The Shopfront, the Centre, and the Work of Truth

The Shopfront, the Centre, and the Work of Truth

Rev’d Jon Swales, 10 minute read.

Churches,

like most institutions,

learn how to present themselves.

There is a front-facing story — a shopfront narrative — shaped for newcomers, visitors, church networks, and social media. It speaks of welcome, healing, generosity, growth, authenticity, flourishing.

Often it names something real.

Often it names something hoped for.

Rarely is it a lie.

But it is selective.

The shopfront tells the truth that can be spoken publicly, safely, coherently. It does not usually tell the whole truth. The danger is not that churches have shopfronts — welcome matters — but that we begin to mistake the window for the building, or the brightness of the display for the condition of the house.

As people move closer to the centre of church life — into leadership, governance, decision-making, influence — a different set of forces becomes visible: budgets, brand, reputational risk, fragile alliances, institutional memory, the quiet fear of decline, the pressure to protect what has been built.

This is not unique to churches. It is how power works. What is distinctive is how easily power hides behind holy language.

Near the centre, speech changes.

Pastoral language slowly becomes strategic. Words like discernment, unity, vision, wisdom, covering, timing begin doing double work. They still name spiritual goods, but they also function as brakes — on questions, dissent, inconvenient truth. This is rarely deliberate. It is learned. Over time, leaders absorb what can be said, what will be celebrated, and what will quietly cost them.

Formation is happening all the while.

Church communications culture plays a role here. Comms teams, whether they realise it or not, draw on secular marketing strategies, not out of cynicism but competence. Churches exist in a crowded attention economy, and leaders want to communicate clearly and compellingly.

But marketing logics always carry a theology.

Vision nights feature carefully chosen testimonies. Stories are selected because they are resolved and legible. Suffering appears only once it has found meaning. Doubt is framed as a stage already passed through. The messy middle is edited out — not to deceive, but to inspire.

Over time, communities, mainly implicitly, learn which stories are welcome. The counter-narrative is silenced.

Metrics begin to shape imagination. Attendance, giving, engagement, volunteer numbers become proxies for faithfulness. What can be measured acquires moral weight. Growth is read as blessing; decline as failure. The slow, uneven work of formation — resistant to quantification — slips from view.

Brand consistency becomes a virtue. Language is standardised. Tone is managed. Messaging is aligned. This brings coherence, but it also narrows the range of speakable truth.

Lament feels off-brand.

Anger sounds unsafe.

Confession disrupts momentum.

Churches can become very good at communicating while saying less and less that is real.

Safeguarding policies and accountability structures can drift into the shopfront too. They are essential. But when their existence is treated as evidence of health rather than tools requiring constant, uncomfortable use, they risk becoming symbolic rather than formative.

Preaching is shaped by these pressures. Teaching calendars prioritise momentum and vision. Difficult texts are deferred. Critique is generalised. Sin is discussed abstractly, rarely in ways that implicate the system itself. Scripture is still preached — but safely.

Staff culture absorbs this quickly. Leaders learn which concerns are framed as “helpful” and which are quietly sidelined. Emotional intelligence is prized, often in service of harmony rather than honesty. Conflict is managed rather than engaged. Even prayer is affected: hopeful, resolved, forward-facing. Confession becomes private; lament occasional.

None of this requires bad intent.

It emerges when churches unconsciously baptise the logics of the marketplace: attention, growth, coherence, reputation. The shopfront becomes polished because disorder feels dangerous and vulnerability inefficient.

Within these systems, responses to power take recognisable forms.

Some collude.

Collusion rarely feels like betrayal. It feels like realism. It is learning which truths can wait, which questions are unhelpful, which silences are wise. Often this is partly true.

But collusion has a cost. What begins as wisdom can slide into accommodation. The imagination narrows. Leaders may find themselves defending arrangements they once questioned — not because they now believe in them, but because dissent has become too expensive.

Some are deformed.

Deformation happens when leaders internalise the anxieties of the system they serve: fear of conflict, fear of decline, fear of being seen as unsafe or disloyal. Over time, the body learns what the mouth will not say.

Deformation can look like fatigue, cynicism, emotional flattening, or control disguised as care. Leaders may still pray sincerely and labour generously — and yet feel their inner life slowly shrinking.

This is not hypocrisy. It is formation under pressure.

Some challenge.

Challenge is rarely clean. It is costly, partial, and often lonely. Those who speak truth near the centre of power learn that courage is not usually experienced as clarity. It is often felt as threat.

Challengers are not pure. They carry fear, ego, impatience. They may wound as well as heal. And yet, without challenge, institutions drift toward self-protection. Without challenge, the shopfront becomes a substitute for the house.

Others simply leave.

Not in protest. Not with a manifesto. Often without language. Something didn’t sit right. The atmosphere felt constricting. The stories no longer matched lived experience.

Many departures are misread — framed as offence or consumer choice. But often they are acts of moral intuition: the body sensing what the mouth cannot yet articulate. People leave because they cannot make themselves fit the narrative without losing something essential. Silence, in these cases, is not indifference. It is exhaustion.

Others try to stay and speak.

They raise questions and name patterns. Rarely do they begin with accusation. More often they begin with care.

But proximity to power shortens patience. What is framed as honesty from the margins can feel like threat near the centre. Over time, challengers may find themselves marginalised — labelled negative or unsafe.

Platforms narrow.

Access is withdrawn.

Cancellation rarely announces itself;

it arrives quietly,

under the language of wisdom and protection.

And then there are those who remain — adjusting, accommodating, learning how to survive. Silence feels safer than speech. What was meant as discernment hardens into self-censorship.

Most leaders, over time, do all of these.

They collude in some places, are deformed in others, challenge where they can, leave where they must — sometimes within the same season, sometimes within the same meeting. The problem is not complexity. The problem is denial.

Recent church history has made this harder to ignore. Movements marked by energy and genuine encounters with God have unravelled — not because everything was false, but because too much went unnamed near the centre. Those closest to power rarely experienced themselves as villains. They experienced themselves as stewards — protecting something precious.

That is precisely the danger.

I recognise parts of myself here — not as a headline, but as a participant. I know the relief of being trusted, the fear of being misunderstood, the temptation to soften truth in the name of peace. Leadership did not create these dynamics in me. It gave them reach.

This is why simplistic narratives — heroes and villains, faithful and fallen — fail us. They let systems off the hook and turn formation into morality plays rather than the long work of truth-telling.

The New Testament is more realistic. Paul refuses the illusion of arrival. He speaks openly of weakness and unfinished formation. Authority, for Paul, is not secured by success but by truthfulness — especially about what has not yet been healed.

Cruciform theology sharpens this realism. The cross is not a credential. It is the place where self-justification is undone — where our need to be right, admired, indispensable, or safe is exposed.

A mature church does not abandon the shopfront. Public witness and welcome matter. But maturity means refusing to confuse presentation with health, or growth with formation.

It means cultivating spaces near the centre where leaders can speak without fear, where challenge is not pathologised, where repentance is not performative, and where honour is tethered to honesty rather than image.

The question is not whether churches will have power. They always will.

The question is whether we are willing to tell the truth about what power does — to institutions, to communities, and to us.

Leadership shaped by the cross will always feel unfinished.

That may not be a problem to solve,

but a truth to remain faithful to.

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Further thoughts.

After re-reading this a few times, I want to say something else that feels important.

I know churches — including some large ones, some with strong branding and public profiles — where the closer you get to the centre, the better it gets. Not shinier. Better.

And it’s not because their systems are unusually slick. It’s because of the character of the leadership.

In those places, the core team actually respects one another. They speak honestly. They challenge each other without tearing each other down. They don’t confuse unity with silence, or trust with agreement. Hard conversations happen early, not after damage has set in.

Questions aren’t treated as threats. Disagreement isn’t read as disloyalty.

So the shopfront isn’t hiding something darker behind it.

It’s a fairly honest reflection of what’s inside.

That doesn’t mean these churches are perfect. People still get hurt. Mistakes still happen. But fear isn’t the organising principle, and reputation isn’t the first thing protected.