The Tentmaker Story

My name is Zachary Firman and I have been attending and serving in the church my whole life. I started working in the coffee industry in 2017 while working towards becoming a youth pastor in Prescott, AZ. I quickly fell in love with being a barista and started honing my skills to serve people better with a simple cup of coffee each day. It started dawning on me that people use coffee as a driver for many aspects of life. Whether meeting an old friend, catching a pick me up on the way into a long day of work, finding somewhere meaningful to spend the day off, or just carving out a small gift for yourself in the midst of all the stress that life brings.

Interestingly, every church I have been to serves this beverage. And even though we don't do communion every week, we do drink coffee every week. "Church coffee" is known as being a bad experience, and yet without fail it is always present and always valued by the congregation and staff alike. So when I began roasting specialty coffee I started donating "the good stuff" to the small church I was on staff at in Scottsdale AZ, 2021. The feeling was electric when I saw the change in the church's posture towards what they were serving; "Welcome to Cornerstone, come try our coffee! We are lucky to have a coffee roaster who supplies us with really good stuff".  So the idea came to me... what is holding us back from having amazing coffee at church?  Turns out it's money, you can't just give away expensive coffee every week and keep the lights on. So I let the idea fizzle out and went back to keeping nice coffee out of church.

But in 2022 God stirred up my heart again for this vision. I took a trip to Costa Rica to visit coffee farmers and see the process that goes in to making this beverage exist all over the world every morning. My heart broke for the conditions we still allow these people, whom we rely on for coffee every day, to live in. So the idea changed. What if instead of just trying to make coffee better, we used coffee to make peoples lives better? What if the beverage we enjoy every Sunday morning became a way to spread the Gospel both in our neighborhoods and all over the world?

So I came up with the strategy: churches buy coffee directly from the farmers, we visit them and try our best to meet physical needs, but primarily just act as really fantastic, consistent customers. Over time through these relationships we find opportunities to share the love of Jesus with these people we rely on. Back home, we pay for this relationship by drinking this coffee. Maybe by taking a bag home from church from time to time, maybe we buy a latte instead of the free drip here and there. It's built in to the way we already exist but now there's a heart and soul and story behind the cup that really feels special. When we buy a bag of coffee from our local church and give it to a friend, that bag of beans is now an invite to church and a way financially to support a global church effort.

We cannot wait to invite churches into this opportunity and we cannot wait to see what God does when we use our effort and talent in every aspect of the church!

Zack and I (Braddock Merrell), have been dreaming in tandem about Tentmaker for over a year now. Our families have known each other for 20 years at this point, and my personal journey in coffee has been very similar. I've been in the coffee industry for about 5 years, and I too quickly fell in love with the community in coffee. So as soon as Zack let me in on his dream of stewarding our coffee talents and connections to elevate and motivate church coffee, I was all in.

Our path has been nothing short of an extremely blessed grind. We cannot wait to make the world a little bit smaller, and every cup of Sunday coffee a lot more intentional. So on top of everything previously laid out, I'd like to reiterate: we cannot wait to see what God does in the global church through Tentmaker Coffee.

Much love, Zachary Firman and Braddock Merrell.