Friday's Internet Edition, July 30, 2010.
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| Clemmons Moravian Church dieners prepare to serve Sunday’s lovefeast in honor of the church’s anniversary. |
The Clemmons Courier - Dean Matlock has a very important job at Clemmons Moravian Church. He’s not the pastor or a deacon, the choir director or Sunday school leader… but he has a critical role in one of the most time-honored traditions of the Moravian Church.
He’s responsible for making the coffee for the church’s lovefeasts — more than 300 cups of it at a time — and has been brewing the stuff for more than 35 years.
A longtime Clemmons resident, Matlock took the job over full-time when his father passed away in 1972 but had been helping him for years beforehand. Combined, the Matlock men have made CMC’s lovefeast coffee for almost 80 years.
It is truly a labor of love for Matlock, who spends more than two hours before each service preparing the coffee and has purchased his own pots for brewing it. The largest pot makes between 250 and 300 cups at a time and requires six pounds of coffee per batch. “This is the way they made it years ago,” he reasoned.
Unlike traditional coffee pots, Matlock uses cotton bags to steep his coffee the old-fashioned way. Once offered a newer, more high-tech model to make things easier and faster, he declined. “The coffee just didn’t taste as good,” he said.