Coffee and Cake Instead of the Scriptures

Coffee and cake will likely be served out after the Sunday night services in the Methodist churches of Toronto during the coming winter. The object is to attract the young people. It is likely other churches will follow the example. – Toronto Star.

So Christ has lost his grip, has He, and it’s coffee and cake instead?

The cross, that story old, yet, they say, ever new; the cross at Calvary; that does not attract. And coffee and cake will now be tacked on to the benediction.

Coffee and cake for Christ’s sake. Just for Christ’s sake, coffee and cake. Does the heart lie in the stomach?

So the Churches of Toronto confess that with their splendid choirs, paid singers, eloquent preachers, free pews cushioned and easy, they have lost their grip upon the young people, the young people who come to town and who board and room away from home. Lost their grip upon the young woman or the young man who today are spending their idle hours in other pleasures than the church affords. So it is coffee and cake for them. This is a lamentable admission.

“God helping me, I will try and get over my stupidity in the future,” says Rev. C. O. Johnston, while speaking on this point and endorsing the coffee and cake idea.

The writer takes no stock in Johnston at all, but is willing to overlook his theatrical ways and long hair if he only gets over his stupidness and grabs the gospel and drops the cake basket and coffee pot.

This great round world is hungry for something, and it’s not coffee and cake. It looks to the theater and it is not there; it tries the supper afterward, the cold bottle and the hot bird, and it is not there; it looks to the dance and the card party, it is not even here in the witchery of the dance, for there comes the cold grey dawn of the morning after, and it is not there; it takes a swing at the glass; joy? Yes, but remorse is always added; it sits by the grate amusing, dreaming and planning, and rising unrestful, unsatisfied. This great will endeavor to reach with coffee and cake, it desires, they desire, more than that.

Drop the coffee and cake idea, parsons; drop it, you young people, and grab your bibles instead.

They say the old-time martyrs were made and fortified on a stronger diet than coffee and cake.

Author Unknown

The Christadelphian Advocate, January 1907, p. 13.