Blake Coffee
Biography
Blake Coffee
Blake Coffee is the founder and executive director of Christian Unity Ministries. A Christian author and speaker, he is called to a ministry of training and equipping the Body of Christ toward unity. Also a practicing attorney, his law/mediation practice is in San Antonio, Texas, but his ministry of reconciliation and unity spans the globe.
Coffee’s father has been in the ministry for forty-five years. As a pastor’s son, he has had ample opportunity to observe the church --- at her best and worst moments. About twenty years ago, he was living and working at a law practice in Austin, TX, when a major conflict took place in his home church in San Antonio, TX. He received phone calls from concerned friends on both sides of the issue and was deeply saddened when the church he loved so fondly lost roughly half its membership. When he and his family moved back to San Antonio a few years later, they returned to serve a church that was horribly wounded. Coffee was ordained as a deacon and became a leader in the church.
Coffee is a 1982 Cum Laude graduate of Texas Tech University and a 1985 graduate of the Texas Tech School of Law. A member of the National Order of Barristers, he then sharpened his litigation skills as a courtroom litigator with the Austin law firm of Wright & Greenhill until April 1995, when he felt God calling him in a different direction.
“I saw the consequences of a church split, and it broke my heart,” Coffee recalls. “I had been through the Experiencing God class and was now teaching it, and I started watching for God’s activity. One day I was sitting at a partners meeting, and I just had this very clear, defining understanding that I needed to leave, that I had some important stuff to do. It was like Abraham --- God said, ‘First leave, then I’ll tell you what to do.’ This was a defining moment for me.”
With the support of his wife, whom he calls “the godliest woman on earth,” Coffee left his partnership and established his own mediation practice. At the same time, he began to develop a ministry of congregational intervention --- a ministry which has grown into what is now Christian Unity Ministries. For more than a decade, God has given Coffee a message for the church about interpersonal relationships. In need of a simple Bible study to use as a teaching tool in his work with congregations, he wrote FIVE PRINCIPLES OF UNITY and self-published it for that limited purpose. In just a few years, almost completely by word-of-mouth, that material made its way into churches all across America and around the world, with over 15,000 copies sold and thousands of other copies given away. The book is already in its third English language edition and has also been published in three other languages.
Coffee’s God-given passion for the unity of the Body of Christ has been a blessing to hundreds of congregations, both healthy and conflicted, who have received his training on biblical models of reconciliation. He is the author of TRUSTING GOD’S PEOPLE…AGAIN (VMI Publishers, 2007) and ONE BODY: Experience Unity in the Church (Texas Baptist Leadership Center, 1999 --- published both as a book and a video seminar). In addition to shouldering his responsibilities with Christian Unity Ministries, Coffee serves as Of Counsel to the San Antonio law firm of Shelton & Valadez, P.C.
Blake Coffee has been married to Kappie, his high school sweetheart, for 26 years. The couple has two daughters. He currently serves as a deacon and Bible teacher at San Antonio’s First Baptist Church. To find out more about Blake Coffee and Christian Unity Ministries, visit www.christianunityministries.org or www.blakecoffee.com.
Blake Coffee
