Race for Third Place

The vision of Starbucks founder, Howard Schultz, is that Starbucks would fulfill the need of society for a "third place."

When we get up in the morning, our lives revolve around two places in modern culture: 1.Home (the 1st place), and 2.Work (the 2nd place). At home, life revolves around relationships with family members and tasks for the home. At work, life revolves around relationships with coworkers (employees, employers, and peers) and tasks that benefit the company.

Traditionally, there's been home, work, and "everything else" - grocery stores and school plays and athletic practices and trips to visit still other places, but life outside work and home hasn't revolved around anything or "anyplace". This miscellany includes things enjoyable (shopping for some, Sunday drives for others), and things arduous (groceries and orthodontists, postoffices and gas stations). Yet they remain excursionary jaunts from home and work, like jumping into water to retrieve the dog toy Rover wouldn't chase or running across the beach on hot sand, we jump out of our places, do whatever is necessary in the "everything else" category, then hustle back to one of our two places from which the world is managed.

So, Starbucks wants to be a third place; cushy chairs and jazz music with cozy, sunlit corners in which we can be reclusive while amidst the crowd. A little bit business, and a little bit living room, Starbucks wants you to feel at home and productive and relaxed in their third place paradigm.

Some might argue the internet and gaming worlds have become a kind of third place for many - which I would concede, but begrudgingly, as people have needed both broader community and escape from things in their first and second places. These pseudo-communities offer a false sense of intimacy and quasi-connections around shared affinity (chat rooms for people who love labradoodles or water-colored Renoir), or shared purpose (annihilating mutant space marauders with electrozap energy rifles). Yet, real sharing, real contribution into each others' lives, real authenticity is too easily avoided (which is why these faux communal relationships are so popular!)... and real community never happens; it's actually avoided!

Jesus called His disciples out of their places and into His. He told a handful of guys to remove 1st and 2nd places from the place of primary priority and replace them with Him. Our savior said things like "hate your family" (Luke 14:26), and "don't work for the stuff you can buy" (John 6:27). He wanted them to make Himself the primary place from which the excursions of life are... uh... "excursioned". He said things like, "Seek first My kingdom, and My righteousness (place and activity) and all these things (of the 1st and 2nd places) will be added to you..." (John 6:36).

He said more or less that God made you with these needs (food and shelter and relationships) not so you could pursue meeting your needs, but as venues of learning to trust God. He wants to move us back to a theocentric methodology of life, where He is the central paradigm from which we live. His closest followers eventually got this, and started an authentic community that shared Christ so closely they actually experienced operating as a unified Body of believers - sharing everything, experiencing things from a centralized paradigm, sending and receiving each other freely, and identifying completely with each other not because of lots of similarity but because of their shared - and overwhelming - affinity for Jesus.

One of Jesus' closest buddies commented on this very process - the creation of a spiritual place where we are the very building materials of the place out of which we live as foreigners to every other place. Consider Pete's words from the perspective of living life from a different, spiritual place:

4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him—
5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ...
9...But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
11 Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.

Peter had already experienced a different life. He knew Christ-Centricity and boldness of Christ-Confidence offered not just a different kind of living, but a different source for life that produces an entirely foreign lifestyle.

Jesus has already done something to change the very nature of our being. We are not what we once were.

I would love to see the Body of Christ - His ambassadors - become the third place of contemporary culture in San Antonio. I would love to see people diving into the busy waters of life from the firm platform of a shared relationship with Christ and each other. I would love to see you build life around more than work and home, but around the breaking of bread, fellowship, and spiritual equipping - the fun and power of what Church is supposed to be - that can only come from Christ-centric living within the community of believers. This is communal living; it's a spiritual revolution of shared purpose, perspective, and empowerment that is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27)

Are we letting our Father raise us up as living stones - made of the same stuff of our Savior - from which we have a place to live a different life?

Only then will we see the Truth of our call - that just as Christ is the Chief Cornerstone, we too, are living stones, being built into a holy temple. And from our place with Him we experience REAL, ABUNDANT LIFE like no other.