Since 2005, Lifeway Baptist Church in Devonport, Tasmania has raised more than $30,000 for Tearfund’s clean water projects around the world through Love in a Cup, a cafe that runs every Sunday after church offering barista-made coffee for a cause.
Twenty years ago, God was tapping Julie Brown on the shoulder a lot, over just a few weeks. There was the Forty Days of Purpose study that her church community took part in, and that lingered in her mind afterwards. Then there was a series of conference presentations and guest speakers at church, including former Tearfund staffer Grant Maynard, all of which prompted her to think about global poverty and injustice. And she watched the 2005 film The Girl in the Café, in which a young woman attends the G8 Summit and confronts world leaders about debt relief and poverty alleviation in developing countries.
“This happened three weeks in a row, and I knew I’d better sit up and take notice,” Julie says now. “One of the statistics we heard was that 30,000 children were dying every day in developing countries, and that that’s linked to how many people don’t have access to clean water. After those three powerful weekends, I was desperate to do something. But I didn’t know what I could do, because we had a family – I couldn’t go and train to be a nurse and shoot off overseas. So then I – well, I / we / God – came up with the idea of making coffee after church to raise funds.”
Julie and her husband David had previously run a cafe in Devonport, so, with the church’s support, they bought a commercial coffee machine and started selling coffee after church on a Sunday. Ever since, all proceeds from the sales of the barista-made coffee have gone to support organisations working on water and sanitation projects, including an incredibly generous contribution of more than $30,000 to projects run by Tearfund’s partners.
“We calculated that we’d probably make enough money in the first year to build three wells. Well, we did three wells in the first three months!” says Julie. “Because people didn’t just buy a cup of coffee – they gave larger amounts of money and they spread the story. One lady didn’t come to church, but she came into the coffee shop and handed me an envelope and said, ‘I’ve heard about the wells, and that’s for the wells.’ It was $1,500, and she did that twice.”
In 2023, Love in a Cup expanded to include a mobile coffee caravan that goes to local events like community Christmas carols and school functions.
“For the first 15 years or so it was just David and I after church on the coffee machine, and other people would help us take the orders,” says Julie. “But in recent years we’ve had new people come into the congregation who are baristas. We’ve got three now, so I guess that’s God preparing them for when we retire!”
David says that 20 years on, the motto of Love in a Cup still resonates with him every day. “What we say is ‘You can make a difference from a distance’,” he says.
“You don’t have to actually be in Zambia or Bangladesh or Cambodia. You can make a difference from a distance: you’ve just got to listen when God speaks to you.”
