Key Points:
- The Deep Time coffee shop is open for business in Asheville, North Carolina, with its own coffee blends roasted on site.
- It doubles as a place where struggling community members can find a job and support as they try to rejoin society.
- Deep Time is a ministry of Trinity United Methodist Church, and the founder is one of the pastors there.
- The Rev. Dustin Mailman has ambitious plans to open three or four coffee shops or cafes in town, and perhaps a tattoo shop and transportation service.
At Deep Time, coffee isn’t a religion. But the people there do have an awful lot of faith in it.
On a lazy Thursday morning at the Deep Time coffee shop, artist Destiny Varner shows off her drawing of a skeletal hand gripping a red coffee cup. The arm is chained and the drawing includes the words “DEEP TIME NOT HARD TIME.”
It’s a motif frequently used on Deep Time merchandise.
“The skeleton signifies death,” explained Mercy Rodriquez, Deep Time’s operations manager and a Navy veteran, as she returned from a smoke break outside the shop, which is located within Trinity United Methodist Church.
“The coffee is a rejuvenation that brings you back to life.”
The theology there might be a little iffy, but coffee as a unifier is inarguably central to this ministry. It was founded and is run by the Rev. Dustin Mailman, pastor of family ministries and missions at Trinity United Methodist.
“If you have a master’s degree, you probably like to go to a specialty coffee shop to meet with a friend,” Mailman said. “But if you’re struggling, you likely aren’t. … What if we gentrified the gentrifiers? What if we say, ‘Coffee can be for everyone?’”
Coffee is the conduit for Deep Time to employ returning citizens and justice-impacted young people to help ease their journey back to society. It started as a small home-roasting operation and Fresh Expressions worship service at the Buncombe County Detention Center, and then moved to importing and selling various coffees that were roasted at the church. The coffee products got publicity from pop-up events around Asheville, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
The coffee shop was 2 weeks old when United Methodist News visited in June.
Mailman has a policy of hiring people “if they have the worst résumé possible.” That usually means they’ve spent time in prison.
Taking a spin around the shop, with its walls painted in bold mustard yellow and oxblood red, first we see a teenager named Shilone Knight serving as barista — manning the counter, pouring and selling the coffee and setting the mood with the mellow music he selects.
Knight seems a little embarrassed because he is a rare thing: a Deep Time employee who’s never been to prison.
“I’m pretty boring,” he said. “I don’t have no crazy story, but I definitely have a vision when it comes down to the work and celebrating the creation of spiritual spaces for the youth and adults who’ve been impacted by incarceration.”
Knight, 17, was referred by a friend of his mom to Deep Time when he was a homeless high school dropout. Asked his ambitions, he answers “financial abundance,” with a laugh. The thing he hopes can get him there is computer engineering.
The next steps are earning his GED certificate, then higher education.
In a central table of the coffee shop, Mailman — sporting a black T-shirt and Dodgers cap — is talking about his ambitious vision for Deep Time. But he is interrupted when a man with dreadlocks sneaks up behind him and delivers a surprise hug.
This is Timothy “GA” Underwood, Deep Time’s minister of community engagement and a man bursting with energy. It’s hard to imagine how such a boisterous character coped with 15 years in prison for drug trafficking.
“This is GA,” Mailman said with a chuckle. “He thinks he can do what he wants around here.”
Underwood said he has started a commercial cleaning business and is looking at getting into the trucking industry. The turnaround for him was when he left the factory job he worked after prison to join up with Deep Time.
“I do like coffee,” Underwood said. “It can be a bridge, a connector for folks to get familiar with one another, get acquainted and hopefully build friendships.”
Regarding his hiring practices, Mailman explained his interest in prisoner rehabilitation goes back to when he was a teenager.
“I was a volunteer chaplain at the (Watauga County, N.C.) jail, so I’d go and I would lead worship gatherings at the jail,” he said. “In hindsight, it was kind of ridiculous. I was, like, 19 years old.”
Mailman was inspired by Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles and Thistle Farms in Nashville, Tenn. Homeboy provides job training for former gang members and ex-convicts, while Thistle Farms assists former prostitutes to leave that life by providing counseling, job opportunities, free housing and health care.
Mailman completed seminary training at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta and worked at Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville before being hired by Trinity.
“I began to build really intentional relationships (in the community) that were deep,” he remembered.
One of those relationships was with a homeless woman who went by “Phoenix,” who was living on the Trinity property.
“She chronically struggled with addiction,” Mailman said. “Without us knowing, she was also hired by our cleaning crew on Saturdays to clean the sanctuary and she became a dear congregant of mine.”
One day, Phoenix was found passed out on the church lawn; she had overdosed.
“As I sat by her deathbed … I heard over and over and over, if she had never been to prison this wouldn’t have happened,” Mailman said. “The nature of her charges kept her from housing lists. They kept her from receiving some vital resources for her health. They kept her from even things like food stamps.”
That experience drove home to Mailman that “ministry really is a life-or-death matter.
“We started exploring, ‘What’s an industry in Asheville that homeless folks are chronically uninvited from? We landed on specialty coffee.”
Coffee is “a great icebreaker,” said Rodriquez, who spent five years incarcerated on drug convictions. “Everybody loves coffee. … Let’s have a conversation, and if there’s any way that I can help you, then I will. So it’s death coming back to life.”
Varner, the artist, spent six years in prison for trafficking methamphetamine, which she was addicted to at the time.
“I’m a sojourner,” she said, using Deep Time’s nomenclature for its workers. “I’m just roasting coffee, because I’m new to the environment.”
Varner heard about Deep Time from a coworker at a factory making Volkswagen engine blocks — her first job after prison.
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“I was really interested,” she said. “For one, I love coffee. For two, I like the concept of the mission.”
Mailman has ambitious plans for Deep Time. He would like to open three or more coffee shops or cafes around Asheville.
“Our big-picture goal is to scale up to a point to where we can hire about 125 people at a time,” he said. “I see this cafe eventually becoming our training cafe. … I have visions of a tattoo shop that focuses on cover-ups for people with hate symbols.”
His wish list also includes a transportation service to help people get to work and some sort of worship experience at the cafes.
“When we bring on the next round of sojourners, there’s going to be significantly more structure,” Mailman said. “Our first 2½ years has been … seat of your pants, let’s get it done. Now we have an opportunity to be really strategic.”
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digests.
