Metro Cafe Highlights Santa Monica Church's Unique Bottom Line

Outside, on the corner of 6th and Arizona, a sidewalk chalkboard sign with an arrow pointing toward a building’s entrance simply states that there’s “Fast Wi-fi,” and on the other side of the board a quote about coffee being the “lifeblood that fuels the dreams of champions.”

UPDATE (1/31/18): Metro Cafe in the News - Leveling the paying field: LA cafe lets patrons choose prices – and hasn't lost cash [The Guardian]

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14, 2017At first glance, it’s hard to imagine that this retro, two-story building freshly painted gray and white, and dubbed “METROPOLIS” is home to a church. Once inside, a coffee shop ( Metro Cafe ) with great laptop spaces and a co-lab work floor for entrepreneurs on the second level don't reveal the structure's true purpose.However, as one becomes part of the conversation inside Metropolis, it becomes clear that emanating from this downtown Santa Monica corner just six blocks from the ocean is in fact a good dose of Jesus.“From the very beginning, we just realized that it’s poor stewardship that ‘the church’ is empty so much of the week,” said Metro Church (Metro Calvary Chapel) pastor Steve Snook in a interview with Together LA. “Growing up, seeing the church empty and not being used 24/7 I just thought, 'This is not good, so we will never do this.'”Snook, whose father was a pastor, grew up spiritually and as a young pastor in the Calvary Chapel (Chuck Smith founder) system of doing church. In 1987, before “small groups” became mainstream, and before Starbucks even surfaced, he said had a vision of gatherings “almost like fires” for discipleship and mutual entrepreneurial growth in coffee shop-style settings in the Los Angeles basin, including Downtown L.A., Malibu, and the hills of Hollywood.He said it’s difficult for churches and many Christians to grasp the concept of going beyond Sunday worship services in the form he’s talking about. “They love the idea, but it’s hard for them. I think there’s an intimidation or something,” he said.When asked about how a co-lab workspace used for businesses such as start-ups and creatives inside the church walls fits in biblically, Snook explains, “A number of years ago, I began asking this question, ‘What is the church, really?’ Not just what’s just been handed down but what is the church and how does it operate practically.“When I was a young guy, I was somewhat idealistic and I looked at [Apostle] Paul’s picture of the church like a body or like a temple that had a foundation that was already laid, Jesus Christ being the cornerstone… that it’s being built not on only the Apostles and Prophets, but we, as in second Peter, are like living stones built into the spiritual house that God dwells.”He said he would read other parts of the Bible that would illustrate the church as the body of Christ and that the different parts would work together.“There’s an element of collaboration that has to come about,” Snook continued. “There’s a picture of Christ being manifest through His body. He has a unified body and every part has to function. The Holy Spirit is the administrator. So, in the same way, we asked what would that look like practically. We started looking at how is the church operating in the marketplace? That’s when we started finding out that someone was like hands, someone was like feet, some were more like the voices, and some were like the ears.“For us it was realizing that like in Nehemiah's time everyone was building the wall, and everyone had this place, and we had to learn to work together.”Snook said that once the vision of collaboration started catching on at his church, people started coming together to use each other’s talents. Instead of first going outside the church for help in the workplace, he said that members first started looking inside the church “with people we already have a relationship with.”His vision of the coffee houses in the Los Angeles area came in a series of dreams over seven to ten days in 1987, he said.

Before Metro Cafe

“I saw these gathering places up close [in my dreams] and I realized that this was the church. This is what we’ve been praying for,” he described. “I knew there was coffee there, and I saw these espresso machines.”He said he didn’t quite understand all of the dreams, but there were panel discussions and forums. “I saw [these gatherings] in key places that were more of the hubs of the region. For me, I had a vision to walk out (move forward slowly). It was confirmed to me. We started with small groups, kind of a new picture of what the church was supposed to be. At the time, there were mostly community groups. We just started walking it out.”Snook said that he and his wife started a coffee shop within a vintage boutique in Santa Monica shortly after his dreams with the idea that this would be a way to “show Jesus up close.” The space included comedy nights, “Philosopher's Cafe” evenings, and events for children alongside their parents.“We had the cool coffee house going with all these events, including an alpha course (introduction to Christianity),” he said. Snook’s ministry and church have had several different locations, looks, and style of operation over the years. Metropolis appears to be the culmination of “walking out” what God has planned for Snook and this group of believers.“The work we are doing right now at Metropolis we believe is a business model, it’s a ministry model, it’s whatever model you want to talk about that other church planters could follow,” he said. “This is a city of dreamers, and a lot of people within the church want to do great things for God, but to walk it out means that you are going to have to pay the price… means that you may have to put ‘everything I am’ into this.”Rodrigo Robles, who is on the church staff, said that one way to describe what’s happening at Metropolis is like this: “We have a space, which we are very fortunate to have, that is more than a building. It’s an organism and it has life,” he said, adding that it’s not a dormant facility.“Metropolis for me, and what I hope it becomes for our community is a kind of park-like setting that’s accessible throughout the whole week,” Robles said. “I hope it becomes a place where there’s life seven days a week. I hope it becomes a place where people feel free to come inside and read a book, to go outside and get some sun, grab a coffee and a bag of chips with their friends.“I hope it becomes a house of hospitality, and through that, people can begin to question ‘How is this so?’ and ‘Why are people so nice here?’ and then we can share why, which [the answer] is Jesus. It’s an opportunity to breathe life into a corner of this awesome city every single day in some way, shape or form every single day in Christ.”[gallery type="slideshow" link="none" size="large" ids="1890,1854,1898,1921,1922,1894"]Photos by John Fredericks/Together LA.--------------------------------------

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'Beautiful' Westside Striken with Spiritual Poverty a Unified Church Can Cure

From outward appearances it looks as though people on the Westside have everything they need to capture happiness. However, there is a spiritual poverty, especially among the young, that a unified Church can cure, says a longtime Santa Monica pastor.

PART THREE – STEVE SNOOK ON THE WESTSIDE

“Being on the Westside, you see some things differently,” Steve Snook, lead pastor of Metro Church, told Together LA (SEE VIDEO BELOW). “We live in a big city, but when I look at the Westside and see our brokenness I think about our spiritual poverty because it seems like we have everything — you have the beach, you have the hills, you have the beautiful houses, you have the cars, you have the beautiful people, you have all the industry ... even Silicon Beach right here in Santa Monica.“And yet, when you think of spiritual poverty, you think of people, you think that they have everything, that they’ve figured it all out — that they’ve figured out how to live and to enjoy what they have… but it’s that brokenness that breaks my heart… because I see the children of this community.“The over-privileged that seem to have everything yet they are crying out for their fathers who are so busy making a life for themselves that they have forgotten their children.”Snook gave his observations prior to a panel he moderated and co-hosted with Together LA last month. The panel — Broken City – Is there hope for Los Angeles? — began with him giving a heads up to the direction the discussion will go.“I’m going to tell you right now, there’s hope all the way across this panel,” he said. “You’re going to hear us being really honest about the brokenness that we see, but not spending much time on the brokenness without getting to a place where we talk about some of what we see happening even now and what is coming based upon the hope that is within us.”Joining Snook were Michael Mata of Koreatown, Cedric Nelms of Long Beach, and Brannin Pitre of Pasadena, all sharing their heart for LA.The importance of strong Christian-based leadership from fathers within families developed into one of the major themes of the panel.“When I see the brokenness of the Westside I see the young child who has everything and yet no one has ever told them the hope of Christ,” Snook told TLA. “There’s no parent, there’s no grandparent. They’re finding that they are going to have to figure it out on their own.“But on this corner, we have a coffeehouse [Metropolis Cafe Santa Monica] where we open our arms to the community and ask, ‘What can we do?’ The hope that I find in this brokenness is that there is one who has gone before us, one who understands brokenness.”The Church“When I look at who Christ is and I look to the hope of the Gospel I realize that one of the places of brokenness that I want to see change is in the Church — to see a united Church, to see that the Church is not about any one individual congregation, that it’s about the Church that Christ laid down his life for… that he says he loves this world that is turning away from him,” Snook said.He would like Christians to “be in a place” where God’s Church is united so that together they can realize that “we’ve been given the answers.”“We’ve been given the cure,” Snook explained. Therefore, we should be “willing to serve one another, to lay our lives down for a greater cause, to lay our empires down for the sake of the Kingdom.“My eyes have been open to the brokenness of the Westside so I can understand how we can be a part of the cure.”This article is the third in a four-part series about the panel discussion hosted by Philosopher’s Cafe and TogetherLA.net on June 15, 2017. The full panel discussion can be viewed on Facebook by clicking on Part 1 and Part 2.Video and photos by One Ten Pictures.4 Pastors Get Real About the City – Together LA Pop-Up Part 1 (Michael Mata)Urban Church Planter: First, What Does the City Need? Part 2 (Cedric Nelms)‘Beautiful’ Westside Striken with Spiritual Poverty a Unified Church Can Cure - Part 3 (Steve Snook)LA Pastors’ Bottom Line: We Want to Help the City That We Live In – FINAL (Brannin Pitre)

4 Pastors Get Real About the City - Together LA Pop-Up Part 1

It may have seemed like a daunting task to figure out what’s broken in Los Angeles then offer a simple solution.

PART ONE - MICHAEL MATA

But that’s not what four Christian leaders from various parts of L.A. set out to do during a panel discussion at Philosopher’s Cafe (Thursdays at Metropolis) in Santa Monica on a recent June evening. Co-hosted by Together LA, the panel — Broken City - Is there hope for Los Angeles? — began with moderator Steve Snook of Metro Church giving a heads up to the direction the discussion will go.“I’m going to tell you right now, there’s hope all the way across this panel,” said Snook, a longtime pastor in Santa Monica. “You’re going to hear us being really honest about the brokenness that we see, but not spending much time on the brokenness without getting to a place where we talk about some of what we see happening even now and what is coming based upon the hope that is within us.”

Together LA: Passion for a unified Koreatown

Prior to the panel discussion, an upstairs meeting and video taping by TLA (One Ten Pictures) led to some fascinating revelations about Los Angeles, a city that's often associated with big dreams, both fulfilled and broken.Michael Mata, director of the transformational urban leadership program at Azusa Pacific Seminary and a Together LA speaker, is an experienced urban planner and pastor. He has spent over 30 years in leading and equipping others in urban transformation through the creation of community and church-based programs. His work has focused on community transformation, youth leadership development, public health, intercultural outreach, and multiethnic ministry. Mata serves as community transformation specialist for Compassion Creates Change, Inc., and was the director of Tools for Transformation for World Vision’s U.S. programs.Mata lives in and loves his neighborhood — Koreatown.“Even though it’s called Koreatown, 70 percent of the people are not Asian,” Mata told TLA. “Even with this great vitality of humanity it’s broken in that we don’t have the interaction as we should.“We live in close proximity to each other, almost 200,000 people within two-and-a-half square miles, and we bump into each other and we eat in the same places and we hear each other’s music but we’re not necessarily connected. Rarely do we actually know the name of our neighbors — actually I do, but many people don’t.“[Residents] live in high rises, in homes they’ve invested in, they live with multiple families or extended families, and they are struggling to survive because even though there’s a sense of great economic energy there, the per capita is one of the lowest in L.A. County.”

Immigrants and young professionals consumed with ‘making it’

“So, you have a population that’s come to the United States who are contributing and being very productive but it seems their lives are consumed with ‘making it,’ maybe not so much becoming affluent, but certainly surviving,” Mata explained. “In that regard, we need spaces, we need a way to come together. Certainly in 1992, when our community was the second flashpoint in the riots, our community did come together.”Churches in the area and various religious institutions gathered together, he said, and asked “How are we going to rebuild together?”Within less than a year, Koreatown did rebuild, he said.The infusion of energy and “new life and looking for the future” gave way to a retreat of sorts.“We all went back to our regular spaces of work, relationships, and of cultural identity,” Mata said. “So those spaces or that bridge are sorely lacking and that’s where I think the faith community can come in.“We have great historic sanctuaries in K-town. Beautiful French-Gothic structures, some of them thousands of square feet, but on Sunday mornings they are pretty empty because the populations that once populated the pews are no longer living in the area. We have a new influx of not just immigrant people but young professionals and some churches are being more successful at that.“But that’s the space where God calls us to be reconcilers,” he adds. “We need to step up as a faith community to be that person, or that facility, or that body that brings people together and helps us to know one another even though we may not have the same beliefs or traditions. Nonetheless, we are living in the same space so why not move beyond just residing to becoming members or members of a community becoming neighbors to one another.”[gallery type="slideshow" size="full" ids="2949,2952,2953" orderby="rand"]

What does Jesus ask of us?

“I think that’s what Christ asks of us — to find our identity in knowing that we are created in the image of God — that the other person across the street may speak a different language, may be more permanently tan than me, eats exotic foods that I might enjoy, but beyond that, knowing that God really has something more in store for them then just survival. That God sent his only beloved Son that we may have life more abundantly that we can flourish and thrive. I think we have that opportunity and K-town can demonstrate to the world that we can come together. That the faith community, the Christian community can be the vehicle by which we, [and] the relationships [we are in] create a vital tapestry of God’s kingdom here in Koreatown.”This article is the first in a four-part series about the panel discussion hosted by Philosopher’s Cafe and TogetherLA.net on June 15, 2017. The full panel discussion can be viewed on Facebook by clicking on Part 1 and Part 2.Video and photos by One Ten Pictures.4 Pastors Get Real About the City – Together LA Pop-Up Part 1 (Michael Mata)Urban Church Planter: First, What Does the City Need? Part 2 (Cedric Nelms)‘Beautiful’ Westside Striken with Spiritual Poverty a Unified Church Can Cure – Part 3 (Steve Snook)LA Pastors’ Bottom Line: We Want to Help the City That We Live In – FINAL (Brannin Pitre)