The Shop Talk Barbership

by Jacob Clagg with Pastor Victor Glover

Every moment of my time spent speaking with and interviewing the pastors of the Southeast has been excellent. Each of the pastors I spoke with shared their hearts for God’s people, and their vision for God’s Kingdom in the Southeast, and I walked away excited for the future they were forecasting. One of these visions in particular felt to me like a genuine revelation. So, let me tell you how God is changing the city of Burlington, North Carolina, through conversations at a barbershop, and why I think the principles employed there are not just relevant and applicable, but obligatory and, dare I say it, an indictment of the way many of us have thought about church for a long time.

The story of the barbershop in Burlington came from Director of the Southeast Regional Conference, and Pastor, Victor Glover. During a roundtable interview with a number of the Southeast pastors, Victor mentioned a “barbershop” as a new place that he was doing ministry. Given that the CGGC’s theme for the last year has been about “reimagining”, and that we ran an entire issue about reimagining how we could use our church spaces for new/different ministries, this sounded like a great story to capture. We set up a time for a later interview, and frankly, I hadn’t anticipated that the story would knock me (metaphorically) off my feet like it had. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s stop talking around the barbershop, and start talking about Shop Talk, a ministry at a local Burlington barbershop.

Shop Talk Barbershop

Every Tuesday, Pastor Victor Glover shows up to the barbershop, and once people start arriving, they immediately open the floor for discussion. They ask what people need addressed in their lives and what they're worried about. “Does anyone have anything on their heart?” Once the initial conversation is done, they start on the chosen topic for that week. As a recent example, the initial question was, “What are you fighting for?” From here, discussion happens again, and individuals are welcome to voice their opinions and to answer the question. After this, the discussion shifts toward problem solving, and questions like, “What can we do right now?” Here, people might not make actionable steps or create a plan to address whatever problem they’re aiming to fix.

You may notice, it doesn’t sound a lot like a church. Where’s the music? Where’s the sermon? Well, those things aren’t present, and that’s because it’s not trying to be a worship service. That’s why it’s held on a Tuesday, so as not to replace a Sunday service. They do pray, and they do incorporate Scripture at times, but generally, this is the place where people with a loose faith, or with no faith at all, come to meet and to share their thoughts and burdens. Many aren’t the type of people who would show up comfortably to a Sunday service anyway. Here, Pastor Victor and his team practice what he calls the Three L’s: Listen, Learn, and Live. “We want to do more listening than we do talking. We need to learn how to better serve our communities,” Victor said, and he mentioned that “In listening to the juveniles, we are hearing that the parents don’t have church homes, and when the parents show up, we can now be a witness.” That’s how they open the door toward “evangelism” as we might traditionally think of it, but the key is that evangelism comes only after they’ve listened and learned from the community. It’s a different strategy than we might normally conceive of, but it’s still fundamentally a Christian endeavor, and it’s still fundamentally about discipleship and mentorship. The key difference here is that people are led to Christian principles not by overt lessons, but through conversation and open discussion.

Why a Barbershop?

The reason why this interview was so impactful to me, and why the vision for the barbershop has so radically reshaped the way I see ministry, is also the very reason the barbershop was created. It wasn’t created just as an alternative method to do church, it was created specifically to bring local people together to start making the community better. It was created to solve a problem, and to bring healing, as Jesus always does. But where other outreach opportunities often start at the practical level of handing out goods, Shop Talk starts with the people, because the community is nothing without the people.

So how did Shop Talk get started? Well, the owner of the barbershop doesn’t just cut the hair of people who walk in the front door. Occasionally, he also provides his services to the local morgue, because even the deceased need a haircut and a shave to look presentable in death. One day, after tragedy struck Burlington yet again, Victor’s barber found himself on the way to the morgue to give one final hair cut to a young man who had recently been killed. Two sixteenyear-olds had been the victims of gun violence and one of those victims was the barber’s nephew. In the barbershop, and through tears, the barber told Victor what had happened, and Victor says that’s when he first ministered to him.

Two weeks later, the barber came back to Victor and told him, “This can’t keep going on. I'm just tired.” Both found out around that time that the shooter was fourteen years old. Gun violence has become an epidemic, and in fact, as I write this, another shooting has just taken place which has left three children and three adults dead. Shockingly, the majority of shootings in Burlington this year have been juvenile related. Likewise, across the entirety of the United States, gun related violence is now the number one cause of death of children aged 1-18, as found by the New England Journal of Medicine. 1 While thinking about all of the trauma Burlington has gone through, Victor said, “You see everything that’s happening and we sit on the sidelines. We got to get in the game now. We got to have skin in the game. If we want to see change and make a difference there, we need people to come on and get aboard.”

And that’s the point. Victor has been trained to listen, learn, and live with his community, and in doing so, Victor has diagnosed a core problem there, and rather than preach Jesus from an altar, he’s preaching Jesus in the barbershop and beyond. He’s preaching Jesus not just to save souls, although that certainly is his aim. Pastor Victor and his team preach Jesus and try hard to model the love of Jesus, to bring the Kingdom to the streets of Burlington, because that’s where Jesus is needed most right now.

The Revelation and What this Means for Future Pastors

But they don’t just stop at the “going.” They went to the barbershop as the first place to go. And, of course, people came. They had good conversation, and they continue to have opportunities to minister, feed, and pray with these people. That’s probably where most of us would call it a success and get comfortable. But not Pastor Victor or his team. Once people came, Victor and his team strategically picked out ways to go deeper into the community. The barbershop isn’t the place they were sent, it was the homebase that they set up to keep on being sent. They’ve picked out the specific streets where they are going next, and they are going to keep on pushing further into the places where Jesus is needed most.

In perhaps his most critical statement, and the one that became my revelation, Victor said, “The church needs to catch up. We can disciple all day long, but we have to be more strategic. A lot of pastors don't even know what’s going on in their own city and their own community. It's all about come, see, and hear, rather than go, be, and do.” Do you hear that? Somehow, we continually fall into the pattern of “come, see, and hear.” We all recognize that we are sent, and that we are supposed to go on mission. But at some point, the “go” turns into “come,” and I’m convinced now, more than ever, that in doing so, we’ve really, truly missed something. And as I sit here, wracking my brain about what my community needs, I recognize that while Victor was talking to me, he was also talking about me. He continued to say that, “I'm hard on our pastors because they’re not in tune with their community. We have got to be more proactive to better address and reach out to our community.” I recognize then that I’m not “in tune” with my community either, and that needs to change.

The traditional Sunday morning service doesn’t need to go away, and churches don’t need to move their worship services into the middle of a downtown street and sing to the open air (although that would be pretty cool, right?). But I’m also convinced that churches that aren’t engaging their communities by actively going outside of their walls are anemic. They are so inward-focused that it has become a detriment to themselves and to God’s kingdom, and I struggle to think of a worse indictment for a church.

On the other hand, Victor and his team have developed, or, in truth, rediscovered what Jesus and Paul were doing the whole time. Victor’s principles of Listen, Learn, and Live are transformational because we have so often believed that the Church’s goal was mostly focused toward Speak (Evangelize), Teach (Disciple), and Distance (from the world). And of course, all of these things were practiced by Jesus and Paul too, but not before they deeply listened to people (seriously, Jesus asks a lot of questions), learned what people's needs were, and lived intimate lives with them. As Victor said, “Listen to the kids, learn from them, do life with them. That opens the door. We don't put Jesus on the front end. We catch them [with Jesus] on the backend.”

1 Rebecca M. Cunningham, M.D., Maureen A. Walton, M.P.H., Ph.D., and Patrick M. Carter, M.D. "The Major Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States." The New England Journal Of Medicine, 2018.