Gift shop outlook
Gift shop at Lizard Point, Cornwall
How transactional is your spirituality?
Perched on a promontory at the most southerly point in Great Britain, this gift shop is one of a small cluster of low buildings whose businesses serve the tourist trade. Made of wood and corrugated iron, its brightly painted exterior is adorned with signs and a selection of hats for sale, with an array of benches and displays in matching blue arranged to the front. A colourful lobster pot provides a pleasing flourish to round off the whole carefully fashioned aesthetic. The windows are filled with seaside-themed trinkets and gifts to catch the attention of passing visitors. It’s something of a joy to behold and clearly succeeds in its aim of drawing the curious inside to explore further and make those all-important purchases.
The premise that the enterprise is based upon is a simple one: what is being sold is what you will want to buy. The owner relies upon there being sufficient people willing to move beyond simply looking at the stock as an interesting way of spending time without commitment on their part, to spending their money and taking a gift away with them. This is the transactional model upon which the little shop depends. It is not there to provide a no-cost social good for those in need of something to do on a rainy day; its purpose is to sell sufficient stock to make a profit.
The parallel with people’s engagement with the institutional church is striking. For a start the majority pass by without engaging with the building at all. Imagine the gift shop without its colourful exterior; a drab hut with no stock on display or in sight and devoid of explanation to indicate why you should enter. How would you know that there are gifts here which you might find attractive? Presumably you would rely on the word of mouth of those who had been inside, but where and how might you find them? Indeed, shouldn’t the onus be on them finding you?
Whereas the range of items that the gift shop has to sell is obvious from first glance, it’s a source of mystery as to why the church is there and what it might have to offer. How do you put the gifts of transforming grace, joyful faith and world-changing obligation on display? How do you make passers-by want to venture inside with real expectation and curiosity? How do you then translate that into a commitment which goes beyond the building into the whole of life? And how do you do all of this when the prevailing view is that church is irrelevant, outdated and dying?
Perhaps the first place to start is to recognise the fundamental nature of the gift shop transaction. It is about people purchasing something special to take away with them, either to keep for themselves or to give to someone else as a gift. Simply spending time in the shop is not the point at all. Indeed it completely misses the point of why the gift shop exists. Shoppers paying for items and taking them out into the rest of their lives is what counts.
If faith is seen to cost nothing and change less, it should come as no surprise that it isn’t attractive. Just turning up for an hour, however pleasant the experience, is pointless if there is no cost and no transaction. By which I don’t mean the collection, but the costly commitment to change oneself and the world for good, the genuine spiritual transaction with God that underpins all authentic discipleship.
This is what makes the eyes of believers sparkle with grace, their lives shine with hope and their words and actions be so destabilising of systems of injustice and exploitation. Taking up one’s cross and following Jesus is the antithesis of window shopping. To enter church is to be confronted with so many precious gifts that the world needs, from climate justice for all, the end of racism, safety for women, the relief of debt, eradication of poverty, freedom from oppression and a real hope that these things can be achieved if we work together. Church is the place where we get our hands on these gifts, own them for ourselves and go out into the world prepared to pay the cost of delivering them to others.
In doing this the gift shop at Lizard Point has much for us to look upon and ponder.
