This week Matt and Zach sat down with Linda Tucker from T3 Rosters   

Find out more about T3 Rosters below.

Connect with the Bearded Theologians at https://www.linktr.ee/Beardedtheologians

T3 Roasters (https://t3coffeeco.com/) is a family-owned coffee roastery specializing in sustainability sourced and passionately roasted coffee. T3 Represents us – the Tucker Family. There are 3 of us (myself, my husband and our daughter). Our coffees are fully traceable and we partner with some amazing farmers and producers. We are your local coffee with a global impact.

Our services include retail, wholesale, fundraising and custom options. We offer local pick up and nationwide shipping. No job is too big or small. Roasting on our 12kilo Diedrich roaster, we have the ability to roast over 125lbs of coffee an hour and grind up to 500lbs an hour. Additionally, we acquired a second roaster last week giving us the ability to double our production. Currently we average 2500lbs of coffee per month.

Our roastery is presently located in Skiatook, OK, but we will be moving our business to Collinsville, OK later this year. We are in the middle of a complete restoration on a building in the historic downtown Collinsville, preserving the history and giving the building new life.

Our very first coffee blend (and now one of our signature blends) is Sunday Morning Blend. Gary developed it specifically for our church because he got tired of drinking bad coffee at church. He also noticed that people were skipping fellowship time, going elsewhere for coffee and bringing it to worship. Sunday Morning Blend was created as a way to bring people back together, and now there are lots of churches in our area serving Sunday Morning Blend on Sunday Mornings.

While we love coffee, we really love what a cup of coffee helps people do. The ideas it brews, creativity it sparks, productivity it increases, laughter it creates, and conversations it starts. Coffee brings people together and it really is a ministry of hospitality for us.

(I am a concentrated Deaconess in the UMC and coffee is my official ministry appointed by the bishop. Before that, I spent 18 years in youth ministry and another few in chaplaincy, community outreach and grief support. I earned my MDiv from Phillips Theological Seminary in 2019.)

For me, hospitality is about extending love and creating a safe and welcoming space for those in our community and beyond.  The concept of hospitality is fundamental in both the Old and New Testaments from Abraham through the history of the early church. At T3 Roasters, we strive to extend the same unmerited loving-kindness that God exhibits to all in our community of reach – from the farmers to the consumers and everyone in between. 

At T3 Roasters, we strive to use our voices to educate our community on the social justice issues surrounding the coffee trade through education and advocacy.

We make sure that our farmers are paid a fair price through direct trade ensuring their farms are able to have a sustainable business – warranting success for them, their families and their communities for years to come.

Through our ministry, we are able to support programs like Coffee Kindergarten that was started in Guatemala as an education strategy to prevent child labor and contribute to school readiness in rural coffee growing areas. And the La Morena program that supports women farmers and gender equality in the coffee trade. Not only are we able to support women farmers, but we empower artisans and provide hope beyond the reach of coffee through the La Morena bracelet project.

Interesting fact: I was not always a coffee drinker. I didn’t start drinking coffee until about 2.5 years ago. But coffee has always been a staple in my life. I have mourned with people overcome by grief over a cup of coffee and I have celebrated life’s greatest milestones over a cup of coffee.

We all either drink coffee or know someone who drinks coffee. We are using it as an avenue to bring people together and create community, both locally and around the world.

Fun coffee church fact:

Coffee was once referred to as Satan’s Drink until Pope Clement VIII (1536-1605) gave his official papal blessing to the drink trying to “cheat the devil by baptizing it”, making it accepted for Christians to drink.