South Minneapolis church plans to combat isolation by building a brewery

For more than a century, Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church has worked to serve the community outside its four walls. From south Minneapolis and beyond, the heart of the church is service, largely driven through volunteer efforts.

"It's kind of an ecosystem," said Senior Pastor David Lose.

But now Lose hopes the church, founded in 1920, can move forward into the future with something new. The plan — to take the church's former chapel that has sat vacant for the past several years, and transform it into a community oriented coffeeshop and brewery.

It's something Lose has dreamed of for years – but after getting the support of Minneapolis City Council earlier this year, it's closer to reality than ever before.

"We'd always thought about if we could use that as a community gathering space," Lose said. "Post pandemic, with the surge what others were describing as a pandemic of loneliness, that felt even more urgent . . . It was wanting to take that space and have it be a place where people could connect and get to know each other."

Lose says the original chapel would have to be torn down to make the plan happen, as years of deferred maintenance and its positioning on the watershed have made rehab too pricey to consider possible. Still, he wants to work with a team to salvage as much of the building's original features as possible and reincorporate them into the new design.

The plan still faces hurdles, including rezoning. That would required the consent of the building's neighbors — something Lose says he's hoped he's earned over time.

Still, he admits the novelty of a church affiliating itself with a brewery.

"It wasn't so much 'Wouldn't it be cool to own a brewery, it was more, looking around and saying what does our community need right now," he said. "When I look at the levels of isolation that I think were already present with regard to the amount of time we spend on the internet, the amount of time that people spent on social media, heightened by the pandemic, the political divisiveness where there seems to be this relentless desire to identify 'what group are you a part of? Are you in or are you out? All of that. I just feel is so unhealthy and doesn't reflect God's hopes and dreams for God's people at all."

BIGGER THAN BELIEF:  You can find a full conversation with Mt. Olivet Senior Pastor David Lose on this week's episode of Bigger Than Belief.