Congregation: It's a church...a coffee shop...a church - it's both, and it says it's ready to serve

Confluence Coffee Shop isn't Starbucks.

For one, it is run by a church, not a big conglomerate.

And the coffee shop, which is in a 9,000-square-foot building off N.C. 150 just over the Davidson-Forsyth county line, is a big part of The River Church's mission and where it holds its services.

"We want this space to be where we do life together," said Brian Leimone, the manager of Confluence.

The coffee shop opened in July and is operated by The River Church, a nondenominational church that started in January 2007. It is an informal church that has life groups and elders instead of auxiliaries and deacons.

Employees don't proselytize, but the coffee shop doesn't hide that it is run by Christians either. The shop is part of the church's mission to be a resource for the community.

"We want to be a movement focused on God that changes the landscape of the community," Leimone said.

The church had held services at Friedberg Elementary School in Davidson County but then lost the space. Leaders of the church then started looking for a new space and found the building off N.C. 150.

"This building was the only building open in this area," said Joey Yokeley, the lead pastor of the church.

Once they decided this would be the place where the church would hold services, they began thinking about how they could use the space for other things that would benefit the community, Yokeley said.

And they came up with the idea of opening a coffee shop.

And not just any coffee shop. The shop is the site of concerts on the weekends, and it has conference rooms and space for parents and their children.

"There was no real hangout area in the community," Yokeley said. The community needed to have a place where young people and families could spend time, he said.

Inside Confluence, comfy couches line one side of the main room with tables and chairs in the middle. A raised wooden-floor stage is just under a flat-screen television, one of two at the coffee shop.

Framed pictures dot the bright yellow walls, and two computers sit on a shelf beside the entrance.

Downstairs is a large room with a stage where the coffee shop holds some of its weekend concerts. It is also where The River Church holds its services. On Thursday mornings, the coffee shop is host to a business-networking group.

The church and coffee shop are making use of all the tools at their disposal. It promotes itself on such social-networking sites as Facebook, where it has more than 800 friends.

Leimone, Yokeley, Justin Luckett and Donny Baldridge make up the leadership of the church.

Christopher Smith was part of the original leadership team that helped start Confluence but he has since left the church, Leimone said.

Yokeley said they modeled the church and the coffee shop after the National Community Church in Washington. That church runs a coffee shop similar to Confluence.

The River Church and Confluence Coffee Shop have elements of the emergent or emerging church movement, said Bill Leonard, the dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a professor of church history. The emergent-church movement is a small but growing style of evangelizing and communicating Christian beliefs and action, he said.

"It begins with individuals who are in some ways reacting against the denomination model and reacting against the mega-church model," Leonard said.

Many of those in that emergent-church movement are intentional about their use of new technologies and social-networking sites to connect to people, he said.

They also strive to not force their beliefs on others or exclude anyone, Leonard said.

But Leimone said he sees what they do as different from some elements in the emergent-church movement. He said he wants the focus to stay on God.

"We met at a school on purpose because we didn't want a building," he said. "We want people to get to know their neighbors…. Confluence was born out of that desire to know the community."

One way of knowing the community has come through social-networking sites, Leimone said.

Leimone said that they established a Web site, www.confluencecoffee.com, and a Myspace page when Confluence first opened. It then started a fan page on Facebook as well. The coffee shop recently switched to a profile page.

"With Facebook, we have a greater ability to see how our customers are responding," Leimone wrote in an e-mail. "We see when they're attending our events, we see when they are promoting us on their profile pages with links and/or statuses."

And most important of all, using social-networking sites is free advertising, he said. Small businesses only have so much money so using social-networking sites is a great way to promote themselves, he said.

Stephanie Richey, a rising senior at Gardner-Webb University who lives in Davidson County, said she started going to Confluence after she saw signs for it in the area. She loves the fact that the coffee shop is run by a church and is dedicated to serving the community.

She keeps up with events at Confluence with Facebook because that's the primary way she communicates, she said.

"I wouldn't know about anything going on at the coffee shop without Facebook," Richey said.

Yokeley said he sees Confluence as a resource for the community.

"We want to see the people in this community thrive, whether they're a part of our church or not," he said.

■ Michael Hewlett can be reached at 727-7326 or at mhewlett@wsjournal.com.