Real Live Poker-Playing Preacher

In Tomball, Texas, a suburb of Houston, reports SF Gate, a Baptist minister named Ken Shuman has an unusual ministry. Quoth David Ian Miller in SF Gate:

[Shuman is] now the general manager of Main Street Crossing, a popular coffee shop and live-music venue in Tomball, Texas, that has become a kind of Christian community center. By day, it's just a coffee house. But on nights and weekends several ministries, including Shuman's Wellspring Church, hold their worship services there. They also run a host of activities, including discussion groups and poker games three nights a week.

"The idea is mostly to provide a fun place to hang out," Shuman says. "We don't do heavy evangelism." Still, he adds, it's often easier to connect with the faithful over a round of Texas hold 'em than from behind a conventional pulpit.

Shuman was an ordinary Baptist preacher who led an ordinarily successful congregation when he had a crisis of faith. He left his church and eventually found a place at Main Street Crossing, a coffee house that serves beer and wine, with live performance space that is available both for music group bookings and Christian fellowship meetings.

I've heard that you tell people that despite being a pastor, you will "whup their ass" at poker. Is that true?

(Laughs) I don't know where you got that quote from, but the thing is, well, I told you I was a success junkie. So whatever I do, I want to do it well. And so I decided after the first night of poker that I had to learn how to play simply because there were people there, and I'm trying to connect with people, and what better way than to sit down at a table for three hours with a group of people and play cards?

So I started reading books and learned how to play poker at a pretty good level. And actually, as of last week, I am the point leader for the league that plays at our place.

And how do your new visitors respond to an ass-whupping, poker-playing pastor?

You know, most typical church people look at me like: "You left this nice big church to come do this? And now you're drinking beer and playing poker? You've lost the faith." And I just have to live with all that. I'm not worried about impressing the church people. What I'm worried about, or what I'm most concerned with, is just connecting with these people that play poker.

And I feel like I pastor all of them. I know about when they are going in the hospital, I know about the surgeries they have, I know about their marital problems, because they have begun to see me as a pastor that they can trust.

I think the biggest issue out there today for a lot of folks is they just don't think there is anybody they can trust with their stuff. They think he's gonna preach to me, or just tell me to come to church or pray a little harder and everything will be fixed. I believe we're all broken people. We're just broken in different places, and we all have addictions, and that we just need to come clean with all that and say: "Life is a journey, and faith is a journey. Wherever you are in that journey, let's journey together, and maybe we can help each other as we go."

My understanding is that gambling isn't approved of by Southern Baptists. Do your poker games include gambling?

No. They don't. It's just a league. The players don't pay to play. And there can be no exchanging of money at any of our sessions. If we did, we would lose our license – our beer and wine license – and feasibly they could shut us down, and feasibly they could haul me to jail.