23 Lessons Coffee Taught Me About Reaching the Unchurched

by Brian Dodd

Many people with no church
background likely process their 
church experience they way 
I did with my first coffee.

I am an anomaly in America culture. At 47 years old, I had never had a cup of coffee until I attended a coffee cupping last week.

Coffee cupping is similar to wine tasting in that you smell the aromas, identify flavors, test texture and then drink different types of coffee.

It is not because of religious reasons that I have not had a cup of coffee. I simply do not enjoy hot drinks. Like many people who have no religious background, I have no coffee background. I was truly an outsider in this group of about 15 people at the event.

Within moments, I began to realize that many people with no church background likely process their church experience in the same fashion I, with no coffee background, was experiencing the coffee cupping.

Does the smell of bacon affect the meaning of a word?

A new study is so fascinating that we immediately wondered how it would apply to words. You, of course, are our greatest resource for insight. After you read about the experiment, help us think about how word meanings change depending on what else is going on around you.

Researchers at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory are investigating how our different senses impact each other, and they recently conducted a trial to learn how sound affects taste.

(What is this sensory confusion technically called? Synesthesia. Read more about the peculiar sensations here.)

The test subjects were given pieces of toffee. First, when they ate the toffee, low-pitched music played in headphones. Then, they ate another piece of the same toffee while high-pitched tones played. The first bite tasted more savory to the participants, and the second bite tasted sweeter.