Creating Change: The Heartbeat of Drip Cafe, Jamie Sanchez & Jesus’ Calling

SPEAKER 02 : 0:00

Hey guys, this is TJ, and today on Talking Truth, we’re talking to the founder of Drip Denver and Recycle God’s Love. He’s a man serving more than just coffee. His faith has drawn fire from a local communist group protesting the shop just because it’s Christian-owned. Instead of backing down, though, he’s pressing in. He’s loving the lost, serving the poor, and standing up for truth. And this is a story of kingdom impact in the heart of cultural resistance. Jamie Sanchez, how are you today, sir?

SPEAKER 01 : 0:24

Doing pretty good. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:28

No doubt. I’ll tell you what, let’s talk a little bit just about your mission, what Drip Denver provides and Recycle God’s Love, the ministry connected to it. Tell us a little bit about how you got started and all that kind of stuff. We’ll touch on the communism stuff, but I kind of want to keep it positive and just talk about all the good you’re doing for Denver. So tell us about Drip. How did it start? How’s it going? All that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:50

Awesome. Yeah, I really appreciate that. The Lord’s doing some pretty amazing things through our ministry. So I started Recycle God’s Love with my late wife in 2012, and we started after a Bible study where we were reading through 1 John 4.10, and he explains, you know, not that you loved God, Not that we loved God, but that God loved us first and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins, and therefore we must love one another. And so we took that scripture and basically founded a ministry on that fact that God loved us so much, we got to share that love with other people. And so on our hearts was the homeless community specifically. And so we started handing out some sandwiches to the homeless and giving out clothing that we had. to them and that kind of thing. And it just kind of grew into an amazing community of people who really love to serve, you know, selflessly the homeless community. And so it’s just, it’s just an amazing community now. So my late wife passed away seven years ago and, you know, me and my two daughters left behind and the Lord has just had his hand on our life this entire time and blessed the just grown the ministry through this time of growing in our faith and our um just our foundation on who god is and that he would never leave us or forsake us and um god is good he provided a new wife for me a year ago and a mother to my two children and and so he’s god’s provided in that way again so it’s super Super amazing. And so for the past, you know, six years, seven years, the ministry has just really taken off to help the community. You know, it started out of our trunk and now we’re serving about three to four hundred individuals at a time where we’re serving hot food. We’re giving out clothing. We’re doing haircuts. We have the mobile DMV come in and help, you know, do photos for ID so they can get their IDs retrieved. And that kind of thing. And most importantly, we’re able to sit down with them at the tables and minister to them, pray with them, give them Bibles, and hopefully invite them into our project, Revive, which is essentially the next step for individuals who are ready to get off the street, as a lot of people know. Not all homeless people are ready to make the move to get off the street. But for those who are, we want to be there. We want to be the hands and feet to say, all right, you’re ready. Here’s some resources, but it’s only going to go as far as you want to take it. And so Project Revive is that. And our vision for it is to be able to provide housing, to be able to provide jobs, biblical sobriety, and essentially everything else they need to get back on their feet and live a spirit-filled life for Christ. And most importantly, the center of the project is discipleship. Because we know that if you make a spiritual change on the inside, there’s going to be a physical change on the outside. So that’s kind of how we found that. And we got the opportunity to… opened up the Drip Cafe, which is our first brick and mortar building for the project. And so the Drip Cafe is a cafe that we use to hire individuals who are ready to be discipled and to get off the street. And so we hire them there. We work alongside them. We pray with them. We bless them. We do one-on-one discipleship and biblical sobriety there and all that kind of stuff. And so it’s been an amazing, amazing thing to see God work through all of that.

SPEAKER 02 : 4:46

That is amazing. That’s a good word for it. And it sounds like you’re, I mean, you’re just walking through as we’re instructed to with, with folks who need the help. And that’s pretty amazing. How did you land on the cafe? Was that just a function of being able to provide, um, employment and things like that to folks or, or what was the drip cafe part?

SPEAKER 01 : 5:04

So to be quite honest, we weren’t really looking to open a business first as part of our project. I think our first idea was housing. And so that’s kind of what we were praying for and having our eyes out looking out for, but God just made this opportunity so obvious that he wanted us there, like kind of like on a silver platter kind of thing. And so we realized, okay, actually this is a better, um, this is a better, you know, chain to break for people, which is the, you know, where’s the workplace, where are you going to be on a daily basis working, who are you working around, that kind of stuff. And so it’s been huge to be able to have that, and we’ve been partnering with some local ministries for housing and sober living and things like that in the meantime until God blesses us with our own housing.

SPEAKER 02 : 5:57

Yeah, that’s important, too. And the location that you’re in is kind of strategic exactly for your mission, too, which just kind of goes to the omniscience of God and where He places us. How did you come across that property? Was there any… Um, any spiritual part to that, you think?

SPEAKER 01 : 6:18

Oh, absolutely. Um, so it was, it was one of my, my brothers in Christ. He, he was, so he was a roaster. And so he was roasting some coffee at a local roastery here and he ran into some guy. I don’t even actually know who he ran into that day, but he was like, Hey, like, I know this guy who’s just, you know, their tenant is about to leave their coffee shop and they need someone to fill the spotlight quick. He’s like, do you know anybody? And my friend was like, oh, I might. And so he just called me. He’s like, hey, do you want to open a coffee shop? And I was like, um, what? You know, and so, but just going through the logistics of it and preying on it, you know, and seeking wise counsel and all that. And it just happened. It was just made so obvious that that’s where God wanted us to be from the fact that, you know, I had, because it’s not just opening a business, right? There’s a lot of experience that comes behind running a cafe and retail food, anything like that as well. And I actually was a manager at Panera Breads for 10 years. And so I essentially have been being built up in management and cafe skills for the past 10 years before that. I went into ministry full-time. And so that was all like, all right, here’s your own cafe. It’s like a miniature Panera Bread, right?

SPEAKER 02 : 7:33

Yeah, that’s a God thing if I ever heard one.

SPEAKER 01 : 7:36

Yeah, it really is, man. And just so many other things that he made it very, very clear that that’s where he wants us to be. And obviously now we’re seeing why he wanted this lighthouse on that street. Yeah.

SPEAKER 02 : 7:50

That’s a huge point because, I mean, where you’re located, you guys are off Santa Fe kind of downtown, right?

SPEAKER 01 : 7:55

Yeah, we’re on Santa Fe and 9th.

SPEAKER 02 : 7:57

Santa Fe and 9th, which is kind of the arts district, and that’s kind of the heart of where needs live usually in just about any city. So what was the first sign of trouble? And for the listeners, if you haven’t heard this story, you can find that on our website. We have a few news stories posted about it. Some protesters showed up. Tell us about that whole experience.

SPEAKER 01 : 8:19

Yeah, the first signs of trouble was on Instagram. We started having people message us some really hateful messages. And we hadn’t even opened the cafe yet. We were just getting our social media set up and getting the storefront built out and all that. And essentially, we just started getting hate messages immediately. homosexual people and so it was really really strange because we’ve never had any encounters like that before and so it was really out of the blue out of left field was like all of a sudden blowing up on instagram of like you guys are horrible for what you do to gay people and we’re like what like we’re just a homeless ministry what are you talking about have you ever been outspoken with stuff like that have you posted doctrine that may be taken that way or anything So yeah, actually, I’ll tell you exactly how they came to that platform, essentially, is on the ministry website. So not the Drip Cafe, but on Recycle God’s Love, just like any other Christian organization, we have our beliefs page. And on that beliefs page, among all of the things listed there, is one of them stating that we believe man was made for woman and woman for man. and that, you know, homosexuality is a sin. And so it’s actually just scripture that is on there. It’s not like opinion, right? It’s just literal copy-print scripture. And so they used that, essentially, this group that came up against us, they essentially used that because they know, you know, it’s a pretty high volume of LGBTQ people in that neighborhood, in that area. And so they’re like, well, how can we get this coffee shop to lose business? Well, it’s turned most of their clientele against them. And, you know, so they use that as a platform against us.

SPEAKER 02 : 10:20

And what do you do in response to that now? So they come out every first Friday, right? and they protest your shop. So what do you do in response to that? Do you have the opportunity to disciple them or anything like that?

SPEAKER 01 : 10:32

That’s a good question. It’s been a lot of discerning what God wants us to do. It’s taken two years to get to the point we’re at now to know kind of what God wants us to do. But At first we were, you know, very like, okay, we need to try to go out there and talk to them. And I even actually went out there personally and was like, Hey, like, what’s the deal? Like, what do you, you know, how come you guys think this? They, they literally won’t get, let me get a word in. Like they want nothing to do with a conversation. Nothing.

SPEAKER 02 : 11:08

It’s unfortunate. We’ve all seen that lately.

SPEAKER 01 : 11:11

So, yeah, it’s like, dude, I just want to know, like, if anything, convince me of your point, you know, like, like if you think this, you know, and that’s what some of the other pastors and my buddies go out and say, they’re like, if Jamie’s like that, I want to know why. Cause I don’t want to be his friend if he’s like that, you know, and they have, they, they don’t want to talk to anybody. They just scream, they yell, um, They have propaganda on their flyers and all kinds of stuff. And so we started that way. And then we had some church groups kind of come out and kind of stand in line and kind of try to hang out out there and try to, you know, if they were because they harass customers if they try to come in the door. And so our church people would be like, hey, no, just ignore them. It’s fine. Come on in, you know, that kind of thing. And that didn’t really work very well either. It kind of started to feel like a us versus them vibe outside. And we’re like, well, that’s not what we want either because, you know, it’s not really us versus them. It’s them versus God. And so we started saying, you know what? Close the door. No one’s allowed outside that’s here to support the drip cafe. Everybody needs to stay inside and fellowship. And so we started doing that and just praying for the group because we want them to be saved, right? I mean, I was once lost and I want those people to have their eyes open too. I want them to be able to be torn. And so we just pray for them. And, you know, it’s kind of, there have been a lot of stuff in between, but essentially where it all came down to is we decided, you know what? they don’t deserve all of our attention like this. You know, the enemy doesn’t deserve our attention and our energy. So what we’re going to do when they’re there trying to steal God’s attention, we’re actually just going to focus on the Lord and worship Him in music. So we started doing musical praise and worship on first Fridays during the time that they’re protesting because they’re scheduled there every first Friday, right? we just schedule worship live at that exact same time in the cafe and we just open the door wide open and praise and worship out the door and we pray for them and for each other and fellowship and there’s been testimonies and there’s you know been people receiving the lord like it’s been it’s been insane praise god ever since we started doing worship yeah it’s crazy yeah

SPEAKER 02 : 13:33

That is awesome. So good to hear. Hopefully I can make it out there some first Friday and worship alongside you, but Jamie, it’s been a pleasure. Tell us a little bit about where people can find you. If there’s any promotional deals or anything that you want to share about the business for folks to get some customers in the door.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:50

So we do have a coffee subscription. You can get coffee delivered to your door. You just go to dripcoffee.cafe, and you can find it there. Or you just come on by and see us, honestly. Come and get a cup of coffee. Come pray with us. Come pray over the building. show up for a first Friday. And we actually, for the rest of this summer, we’re going to be doing, we have been doing for the past month, we do live music every Friday. And so, but the first Friday is strictly worship. But all the other Fridays are just Christian artists, all kinds of different genres that are just popping in and playing music live at the cafe. And so that’s a great night to show up and hang out and get some coffee as well.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:34

Jamie, it’s been a pleasure. Do you mind if I just say a quick prayer for you real quick?

SPEAKER 01 : 14:38

Please do, yeah.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:39

Heavenly Father, thank you for Jamie Sanchez and his heart in Drip Cafe and for his following your will and not his through everything that you’re guiding him through to be a force for you, Father. We ask that you bless him and his employees and all the people he serves each day to do your will, Father. Pray this in your name. Amen. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us today, man.

SPEAKER 01 : 15:02

Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.