them something to the effect of “we want to do something to really bring the truth of the gospel to our generation.”

The elders said, “Terrific! We love you, we love your energy, and we really want to get behind this terrific initiative. So, you can have the 5:30 service to do something specifically for the people who God has obviously laid on your heart.”

“Great,” said Steve.

“However,” continued the elders, “we have a few… a very few… caveats. Firstly, given that we meet in a school hall, the chairs have to stay where they are.”

“OK,” said Steve.

“And the worship is a key part of our brand. So you have to retain that.”

“Yes…”

“And, when it’s the Senior Pastor’s turn to preach, he spends days crafting his message. So you would have to include that.”

“Of course….”

And so the conversation went, until the conclusion was that Steve and his team could light a candle on the stage.

At which point Steve said something like this: “Thank you so much for all the support you are showing me and I really feel all the love in the room for this idea. However, we think there might be even further levels of Gospel contextualisation which might be possible.”

So in 1999, he and his not very connected young people began to meet in a café in Hawthorn, on Tuesdays at 6:30, to be a “church we actually want to go to.” The deal was: pay for your own dinner, and we will pay for the coffees, as an act of hospitality.

Potted History

Cafechurch was a churchplant from Stairway Church (formerly C3 Whitehorse), founded by Steve Venour, who had been the youth pastor. The community met in a number of cafes and then pubs (because they have function rooms) in Eastern and then Inner City Melbourne. Steve stepped down as key leader in 2009, and was succeeded by Alister Pate.

Cafechurch separated amicably from C3 in around 2006, and between 2007 and 2012 was in a relationship with a similar group called Solace, who had been a church plant largely from St Hilary’s Kew.

A lot of people have come and gone from our community over the years, but the vibe has remained the same. We tried to sum it up with our four values:

1. Everything is spiritual: How chatting over coffee in a bar is in fact a radically incarnational statement.

2. Open-ness, inclusivity, and acceptance: How can we wrestle honestly with questions of faith? Is doubt OK? Inevitable? Perhaps even a bit desirable sometimes?

3. Authenticity: We want to be real – real with each other, real in our dealings with the world, real with God. How can we free ourselves of masks and encourage one another?

4. We’re all in this together: Some people like to call it “Every Member Ministry”, but we’re going to experiment with Church as Wikipedia.

The format was conversational three weeks a month, and we had communion, generally in the chapel of the Centre for Theology and Ministry on the final Tuesday of the month.

One way to think about it is to ask: What would it be like to meet with a dozen people for dinner every week for a decade, and spend every week talking about Jesus and the Good News? How would that transform your life? How would that resource you for the rest of your life? What would it be like to have a church which could just focus on working out what is absolutely key to faith?

A huge amount could be said about the experience of being involved in Cafechurch, but perhaps the key questions were around what it meant to be church in post-Christendom. When you meet in a pub function room, and are always dependent on the hospitality of strangers, it moves you a long way away from the Christendom assumptions of traditional church (and for us “traditional” included both mainline and Pentecostal expressions of church.)

The other commonality in our community was that a lot of people were on what we would now call a journey of deconstruction of their faith. For some people, that meant that Cafechurch was their last stop on the way out – a gracious place to say goodbye to an important aspect of their life. But the hope of the community was always to help people to find a constructive way to reconstruct their faith, and that hope has continued into our new incarnation.

In 2019 Alister was ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament by the Uniting Church. He suggested to the denominational authorities that, as Northcote was a building without a Christian community, and Cafechurch was a Christian community without a building, perhaps something fruitful might be possible. So the community began its new incarnation as Northcote Uniting Church, with the new challenge of how to apply the valuable lessons of Cafechurch to this new context of being a Congregation of the Uniting Church in Australia.