Fuel for Thought: God Offers "Deep Time Not Hard Time"

The article I’m sharing today opens with this line: “At Deep Time, coffee isn’t a religion. But the people there do have an awful lot of faith in it.” I chuckled, because every morning I roll out of bed and ritually brew a large cup of pour-over coffee. But for people coming home from prison, rejoining society is neither funny nor easy.

Deep Time is a social enterprise and ministry of Trinity United Methodist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Founded in 2023 by Rev. Dustin Mailman, Trinity’s pastor of family ministries and missions, the coffee shop operates inside the church building and offers employment, community, and support to formerly incarcerated people working to rebuild their lives in a world that is too often unwelcoming, unkind, and unsupportive.

For people of faith and goodwill, unkindness is a contradiction. For Christians, it is antithetical to everything we profess. In a recent devotion, I invited us to let go of the blindness we carry as we drive through downtown on our way to church. When we encounter the poor, the uninsured, the formerly incarcerated, or the under-resourced, we rarely consider the institutions that paved the path to their circumstances. We judge people by where they are without examining the systems and hard choices that put them there.

Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, observes that we sing "'Break Every Chain' on Sunday, then go out on Tuesday and vote for the candidate who promises more chains and more incarceration". And yet we say we want to be more like Jesus, the Jesus who never turned away from thieves, prostitutes, or adulterers.

At RootedGood, we encourage every church to understand both its passions and its community before launching a social enterprise. Every congregation and every community is unique. The possibilities for using church space creatively are nearly limitless, but the ones that work are the ones that fit both the church and its neighbors. Deep Time is a beautiful example of that fit.

After reading the article, I went straight to the Deep Time website. I hope you will, too. There’s so much more good stuff to discover.

Angela Johnson, Director of Sharing

RootedGood

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